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Making friends is not something I’ve had to think about for years. On the bus down to the Gaeltacht at twelve I fretted about whether I’d make friends, and it took me a while to get sociable when I went to St. Pats at seventeen but after that, friendships just happened. However, at the ripe old age of thirty-three, I’m in a new city and it’s now a necessity for me to get out there and make friends. Twenty years have passed since I sat on the bus to the Gaeltacht, and the world and I have changed. So too has the art of becoming part of a community. And so, there follows a public service announcement from a grown-ass woman about how easy it is to shirk the task of making friends, in favour of Netflix or WhatsApp messages. This post is about me cultivating friendships in a new city but could just as easily apply to life in Dublin.
As of the other day, I’ve been in America for four months now (noting four-month anniversaries is as sure a sign as any that I need a job) and it occurs to me that I’ve made surprisingly few friends. Not ‘none’, just not as many as I thought I would. I was focused on getting a job, crafting cover letters, reworking CVs every day and exploring as much of this city as I could but still, something niggled at me telling me that I should be making more friends. I was out of practice, so I googled suggestions for how to make friends and got the usual suggestions; join a club, volunteer, get involved in some cause etc., all of which I duly put on the long finger. Google also suggested MeetUp, a website used to organize online groups that host in-person events for people with similar interests. MeetUp is great and I’ve met people through their events; the key to making MeetUp work is to go to things specifically for people who’ve recently moved here instead of people who’ve been here forever. But Google had unusual suggestions too; hanging out in your local bar or downloading Tinder. These struck me as odd because neither are where I would go in search of real friendships (is that just me?), which suggests that my definition of friendship is a bit more committed and intense than might be the norm here in an American city. However, according to an interviewee (Jared Diamond, super-smart popular science person and Yank) on last week’s Irish Times politics podcast, friendships tend to count for less here in the United States because Americans (#notallAmericans, don’t @ me) are less likely to be in close and regular contact with the people they grew up (they could be living up to three thousand miles away from home). That distance gives rise to habitual isolation, something exacerbated by the decline in face-to-face contact that owes itself to smart technology (don’t worry Europe, it’s coming for you too; we all have the phones). I had noticeed the tendency here to more isolated living but it’s always nice when someone way smarter says it too. That said, it could be time for me to join the GAA club or take a language class. All suggestions, particularly those lifted directly from 1990s rom-coms, gratefully accepted.
But it’s not the Americans’ fault that friends have been harder come by than I thought they’d be; there’s a bigger picture to all of this. A few weeks ago, I read an article on immigration to the US. It noted that assimilation was difficult in the nineteenth century when home was a three-week sea voyage away but is more difficult now because of the ease with which immigrants can remain easily connected to their place of origin, owing to technologies like WhatsApp, email, social media etc. The author was referring to immigrants who arrive with little English but though I have no language barrier to overcome and have less cultural norms to navigate, the article kind of applied to me too. I had not prioritised joining clubs or getting out there because everything I needed was on my phone. Example; I have not yet been to a baseball game, but I’ve been religiously watching the hurling and football. I didn’t need to involve myself in the community because my real community was at home and I could check in with them whenever I wanted. I don’t read the Chicago Tribune because the Irish Times is on my phone. (If I could get Love Island here, I’d probably be watching that too). Now, if I found myself indulging in the flavours of home and I didn’t even realize I was doing it, imagine what it must be like for migrants who come here with little English and few cultural reference points to relate themselves to here?
Returning to the technology (without sounding like I was born in the 1960s) the other reason I felt no urgency to get out there and make friends was that everyone I knew was on WhatsApp. I am absolutely blessed to have a loyal and wonderful support network at home and they’re always on the other end of a WhatsApp message or call. You can’t beat yourself up for what you did not know, but I did not realize until recently just how reliant I had been on those very friends, though they are thousands of miles away. I was messing a few weeks ago when I compared experience to that of Saoirse Ronan’s character in the film Brooklyn but when she said goodbye to them all at home, other than occasional letters, she had no option but to throw herself completely into her new life – and that’s not the case today, for good or for bad. I was also doubly spoilt because I moved in with a friend and we hang out together and do stuff all the time. Had I come here, ten or fifteen years ago when long-distance calls cost a fortune and WhatsApp was not yet invented my experience thus far would have been radically different. That is not to say I regret anything, but it’s a timely reminder that it’s about time I put down the books, got out of the museums and start making a proper effort to cultivate relationships here instead of relying too heavily on those at home. The fact that I had little awareness of my reliance on the folks at home shows how isolation can creep. And that applies as much to life at home in Dublin as it does to the newly arrived of Chicago.
Any of the frequent recipients of said-WhatsApp voice messages who are reading this and thinking that the ten-minute WhatsApp voice messages are going to come to an end may rest assured that I will be fastidious in balancing my new-friend-finding duties with my monologuing-down-the-phone duties. There is nothing wrong with getting comfortable in oneself but though I’m here and you’re there, my experience shines a light on how we need to keep on top of being sociable and getting out there. Healthy societies thrive on vibrant communities, but they’re struggling and if we’re all sitting in watching Netflix they will continue to do so. I’m going to a community meeting tomorrow about the Green New Deal, what are your plans?
Tell me about them in a WhatsApp message. I’ll definitely reply.
doireann.ie 