Please enter one by one

Humans are social animals and, as such, we all have a certain need for regular contact with our equals, but the needs vary from one individual to another. The introverts among us will seek to limit their contacts to people they already know and with whom they are comfortable, whereas extroverts will not only be happy to spend time with strangers, but they will even try to reach out to them and establish new relationships. In either case, there will always be a recurrent group of varying size that we call friends, which will normally cover most of our need for social contact.

Today I was discussing with Karen over coffee how the perception of the gender roles affect as much the things we do as the things that we do not do, and how the social situation has a dramatic effect in how deeply our convictions are expressed or completely suppressed. Looking back to our childhood she recalled that she was never interested in spending time with the girls in her class. I confirmed that I was not interested in the boys in my class either, because their spent the whole recess playing basketball or some other sport. Instead, I would become friends with one of the girls and spend the time chatting around about everything possible.

Photo: needpix

Looking deeper, we came to the conclusion that it was not so much a matter of wrongly assigned gender (I never felt like a girl and she never felt like a boy, although she envied some of the activities that boys were entitled to an she was not) but of common interests. I can clearly remember having boys over at my place for play dates, but the crucial difference to school is that this was all vis-a-vis: I could handle a conversation with any of my peers, because that allowed me certain amount of control to try to keep in the areas of my interest. I have always had a broad range of interests, so I had no problem to build bridges and find a common ground where we could both have fun. But the moment it was three of us together, the commonalities between other two would typically be so strong and so far out of my area of interest that I would immediately feel excluded.

For Karen, the situation is not any different: she has an avid interest in international politics, feminism, literature, cuisine, but whenever a group of women get together they tend to gravitate to house decoration, clothing, child care, cake and sweets, which she can only endure for so long before she loses interests and fall back behind the conversation. And the same applies to me, just with different topics. The sad part is that we could spend hours talking to anyone in the room if the situation were slightly different; the problem is the diversity of our interests and how little they overlap with shared interests of other people.

Luckily, we found one another, because we have no problem finding topics of common interest. Indeed these discussion are sometimes the culprit of my persistent lack of sleep, but I find it totally worth the sacrifice. However, one point of concern for me these days is the fact that our kids do not share this view with us. Do not get me wrong: I know they are smart and interested, because they are more than ready to have deep discussions with us over lunch, but I have the feeling that they are content with having banal conversation with their friends. I do not know how accurate the impression is and I can only hope that they do find a way to connect deeply. Perhaps I am just getting old and do not "get" the new ways of being friends. I will have to look into the matter. Have a nice evening.