I found 90% of this article kind of silly. The part that I didn't find silly or useless is what I've observed of my clients who are in the age of about 20 to 30 years old. Some of them have had difficult life experiences, especially death or other great loss, and they feel out of sync with their peers- as if they've matured 20 years in the span of only a few. Even without grief and loss, I can understand that feeling of isolation when typical social 'bonding' begins to feel empty. I am not thinking so much about that type of change here in this blogpost.
Here's more from the Times article: Psychologists consider it an inevitable life stage, a point where people achieve enough maturity and self-awareness to know who they are and what they want out of their remaining years, and have a degree of clarity about which friends deserve full attention and which are a drain. It is time, in other words, to shed people they collected in their youth, when they were still trying on friends for size.
The winnowing process even has a clinical name: socioemotional selectivity theory, a term coined by Laura L. Carstensen, a psychology professor who is the director of the Stanford Center on Longevity in California.
"Shed people they collected in their youths." That is kind of yucky. This is maybe where the article begins to plunge into a worldview that doesn't exactly jibe with mine.
I've found that as I get older, many friendships have an ebb and flow. When I was younger, I of course had the experience of rejection when I felt more interested in spending time with someone who just did not seem to have as much time for me. This was usually due to the life circumstances of the one friend changing (I remember when my friend H got a serious boyfriend and moved in with him - I hate to say it but my next 'boyfriend' was probably someone I dated in part to fill up the empty time that I'd previously spent with her. Ugh. The embarassment of youth!). Over 25 years, H and I have had very close times and times where we haven't spoken as frequently, but because the friendship has lasted so long, we both know and trust that we will always be friends.
This is the great advantage of letting go of 'defriending' someone or having to place a label - time unfolds and a deeper form of friendship has room to take root. I also think it's a good idea in friendships, not to just have one best friend. Evidence that the one best friend thing is a bad idea usually starts accumulating in about 6th grade.
I'd like to propose that we all just relax a little. Give ourselves and other people room to change and grow. Have a sense of humor. Most of the time we don't have to make dramatic moves like 'ending' a friendship. It can be a hard world at times; I think it's good to value all kinds of friends and friendships.
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