Tales of sorrow and whoa

The word on the street is that it's harder to make new friends when you're an adult than it is when you're in school, and that the friendships you make are not as deep in some way.

My observation is that this is generally true, and I've been curious as to why (aside from the obvious combination of close proximity to lots of people of similar age and background and copious unstructured time that makes college so ripe for making friends) and the thing that occurred to me was that adults have too many stories.

There's nothing wrong with stories, of course. Someone who collects and retells stories skillfully can be marvelous company. But when teenagers and young adults spend time together, they don't have many life events to recount, so their conversations are centered in the here and now, which is a shared experience. The shared experience aspect is part of what really binds young people together.

Adults, on the other hand, are constantly referencing things that happened earlier in their life that they believe to relate to what's going on now. New experiences may be new for adults, but not in the same way because we tend to want to put things into context.

At this point, when I spend some time with someone who I am just getting to know, I often leave the encounter with the feeling that we haven't bonded in any way; all we've done is share information. This generally feels disappointing and even wrong, like all I've done is entertain and be entertained instead of actually relating.

Another problem with the stories is that you eventually run out of the good ones, and that part of you gets tired of the story, even if it's a good one. I get this to a lesser extent in classes if there's something that I always tell every class, but at least those stories usually have some pedagogical value. In regular conversation, it's not a good feeling afterwards, and I immediately start inventorying to try to make sure I don't tell the same story again next time, because I am terrified of repeating myself.

So the problem then is how to proceed beyond all this. Say I'm at a point in my acquaintance with someone where I've probably used up most of my best stories. Now what? Even if I'm a good listener and really think about what the other person says, how do I respond without relating it to something other than whatever's currently going on? Is that even possible, or am I buried under the past?

More on this later.