| Shared suffering is a guaranteed way to make friends. When you are placed under high amounts of stress and you are with someone else an instant bond is forged. Physical stress is the most obvious but mental or emotional stress are just as affective. If you want to make friends do something you hate or are horrible at. The NYT article sited talked about 'getting over that hump' in a relationship. Meeting people seemed like the easy part, but forming a friendship was the problem. Ask them if they are afraid of something or cringe at the thought of doing something then organise the effort. Know your limits and cooperate against them. When failure is obvious everyone is free to have fun and avoid any anxiety to impress or succeed. Example: I went indoor rock climbing with a friend. It was his second time, and my first since I was ten.
We got to the gym, did a few easy tracks and then I suggested we go at the most difficult track on the wall. We made it about ten feet up the wall then fell off. Our hands were simply too weak. We knew it was beyond us, but this was the first time all day that we laughed so for the rest of the day we just kept trying the same track. We breaked for lunch and then argued whether we were too spent to go back for round two. We decided to hell with the fatigue we have to beat that track. We went back and, again, fell every time we tried. The next day I saw him walking down the street so we got some coffee and laughed about how the both of us needed to find someone else to open doors and jars of peanut butter because our hands were so exhausted our grips had become useless. There was very little `proper` socialising.
Impossible to talk about anything except grip suggestions when one guys on the ground and the other is on the wall, but we got to know each other better, I think, than if we had talked about work or whatever. Dinner is nice, but you want something you can look back on and say, 'Haha, do you remember when... that shit was ridiculous.' |