I’m reading a very long thread on another message board about friendships dying out gradually after college graduation. The most common reason, they found out that they had little in common with their friends. They usually learn this through facebook, via profile, status updates, messages, etc. Or, their friends bail out on them for the same reason.
A few weeks ago I was listening to something on NPR (I believe) about pre-marital counseling. Supposedly this therapist said that 2/3 of the couples broke up after using the services. This was because the couples discovered that they disagreed on some major viewpoints and goals in life.
I’m curious about how on earth does something like this happen? How can you be “close” to someone for years and not know basic stuff about them?
Most of the things I know about my close friends, I found them about before I even saw the info on facebook. And, when I dated, the topics that commonly appear in pre-marital counseling…were discussed in our third or fourth dates.
I’m more curious about how do such people get close to each other in the first place without knowing a lot about their interests, worldviews, and life experiences?
I think generally it’s very easy these days to dat someone for a long time just by going out with them often. You can talk about your day or your benign interests constantly without scratching the surface. If you have money, this becomes easier - you can go out for drinks, dancing, movies, dinner, all without going to each others’ homes and confronting how the other one lives and so forth. You can engage in activities that don’t require communication, like lots of outdoor activities.
I see this in couples frequently. It’s the reason that, in 2 weeks of dating, the SO and I were mistaken for a couple that had been together for years: lots of people simply avoid intimacy or avoid it via the ways they date.
I think there is a level of self- delusion too. I have known women (for example) who want children and are with a guy who says he doesn’t, but they think he isn’t that serious, or will change his mind or something. Now, sometimes they are right. But sitting in a counselor’s office can make you face things that you didn’t see clearly, or just refused to believe earlier. Similarly with friends, you may underestimate the strength of someone’s feelings. A friend may make a somewhat racist offhand remark, but because you like that person you write it off as an odd one time thing. But when they update their facebook with a racist message, that’s a little harder to overlook.
Proximity forms friendships as much as common interests. People become friends when they are thrust together in situations like college dorms, or the military or prison simply because it makes the situation better and for awhile they have that common experience. Once that common location or situation disappears their differences become more obvious to them.
Once you reach legal drinking age, things can change. I lost a friend that occasionally drank while underage but suddenly became a total party animal once hitting legal drinking age. I mean, clubbing every weekend instead of having movie night at someone’s house, that sort of thing.
The college years are a time to experience new things. People who were sheltered before find so many new things at university. Someone who was pro-life in Idaho might change their mind if they go to college in a more liberal state and meet new people.
Some people are just really tight-lipped on topics. I can talk religion and world views and other controversial stuff until the sun goes down with some of my friends, but for some reason they are all tight-lipped about their sex lives. They just don’t talk about it. For all I know, their bedrooms could be secret BDSM dungeons.
Denial. When you started the relationship a year ago, you might have been all gung-ho about having kids. And then maybe you start spending time with your SOs family full of little kids and realize you don’t want kids anymore. But you absolutely love your SO and so you bury the topic until you’ve been married for 5 years and your SO says he/she wants to start trying to conceive. You didn’t want to say you changed your mind earlier, because that would mean you two would break up.
Your lives go in different directions. A lot of my brother’s friends had kids in their 20s. He had his first when he was 34. If he wasn’t willing to work around the schedules of his friends, the friendships would have ended. And that’s not taking into account those who moved away after grad.
And don’t discount a lifestyle change or a major life changing event with one party or the other in a friendship/relationship. A sudden death in the family might make someone suddenly become religious, or could have the exact opposite effect of making them abandon their religion because of how things play out. When someone has a kid, that is often a killer of a ‘lifelong’ friendship because one party has a different set of priorities and it changes their beliefs.
Sometimes the event manifests itself in a very weird way too. I have a friend who recently had young nephew die of an usual heart condition. He was very liberal and not very religious. Now he has become much more religious, and as a result more conservative, and now has a problem with gay people where he never seemed to before. Naturally I called bullshit on this, but he claims he was “always this way”.
Values and opinions form and solidify over time. Younger people are by nature more open and less formed. On many subjects, it’s just a matter of ignorance is bliss. As you mature and get more life experience, you are confronted with more issues that require you to take a side or form a value.
How often do you hear of couples who “just grew apart”? When they start out it’s all about sex and socializing and experiencing life, some of things that are differences are intriguing, they just add to the experience. It’s only later that many people start to care about politics, money handling style, goals, etc. The fact that one develops a taste for racing dirt bikes and camping, while the other one gets interested in restoring renaissance art - it just didn’t come up!
For some things, I think people’s views are so hard-wired that they don’t even think to check that their friend/SO agrees with them because it never occurred to them that anyone would disagree. These are lifestyle things: when should money be spent? When should it be saved? How does one treat a guest? How should a child be disciplined? How do neighbors relate to each other? How are birthdays celebrated? What is a healthy dinner? How are chores divided?
Many of these things don’t get “talked out” early on because they never come up, and both people think that their standards or methods are universal.
I agree with those who say people just change over time. I know I’m very different from the person I was in high school as are the classmates I’ve connected with through Facebook. We’ve all grown, many times in different directions.
Similarly, friendship or relationship deal breakers for me now are things that may not have mattered as much to me years ago. For example, in college I’d have friends who were great fun at parties but completely untrustworthy. These days, it’s very important to me to trust my friends, but I can have my own fun at parties!
Sometimes stuff just happens, and no matter how think you or your friend will respond to it, it turns out differently. Take Yarster’s friend.
Two people get jobs. One sees the job as the road to advancement and wealth. The other sees it as just a job. Probably neither could have articulated their feelings before they got the job.
The thing about life is, you don’t know how it will affect you until it actually does.
Add that many people “travel like a ship’s figurehead: looking at everything and seeing nothing”.
After going on a date with one guy, I know how he feels about punctuality; how he is with money; whether he’s a morning or late person; I may not know his denomination if he’s got one, but I know his attitude about religion. But the signs which have told me this information, while available to anybody else, aren’t always interpreted by the other people there. My BFF didn’t discover her boyfriend (now husband) wasn’t religious until they’d been dating for about 6 years - we went to the same high school (where he was one of the students who skipped Mass when there was one as part of a school feast day), we were from the same town, the whole rest of our group of friends knew it… but she’d never realized that she never ran into him at a religious function unless she’d dragged him there.
And some things, you don’t notice because it’s the first time you’ve encountered them. Knowing the Grandfater from Hell made me able to detect snake charmers from a mile away; people who have never encountered the ugly side of one see only the charm, not the poison underneath. For over 25 years I had never met someone who’d straight lie about his romantic intentions, so when I met someone who did I didn’t realize he was doing it - the possibility didn’t occur to me. Now that I know those people exist, I would be more likely to recognize the signs if I met someone else like that.
We present different aspects of ourselves to different people in our lives. The person I present as when I am with my parents is slightly different to the person I present to my friends, which is slightly different to the person I present at my workplace, which is slightly different to the person I present to my husband, and so on, you get the drift.
With the advent of the internet and social sites like Facebook, suddenly we’re presenting to all those different people at once, and because posting to a website feels a bit disconnected, we don’t stop to think that what we’re posting is not necessarily something we’d share with our work colleagues, as an example. So they see a different aspect to us than what they would do normally.
People also lie. My soon to be ex is a totally different person then I thought she was when we meet 7 years ago. Granted people do change, but she’s done almost a total 180 in her attitudes and how she talks to me. Now granted some of that is because of the divorce, but there are some things, like what she thinks the kids should do, are different from what we’d talked about before.
I think that some people try and be like the person they’re with and they’re too afraid to tell that person that they’re not interested, or they’re afraid to do it. My ex doesn’t like motorcycles, but she went on a couple of week vacation with me. Now she thinks they are too dangerous. From previous relationships she’s done skiing, camping, hiking, all those kinds of things that she never even talked with me about doing.
I guess people are so afraid to hurt someone else’s feelings they go along with it until they can’t any more. I say all the time if I don’t want to do something, see ya later, have fun. It’s funny how at lunch I don’t want to eat somewhere and one guy seems to take it as me being a jerk that I don’t want to eat there. Nope, it’s just me not wanting to eat there, you guys go, have fun, I’ll see you tomorrow. I think some people have a hard time doing that.
People don’t know themselves as well as they think they do. So much of the time we are unaware of our attitudes toward things unless and/or until we’re forced to articulate them. It’s easy, therefore, to spend a lot of life without doing the deep self-reflection that we assume everyone does.
If you don’t know your own attitudes and opinions, it’s hard to share those accurately with others.
Sometimes, with spouses, you know the differences ahead of time anyway, but choose to ignore them thinking they’re not really that significant.
One smokes; one doesn’t.
One likes to drink to excess occasionally; one never does.
One likes comedies; one likes action flicks.
One likes seafood; one doesn’t.
One has no hobbies; the other likes to golf and ski.
You might agree on money, kids, and 100 other things, but after a while a whole lot of seemingly insignificant items can wear you down.
A lot of my college friends were people I only met because we lived in close proximity in the dorms. Our interests were the same…get drunk. Over time, some people have kept the same interests while others have expanded their horizons. I haven’t kept in close touch with those who didn’t get much past the “get drunk” interest.
I’m totally with Manda Jo. People think that “their way” is always the right way. This isn’t ego, except unconsciously, or anything like that - it’s simply a total lack of awareness that things can and are done differently.
However, I do see this sort of thing less in children of immigrants that remember the old ways - their parents only see things one way, and their friends see things another way - so they already grow up with an idea that there is always more than one way to do things.
And then of course there is the “I can change him/her” factor, although admittedly mostly women do this with men, and then of course there is the flush of romance that fades and people wake up suddenly.
I’d also say that context-based relationships can throw big blinders up. For example, I’m an avid paddler and for awhile I dated a girl that I met on a multi-day kayaking trip. At first, it was all “Wow we have so much in common!” But really, it was all paddling-padding-paddling! It was an awesome summer during which every weekend we were on water, we hung out with people who paddled, when we went to dinner we talked about past paddling adventures.
We dated for six months. Now in hindsight, I can honestly say that after six months of dating, there are key things about her that I wouldn’t have known. I wouldn’t have known if she was raised in a religious household, for example. I have no idea what she is like around children. I have no idea how she really spends money (at the time she was saving up for a new boat).
She could have been an anti-vax whack-job for all I know, but we were always talking about paddling, so a huge swath of stuff just never came up in discussion. Bascially, after six months of dating, I didn’t know her very well at all.