If you are about to enter your thirties, more than one person will describe it to you as the best time to use the fulfillment of an additional decade of experience. You may hold dear your old university friends, and remain very close with them, however it is always good to meet people who don’t remember you from your reckless high school and university partying days.
Our DESIGN SCENE Magazine editor ANA MARKOVIC talks about breaking out of the bubble. going out for dates, finding friends and self confidence in unlikely places:
TAKING PART IN A POPULARITY CONTEST
Whether you are using a dating app, or simply looking for friends using random video chat websites, you are in the time of your life when you are confident you can afford to be picky and patient. To take your time and find people without attending those painful parties and avoid those mean girl small talks. Thanks to today’s dating apps as well as social media there is always a chance you will meet your soulmate, or a very dear friend. Also, for married women, the dating pool as well as finding new friends hits a completely new realm.
When you are in your thirties, there’s inevitably things you already know – you understand you are not for everyone, and not everyone is for you. Thus, as you get older, the list of potential friends no doubt shortens, since you are more focused and your actions and far less influenced or controlled by any sort of outside opinion. The position you are in is quite opposite from where you were in your twenties.
New friends will come to you because of who you are, not because they can influence who you are to become. You definitely know yourself better, and you are able to pick and choose your friends with a much more rational view.
THE OLDER THE FRIENDSHIP MORE VALUABLE IT IS?
Friends are part of various stages of your life, for example in high school or university, your first line of contact are your classmates. You will often form a connection with people you are randomly assigned to seat with, taking you months if not years to realise you have literally nothing in common. Which is one of the main reasons many of us drift apart from majority of our high school and university friends only months after graduating, if not even earlier. Looking back, you will realize how with most of your school friends your roads have diverged dramatically. At the same time only a few years later, those friendship hold little to no value to your present day.
In your thirties a person does not need to have known you in your most crucial stages of your life to create a true connection with you. With all the highs of creating new friendships, there is also truth in various surveys showing your social circle is to get smaller.
Furthermore, not all of our connections can be as meaningful and deep as it initially seems. Most of us have a story of a fiery vacation romance, which turned into nothing much but a memory, fond or heartbreaking one. Whether it was a romance, bromance or anyway you would like to define your friendship, there’s always instagram to hold the memory for you, just in case. Instagram friendship goals – take a look at Reese Whitherspoon and Laura Dern’s friendship, blossoming after their Big Little Lies show success.
HAVING A RELATIONSHIP WITH ONLY 5 PEOPLE
World renowned British Anthropologist and Psychologist Robin Dunbar is known for his theory stating clearly you can make and maintain a close friendship only with five people. You have surely heard of this theory in many of forms, one of them as many friends as fingers of a single hand, and so on. However what Mr. Dunbar includes in his study goes far from a relationship with only five perople. By his studies number 5 includes only the closest of your friends, then increased by a factor of three it leads to 15 best friends, followed by 50 good friends and 150 ‘only’ friends.
Even if your life is filled with friends, and at times you wish you knew less people, we do find happiness in the random moments on our way to expending friendships. Thus, throughout our lives we never stop expending our circles of friends. While the people of our past are dear to us, you do not want to be hampered by them in your journey.
We come down to a sort of a tribal line in our DNA, when people used to organize in tribes. In today’s day and age it is completely fine to choose a new tribe as you go along the way, a tribe right for your new part of the journey. Making new friends while still having old friends, no matter how close you are with them, will help your old and new self form a complete you. Instead of worrying about our circle of friends, embrace the journey and look forward to meeting new companions along the way.
All images from SPECTRUM story photographed for BEAUTY SCENE magazine Alex Jackson – there’s more.
