Over the past two years, I’ve gone from single to married. The idea of having a child with my wife has become a very real possibility. I’ve watched a lot of friends choose to stay single, take the plunge and get married, and even have children. All this has led me to reflect an awful lot on how all this affects one’s relationships.
Sure, it’s easy to say that you’ll be friends with someone for life, but the truth is that couples like to hang out with couples, guys don’t like cruising for chicks with a married guy, and mostly only other parents really want to hear everything new parents have to say about raising a kid.
Do we self-segregate according to the groups to which we belong? I think we do. I think it’s only natural. But we obviously don’t cut off contact with old friends just because they’re at a different stage in their lives or because they choose different lifestyles. The way I figured it, it worked out to something like this:
The diagram isn’t supposed to represent who the people in these groups interact with, but rather which people they interact with in their free time. So, to use a real life example: single guys are very likely to hang out each other in a bar on a Friday night, and a married guy like me might join them occasionally, but the married guy with (young) children almost never will.
Two things about this representation bothered me, though:
The whole Venn diagram nature of it seems so absolute. Obviously, it’s not absolute, it just (possibly) represents some trends.
Going from a married couple to parents seems to have a far more dramatic impact on one’s social life, partly because of the time that parenting consumes, and partly because the added responsibilities of a parent results in a host of new activities which frequently prevent socialization with the other two groups.
For that reason I think the diagram below is more accurate. The whole “electron cloud” representation is more tolerant of exceptions to the generalized trends, and the repositioning reflects the relative social isolation of the new parents from the other two groups.
Obviously, this is all stuff I just made up. Diagramming them seems to make them more real, though, or at least easier to think about.
(Hmmm, can you tell I’m a bit anxious about the prospect of becoming a parent in the next few years??)
You forgot the fourth circle, far, far to the right: living in Pudong (the fourth circle… of HELL! cry)
But more seriously, I think you’re right to blur the lines because it really depends on what kind of effort you make to cross over into hanging out with people not like you. Some people do it a lot better than others, even people within the same marriage.
Micah,
Yeah, obviously, effort makes a difference.
Were you not listening when I made these almost the same observations? I pointed out that people meet & socialize one way when they’re single. It changes slightly when they get married. The big change, at least it seems so in CONUS, is that, once there are children, the parent tend to make friends among the other parents of the kids that their kids socialize with. That was the big thing about Teams: it was once of the 1st opportunities that we had to make friends with other married parents that weren’t based on kids activities.
Your fuzzy diagram works. It fits with the concept of fuzzy thinking.
When did you make those observations? It probably made no impression on me then because I had no personal frame of reference at the time.