Social contact

[Zoe Girl]

I am back in the school year and i want to keep up social contact that is not just with school and work people. I had better social contact the previous weekends, but i still did leave the house to meet my sister for coffee and had a good phone call with someone i hadn't talked to in awhile. I am signing up for a Thursday night class again that will go all fall. It is with my Buddhist teacher in boulder and is a dedicated group so it feels like friends.

I tried a few people to do something like hike, but no one was free. I have limited capacity to do that if i don't get results but i keep trying.

[Tybee]

My son just started dating someone he met online. It seems like the biggest challenge they face is finding time to be together with two demanding work schedules. I think this is really true for everyone these days, and not any indicator of any sociability or introversion or anything else. Just musing about this problem with social connection that everyone seems to be facing these days.
Glad you are going to get back to the regular class for the fall!

[SteveinMN]

My son just started dating someone he met online. It seems like the biggest challenge they face is finding time to be together with two demanding work schedules. I think this is really true for everyone these days, and not any indicator of any sociability or introversion or anything else. Just musing about this problem with social connection that everyone seems to be facing these days.

I know social media takes its lumps here, but it's popular for several reasons; one of which is that it allows friends to enjoy some asynchronous communication. It's not the only way to connect, but it works among full-time jobs, chauffeuring kids wherever, doing house chores, and trying to maintain commitments like quiet time and hobby time that are so easy to push off.

DW and I met largely because we could browse on-line personals at o'dark-thirty a.m. or p.m.; the odds of having met each other through the one not-terribly-close friend we have in common would have been astronomical. The time devoted to going on date after date with Mr./Miss wrong -- probably wouldn't have happened.

A friend of mine and I wanted to see a baseball game for a minor-league team here in town. It took several weeks to find a game that offered two adjacent seats -- and we never in those weeks managed to find a time before the game that suited both our schedules and the 30-40 minute drive between us to meet to exchange and pay for tickets. It is a challenge these days.

[ApatheticNoMore]

most of those things aren't social media and actually predate much of it. Asynchronous communication - email - predates social media. And the email is more likely to actually be communication as well. Online dating - predates social media - although really there were dating ads in the newspaper even before that, for people who would never meet otherwise, maybe more stigma and not used as often, but it's not like people never met that way.