Not that long ago, I got an email from a former co-worker, asking me to meet for coffee.
It was just after the first of the year. There?s a lot of resume polishing that happens post-holidays. Especially among people who work in marketing agencies. I figured he wanted to network.
We coordinate schedules, no easy task. We meet. We drink our coffees and talk about the things professional dads talk about. Work. Our families. Movies. Things we find annoying. We pass a pleasant hour. We get up to leave, shake hands and head off to our jobs.
As I?m walking to my office, I wonder what just happened. Because him starting a job search never came up. He just wanted to hang out.
I?d didn?t even realize I?d been on a man date.
?
As a parent, making new friends is neither natural or easy.
Do you strike up a conversation with someone at the gym? (Short answer: no. Because what ends up happening is that this person starts taking the treadmill next to you so you can talk. If you?re like me and think of running time as quality alone time to be protected at all costs, including violence, that person quickly becomes the most irritating person in the world.)
Are you friends with your co-workers? (Short answer: maybe. But it?s a sitcom friendship, all taking place on your workplace set, because you want to get home and spend time with your family. And if you do hang out with them away from the office, you have to be conscious of your partner, because when two people from a job get together, talk invariably turns to work and the last thing your wife wants to hear are all these stories about people she doesn?t know. It would be like she started to watch a tele novella in the middle of the third season. All these people are talking, but she doesn?t know any of the relationships or what the hell they?re talking about.)
Are you friends with parents from your kids? school? (Short answer: probably. But what if your kid likes a kid in class and wants a play date and you don?t like that kid?s parents? Or you and your wife like one parent, but not the other? There should be a match.com for parents. I?m writing a business plan and raising venture capital money. If Instagram can get funding, surely this can, too.)
Do you look up old friends on Facebook? (Short answer: yes. But you don?t friend them.)
It used to be easier. You?d share a locker with a guy and become buddies. Friends by alphabetical order.
Morrison died alone in a bathtub, so what does he know?
At the end of the week, I?m heading to the Dad 2.0 Summit in Texas. It?s for bloggers, brand people and agency types to talk and connect. If my Dad had ever gone off for a weekend to talk to a bunch of other dads about being a dad, I would have thought it was really really weird. Or a cover for him to go see his other family. (He didn?t have another family.)
Gatherings of men back then were more limited. To bars and pool halls, mostly. My dad took me to both as a young boy. There was something exciting and illicit about watching football at a corner dive when I was five years old. Like I just got a peek into something I wasn?t supposed to see. A pull back of the manhood curtain.
Google ?make the most of a conference? and you?ll get an endless list of links that are all about optimizing follow-ups or creating action lists or finding ways to make an impression on the power players. I don?t want to do any of that. It?s probably to my detriment that I have no ?conference strategy? aside from avoiding getting lost and ending up in some kind of Urban Cowboy ride-the-mechanical-bull situation.
Fortunately, there is a whiskey tutorial one night. So I?m hoping that my old friend can help smooth the edges of my jaded and pre-conditioned personality and let a conversation be just that. A conversation. Maybe even the precursor to a friendship instead of a favor.
(Image via fvquotes.com: source)
Written by Alan
Source: http://www.alwaysjacked.com/2013/01/another-reason-adulthood-sucks-making-friends-is-weird/
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