France Has Rich Social Life. The Rich Social Life’s Entry Points Are Established.
PARIS — The adult friendship in Paris is made through: the workplace (the most reliable source of adult friendship in the city, where sustained proximity and shared context produce the conditions for friendship’s development), the neighbourhood association or activity (the running club, the book club, the choir, the cooking class whose weekly recurrence provides the repeated contact that friendship requires to develop), and the introduction through existing friends (the dinner party where two people who should know each other are placed next to each other by the host who has made this assessment correctly). All three mechanisms work. All three require: the repeated contact, the gradual disclosure, and the eventual explicit acknowledgment that the relationship has become friendship rather than acquaintance.
The Paris Specific
Paris’s specific adult friendship challenge is the city’s density of social options: the person with many interesting people available does not develop any specific relationship with the intensity that scarcity would produce. The interesting conversation at the dinner party is replaced by the next interesting conversation at the next dinner party rather than deepened by the specific follow-up that makes it a friendship. Paris’s social richness is simultaneously its friendship challenge. The person who closes the Paris option set and develops the specific relationships is the one who makes friends. The closing is the difficult part.
According to Psychology Today’s adult friendship research, adult friendship requires approximately 50 hours of shared time to develop from acquaintance to friend. The 50 hours must be unscheduled or voluntarily scheduled rather than required by context. Paris provides the context. The voluntary 50 hours is the investment.
Worth the investment at Virtuosal.com.
