This article starts with several paragraphs of rambling about the author and his wife and whatnot. I don't know if there is an official name for this sort of medium.com writing style, but I have seen it criticized before.
Maybe medium.com authors are paid by words?
Anyway, I am sure it's a good article. Sadly, I am now conditioned to close the tab whenever the article starts with the author & friend or partner last Friday...
Your loss. It's a great article, with a researcher's results woven in with the author's personal experience of it as a (fairly compelling) "worked example". What you describe as "rambling" is 2 sentences of introduction to the former, followed by 2 sentences of introduction to the latter. If your attention span can't handle 4 perfectly relevant introductory sentences, that's not the article's fault.
America is a very mobile country. One best friend moved a couple of hundred miles when we were in elementary school. My family moved when I was between 8th and 9th grade, which was goodbye to a lot of friends I had known for anything from nine to a couple of years. (There wasn't any Skype in 1969.) I moved after college.
Points off to the author for identifying Alain de Botton as a philosopher. Also for the expression "perform masculinity".
I think America used to be very mobile, but if the economic plight of the interior is any indication, it would seem that the country is not as mobile as it once was.
> How many times have we heard parents say, “Oh, they’ll make new friends,” as if the relationships of children are so shallow and contextual that they can be swapped out like last year’s lunchbox?
This is where the author loses me; for several reasons
1) Parents might have several reasons for severing a child's friendship, whether relocating for a job, disagreements in the adult relationship, or disagreements in moores and values.
2) People will experience loss in many types of relationships. It doesn't mean they were worthless, in many ways this grief means just the opposite. It's similar important for people to be able to create new friendships with new people.
The point the author is trying to make IMO is that the parents dismiss the relationships as shallow and contextual, while the children themselves, the ones actually in the relationship, have no choice whatsoever.
Of course relationships will come and go in everyone's life, but in an adult relationship at least there is some choice made by one of the two parties invested in the relationship.
I met my dearest and oldest friend in the fourth grade. If my parents had made a life decision that would have cost me that relationship it would have been a huge, huge (really unimaginable at this point) loss for me.
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 30.4 ms ] threadAnyway, I am sure it's a good article. Sadly, I am now conditioned to close the tab whenever the article starts with the author & friend or partner last Friday...
America is a very mobile country. One best friend moved a couple of hundred miles when we were in elementary school. My family moved when I was between 8th and 9th grade, which was goodbye to a lot of friends I had known for anything from nine to a couple of years. (There wasn't any Skype in 1969.) I moved after college.
Points off to the author for identifying Alain de Botton as a philosopher. Also for the expression "perform masculinity".
This is where the author loses me; for several reasons
1) Parents might have several reasons for severing a child's friendship, whether relocating for a job, disagreements in the adult relationship, or disagreements in moores and values.
2) People will experience loss in many types of relationships. It doesn't mean they were worthless, in many ways this grief means just the opposite. It's similar important for people to be able to create new friendships with new people.
Of course relationships will come and go in everyone's life, but in an adult relationship at least there is some choice made by one of the two parties invested in the relationship.
I met my dearest and oldest friend in the fourth grade. If my parents had made a life decision that would have cost me that relationship it would have been a huge, huge (really unimaginable at this point) loss for me.
At a certain point, you stop being able to form healthy relationships after you’ve been severed from so many.