Playdates for Grownups

Here's what I've read:

* People are social animals by nature.
* Infants who are fed but receive no other human contact fail to thrive. Their bodies don't grow; their minds do not develop; they get sick; sometimes they even die for no reason.
* A good social life strengthens the immune system.
And in addition, I can vouch for the fact that starches eaten with company have less negative impact on blood sugar levels than the same starches eaten alone.


So there is scientific evidence that people need companionship. Yet In this age of computers, a healthy adult could go days without any human contact if he telecommutes, shops on the Internet, and uses the self-checkout line at the supermarket. If you exclude electronic communication and limit "companionship" to actual face-to-face contact, modern society is moving more and more rapidly toward isolation. And the older people get, the more isolated they become.

Children still gather in schoolrooms and playgrounds. In the safety of that casual contact, children strike up new friendships all the time. As we age, society provides us with fewer and fewer opportunities to meet people casually and get to know other people without putting our egos on the line. Children find new playmates and make lots of playdates; grownups not so much.


Maintaining friendship, even with BFFs from childhood, requires time and energy, both in short supply for the average working adult. Retirement frees up time and energy. But what a shock it was for me to realize that I had to work hard to have playmates in retirement. When you don't get out of bed, get dressed and go off to an office every morning, you do not have a gang to go out to lunch with. In retirement, you have none of those shallow meaningless office relationships that imitate companionship in the lives of so many employed adults.

I'm one of the worst offenders.  My work life centered on developing computer software, a solitary activity by its nature. At the end of a long day of interacting with a computer, I generally felt delighted to come home and be alone with my cats and hobbies. All my favorite hobbies are also solitary pursuits. I paint. I create bead jewelry and bookmarks. I read lots of mystery novels. When I was younger I wrote novels, too, although none of them were ever published.

After retirement I became a volunteer for an organization that assists seniors who want to remain in their homes. For many of those seniors contact with the rest of humanity consisted of waving at the nice friendly garbage man on Tuesday mornings, chatting up the postman every afternoon, and my weekly two-hour visit. I wouldn't want to age into that lifestyle.  That life held no appeal for me. 

I considered moving to one of those communities for people 55 and older. Those communities attempt to replicate the playground experience of youth--getting people together for lots of organized activities with the assumption that if people mingle enough some friendships will effortlessly fall out of the mixture and everyone will eventually find playmates.

But those active adult communities are also based on the tacit understanding that birds of a feather will flock together. The law doesn't allow discrimination on the basis of race or religion, but the law can't force people to be friendly or kind or polite.  Prune faces are not just about wrinkles. Visits to a few active adult communities convinced me that I wouldn't like to be in the minority in one of those communities anymore than I'd enjoy being in the minority in an isolated rural village where a new family might be outsiders for two or three generations.  And I am not very good at conformity so I could be a minority of one in any crowd. 

The option always exists to find newer and more sociable interests. For example, my neighbors are into square dancing and they have often invited me to come along with them. They dance at least four nights a week and socialize with their square dancing friends all the time. My neighbors love square dancing so much that they even go to the dances when one of them has a broken ankle or new knee. They are living testimonial to how much fun square dancing can be for someone who enjoys that kind of thing. 

I, however, am a total klutz. My mother--a romantic as well as a daydreamer--induced labor hoping I'd be born on my father's birthday. I must have been brain damaged by her severe contractions because I can't tell right from left without considerable thought. On my first driving lesson I turned the car over because I didn't have time to figure out whether "right" meant toward the passenger side or into the big open water pipe ditch on the driver's side. I am convinced that at a square dance I would quickly throw my square into total chaos. Square dancing sounds terrifying to me. Square dancing sounds like torture. I doubt I could make new playmates at a square dance.

After ruling out all other options, I decided I needed to make more of an effort to figure out where people who shared my current interests might be located. Then--a little harder--I would have to get off the couch and go to those locations. So far I've found classes in drawing, painting, and beading, craft fairs to sell beadwork, and a local club for people who read mystery novels. Each of those activities has some attraction for me for its own sake whether any fun new acquaintance materializes or not.

Every now and then I meet someone at one of these activities whose company I imagine I would enjoy if we made a playdate. Then I have to risk rejection by reaching out to suggest a playdate if the interesting person doesn't beat me to it. Most people do find the threat of rejection daunting, but that only means that lots of people will be grateful to you for making the first move so they don't have to...

I've concluded that rejection should only be a significant threat if I were looking for a significant relationship like a BFF or True Love. All I want is a playdate once in a while for coffee or lunch out or to pop into an art exhibit or to hike in the park, so rejection should not be too devastating and the threat of rejection should not be a reasonable obstacle to taking action. At least in theory.

So far this is working for me. When I get off the couch and go out to places where I have fun, I do meet fun people. Almost magically, the people who strike me as potentially fun turn out to be people I have a lot in common with. Some could even turn out to be BFF's over time...but they don't have to. They are just as valuable as playmates for playdates.

I guess the lesson learned is that once you get off the couch, life begins to happen--even in the sixties.