
Why Do We Murder the Beautiful Friendships of Boys? (2017) - magpi3
https://medium.com/s/man-interrupted/why-do-we-murder-the-beautiful-friendships-of-boys-3ad722942755
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cafard
Do we?

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".

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joyeuse6701
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.

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smileysteve
> 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.

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magpi3
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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zwaps
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...

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dTal
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.

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squozzer
Cui bono?

