Game. Set. Match
How a tennis match between two newlywed couples destroyed any chance at friendship
When my wife and I were newlyweds, we met another newlywed couple a few apartments down from ours. They married a month after us. When they moved in, my wife took it upon herself to formulate a well-devised plan to strike up a friendship.
“Let’s make new friends,” she said. “They look about our age. Maybe a couple of years younger. They just got married. We’re all at a similar stage in our lives.”
I’ve found making friends as an adult a near-impossible task. It’s like going to the grocery store and finding the right shopping cart — one that doesn’t have a wobbly, squeaky wheel. Everything about it is awkward, including the most basic of introductions: your name.
When you’re a kid, you have it easy. As a parent, I envy my son’s ability to strike up a friendship out of thin air. He sees a kid roughly his age and walks up and says, “Hi, my name is Henry. Do you want to be friends?”
Then he plays toy trucks with the other kid or pretends to be Batman and the other kid Robin and they save Gotham from the villainous Joker and his henchmen. You can’t do that with another adult when you’re an adult. I mean, you can.
