And by “good time,” they mean hiking, eco-activism, trading nerdy theories about “Lost.” Yes, Ryan Blitstein and his girlfriend/wingman have each other — and Facebook and MeetUp and CraigsList — but they also have solitary jobs in a relatively new city (Chicago), and, as Blitstein writes in a nice essay at Salon.com, they are also having a hard time making friends.

“My Facebook profile is bursting at the seams with hundreds of acquaintances, colleagues and contacts, many within walking distance. But I can count on one hand the number I’d even take out for a drink. So much for the brave new world of social networking,” Blitstein writes. “Until recently, I thought of myself as different, especially when it came to maintaining friendships with other men. I am not afraid to ask a guy out on a so-called man-date. I don’t need to use SportsCenter or an action movie or an indie rock show to overpower the supposed latent homoeroticism that some men attribute to one-on-one male socializing. I’m as comfortable talking about relationships with another dude as I am arguing about politics. But it seems the older I get, the harder it is to find new people to engage in these conversations.”

And: “There is a vast gulf between vaguely keeping in touch with someone and actually sharing, experiencing, exploring and all the other things you give and get and take from a close friendship. I find it increasingly difficult to cross over that gulf with those I’m meeting now. It’s a poignant thing to be a full-grown human and realize you’re deficient in something that seems so effortless for children.”

Blitstein’s essay is not an obvious broadside against the “alienation” of “technology,” yadda yadda. (I’d argue that the “connectedness” fostered by Facebook, while often superficial in one sense, still does the job of affirming one’s role in one’s own life story. High school! Camp! That crappy post-college internship! OMG! Hi hi hi!) But judging by many of the letters written in response, Blitstein and his girlfriend are not, so to speak, alone — and I think there is something new and modern, if not high-tech, about that. When we married much younger, skipping the seeking-our-fortunes/-selves segment of our twenties, we kept our high school and college friends because we’d graduated with them, like, last year. Now, like our phones, we’re mobile. There are more phases in our lives, more places to put down — and pull up — stakes. Makes sense to me.

What about you? Has making friends gotten harder for you as you get older? Might that also make it harder to make more-thans, too, given that “through friends” can be a romantic goldmine?

My sister called me to rant about her ex deleting her as a friend on Facebook. She asked me to check and see if he deleted me too.”Why do you care? You broke up with him. And I’m at work; I don’t have time for this.”

Not the response she wanted. Click. For the record, she’s the older sister.

I then checked my Google reader (because there’s always time for that at work) and saw this in my feed of the New York Times most e-mailed articles.

I sent the link to my sister, telling her she was probably sacrificed in a reckless moment of hunger, when her ex had a severe craving for a Whopper.

Once upon a time, BG had a perfectly magical date with a then-obscure movie star who, as it turned out, was apparently on a different date at the time. One of the fun parts of the story (and its two-years-later coda) is this: the friends who set us up had told me way too much about him. I knew his hobbies, his college major, his newborn niece’s infelicitous name. The challenge for me, then, was to react to his biographical information as if it were news (“Econ, huh? So then how’d you get into acting?”) and to not ask questions about things I wasn’t supposed to know yet (“How’s your niece? I mean — how’s Nice? In the summer? Ever been?”) I met this challenge, thankyouverymuch, but it required a mighty effort. And nohedidn’tcallwhateverthat’snotthepoint.

The point is: that was before Google.

(more…)

Since life is so often stranger than fiction (people stealing leaves in India, doctors pulling screws and nails from a metal-eating man, the Clapper), the Bush Theatre in England decided to go to the source when conceiving its newest show, “50 Ways to Leave Your Lover,” which opens its run Saturday at the Latitude Festival.

The theater asked people to share their worst (or “best,” depending) breakup experiences, 50 of which found their way into the 50-minute play, performed by two men and two women. The breakup lines uttered range from the classic “Let’s just be friends” to the soon-to-be classic “I’m dumping you by changing my Facebook status.”

I once was dumped by a guy who apparently decided the only was to get rid of me was to drop out of college and drive from Louisiana to Alaska to work on a fishing boat. I got a postcard letting me know. That one’s perhaps better for an epistolary novel, or Discovery Channel reality show, but hey: tell us what vignette would you have offered for inclusion in this real-life art?

I love the Internet. It is indeed a beautiful tool, allowing you to research information efficiently and to communicate with an ever-expanding global network. And now, of course, as Switched.com reminds us, you can also use it to break up with your significant other. (That is, if you’re momentarily unable to text. Rrowr!)

Have we really gotten that lazy? Have our communication skills gotten that crappy? Are we just too chicken for — never mind a face-to-face — a phone-to-phone? Why I remember back in the day when I would take a deep breath, review my written speech, pick up my rotary phone and proceed to break hearts. Kids these days! All they have to do is change their Facebook status! Though, I suppose there’s always room for creativity, like the woman who was dumped on Wikipedia who sold her ex-boyfriend’s stuff on eBay. Now that, that’s e-theater.

On the upside, as Switched’s roundup also reminds us, the Internet has also created the opportunity for creative marriage proposals. Remember when CmdrTaco at Slashdot got down on virtual bended knee? Almost seems quaint now. My current favorite is this fake iPhone commercial. So iCute! Now if someone would propose to me in the form of one of those adorable ads for Sonic, I’d be the happiest girl on the planet.

Speaking of deconstruction, here’s a piece from Sunday’s New York Times Book Review:

At least since Dante’s Paolo and Francesca fell in love over tales of Lancelot, literary taste has been a good shorthand for gauging compatibility. These days, thanks to social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace, listing your favorite books and authors is a crucial, if risky, part of self-branding. When it comes to online dating, even casual references can turn into deal breakers. “Sussing out a date’s taste in books is ‘actually a pretty good way — as a sort of first pass — of getting a sense of someone,” said Anna Fels, a Manhattan psychiatrist and the author of Necessary Dreams: Ambition in Women’s Changing Lives. “It’s a bit of a Rorschach test.'”

<snip>

James Collins, whose new novel, Beginner’s Greek, is about a man who falls for a woman he sees reading The Magic Mountain on a plane, recalled that after college, he was “infatuated” with a woman who had a copy of The Unbearable Lightness of Being on her bedside table. “I basically knew nothing about Kundera, but I remember thinking, ‘Uh-oh; trendy, bogus metaphysics, sex involving a bowler hat,’ and I never did think about the person the same way (and nothing ever happened),” he wrote in an e-mail message. “I know there were occasions when I just wrote people off completely because of what they were reading long before it ever got near the point of falling in or out of love: Baudrillard (way too pretentious), John Irving (way too middlebrow), Virginia Woolf (way too Virginia Woolf).” Come to think of it, Collins added, “I do know people who almost broke up” over The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen: “‘Overrated!’ ‘Brilliant!’ ‘Overrated!’ ‘Brilliant!’”

For me, honestly, the literary dealbreaker I recall most clearly was the guy who had no books. What about you? Which suitors have you judged — fairly or not — by their covers? Post your mini-memoir here.