I have no idea where to meet people to spend time with, especially with a busy life including school, work, and family. What do you suggest?
– Emily, Indiana
Hi Emily, thanks for your question (especially for taking time out of your busy schedule to send it!). One of the great advantages of “spending time” is that it meshes so well with you living the life you want to live. We acknowledge the difficulty that anyone with a full and rewarding life of family, work, and school responsibilities will have in finding time to meet people in social situations. In your case, a little planning is probably necessary!
In situations like yours, we find that the time pressure often increases the tendency to use checklists. After all, you don’t have a lot of time to waste. Try to resist doing this! It may seem like a time saver, but in reality it is a time waster.
First, think about the time you’re spending creating your checklist, which is really imagining what you believe to be your “dream match.” While it’s good to understand your boundaries and to benefit from self-knowledge and the wisdom of past experiences, attempting to match real people to a mythical template creates problems when you’re spending time with someone else.
One of the things we stress to people is to be present with the people in your life. This means that you’re giving them your attention, you’re truly listening to what they have to say, and enjoying what they have to offer in that moment. The checklist can distract from that, as your mind is busy categorizing everything they say into one of the line items on your list.
Second, one of the consequences of the global reach of our communication technologies, and even just the ease and speed with which we can reach people locally through our cell phones, is that we are increasingly victimized by “analysis paralysis.”
Don’t get us wrong, we think you should take advantage of technology to increase the efficiency and scope of your life. That’s especially important when you’re as busy as you are.
Bringing this back around to your question, there is no handy list to tell you where to meet people you’ll enjoy spending time with. That will be determined by you, by your interests and by you coming to understand (or discover) the things that connect you to who you are. Pursue those things, and in doing so you’ll open yourself to finding people to share your journey with. Some of them will turn out to be friends, some will fade from your life as quickly as they entered it, and hopefully at some point one may turn out to be something more. But by focusing on something you can control—how and where you spend what free time you do have—you’ll be creating a fulfilling life for yourself, which is something to treasure.
(For those of you screaming in your heads, “online dating!,” come back next week where we’ll address a reader question about that topic.)
