• Location: Keele University, Staffordshire, England
• Mood: determined
• Music: Melissa Ferrick: Drive

Social

I've had a good month for seeing friends I don't spend time with often enough. I managed long phone chats with hatam_soferet and lethargic_man, and jack and I managed to get most of a weekend with doseybat and her mother and pplfichi, and the wonderful angelofthenorth came to stay with me for a few days.

I feel really really blessed by having such wonderful friends, especially when they reach out to me when I'm doing badly at keeping in touch. And several other people have got in touch too and I really do want to get back to them to make plans. And I'm not doing at all well at posting or commenting here (though I'm still reading, definitely, I haven't missed a day.)

It's easy to worry that I'm failing to live up to the standard I've always held, that I shouldn't let friendships slide because I'm too absorbed in romantic relationships. But I think that's not really true, that's just me being self-critical; there are lots of reasons why I'm finding keeping in touch hard, and it's not particularly because I'm poly or caught up in NRE. (Really, it's been 2½ years, I can hardly blame newness.) I've always struggled with regular correspondence, and keeping lots of different friendships going is hard for everybody at a life stage when we're dealing with demanding jobs, parenting – and it's more and more common that my friends have caring responsibilities for older relatives, grandparents or even parents.

And the fact that lots of my time and energy is taken up by commuting. I can't socialize much during the week since basically none of my friends live near me (since mathcathy moved away). I can't easily cram socializing into my extremely tight weekends, because if I go anywhere other than Cambridge I end up not seeing my partners for ages. Also, everybody is ridiculously busy and booked up at weekends. I think the solution to this is probably to move nearer to my main social group, who are in Cambridge and London, and hopefully that will give me more time for friends who are more distant. That is obviously quite a difficult thing to sort out, though, and I don't want to pin too much hope on everything magically becoming easier.

Anyway, the only way to restart the habit of posting here is to just go ahead and do so. Have a meme which ghoti sensibly imported from FB: suggest a category and I'll tell you my top five things in that category. Feel free to propagate it if you think it would be a fun thing to do in your own journal.

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