Communal Study 007: Scheduled Hangs

“Grass is green where you water it”

If you are in an unstructured environment, planned, regular hangouts are critical.

The normal trajectory for people transitioning from structured to unstructured environments, or changing life stages, is predictable. If friends do not make an effort to have a more organized approach to spending time together, inevitably how frequent you see each other will fall. A dynamic of “who is reaching out to who” can also emerge. You do have to be on the same page with your friend about wanting a purposeful friendship. There should be a conversation that sounds like “Hey would you like to plan a time weekly, bi-weekly where we can…”.

To put it logically, if you do not have a time or place that you know you will see someone, regularly, the only hope for seeing them is if one or the other of you happen to think of each other and then reach out to plan something. This leaves a lot of room for disappointment & assumptions on either side. Often times both parties are left feeling that the other does not care to hang out with them, even though neither of them has reached out.

You may be able to think of a time when speaking to someone you said,

“They just haven’t reached out to me in a while…”

And then someone replies,

“Have you reached out to them?”

But you haven't reached out either.

People do not have equal strength when it comes to initiating or reaching out. Scheduled hangouts or planned, regular events eliminate the dynamic of waiting for someone to reach out. Or leave it open to question.

For us, there is a sort of desire for different iterations of scheduled hangouts. For example, there is a dream of having one large group trip that happens every year. Everyone who went last year is excited and planning to go the following year. This fosters group chemistry and a sense of, if only once a year, community to look forward to.

Another more frequent example would be getting coffee or pizza or drinks, etc with a good friend every month, two weeks, week what have you. This type of scheduled hang lends itself more to being in on someone’s life & what is going on with them on a more day-to-day fashion.

There are different ways of seeing someone regularly than having a conversation and then scheduling a regular hangout with them. There are solid friendships that exist almost exclusively in a third space. Think a bar, coffee shop, soccer field, basketball court, gym, climbing, etc. What we are delineating is when a friendship is moving from structured to unstructured or into a different life stage it is important to organize how the friendship will persevere without spontaneous interactions.

“THOUGHTS OF THE WEEK”