Struggling to Make Friends As I Get Older

Some relationships have become only small talk

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I have been having a mini-existential crisis lately, and I struggled to find out why. I realized why yesterday: I am not as great at making friends as I used to be.

For the past three years, I have been an evening law student who has worked during the day as a teacher. I am about to graduate law school and transition onto the next stage of life. As an evening student, there is a lot less focus on being able to focus on the social aspects of law school since we obviously have a lot less time to spend at the law school than the usual law students and have to be as efficient with our time as possible. It was sometimes hard to be social when I was busy and occupied from 7 a.m. to 9 or 10 p.m. on any given day. But we have spent a couple of hours in class together a couple of days a week, so there was some considerable time we had to spend together.

I am about to graduate in a month, and I went to an end-of-year celebration for my class. I came away from this celebration realizing I don’t know a lot about my classmates, and they don’t know a lot about me. They know the surface-level information I volunteer — that I’m in law school, obviously, and what kind of law I want to pursue. They know what classes we enjoyed together and which we didn’t, and…