by Kristen Gregory
We talk a lot about the rising cost of our hobbies. We rarely talk about the cost of friendship, which has similarly been hit by inflation. They say it’ll take you forty to sixty hours to convert an acquaintance into a casual friend – and if you want to deepen that bond, you need to spend as many as two-hundred hours of quality time together to be besties. While literal measurable time can’t “inflate”, the value of it has skyrocketed, thanks largely to just how much of it we need to dedicate to work, working out our finances, working out how to re-skill and navigate a treacherous job market, working out what to cook for dinner, and, well… working out. It’s all work, and it’s all a big demand on our waking hours. Cultivating friendships, new ones at that? Sounds a lot like work, to be honest.
There’s nothing I can say about making and sustaining friendships as an adult that hasn’t already been said. We make friends with the people we grow up with because they’re who we spend most of our waking hours with – at school, at work, in church. When we start our first jobs, we quickly realise that we see more of these people than we do our own families. Are the people we work with really who we’d pick to be friends with? Not all of the time, no, and it’s the same for those we went to school with. Relationships of circumstance are not all equal. As card-game enthusiasts, we have one thing over those trying to develop friendships more casually: the choice of circumstance, and the opportunity for sustained quality time.
The first card game network I built wasn’t until I graduated from University. A friend and I working retail were vaguely amused by the fact our store was stocking Pokemon Trading Card Game boosters, a game we’d not touched since childhood. The set in question was Black and White: Legendary Treasures, and looking back? What a set that was to reel in relapsed players. It had a bonus sheet with awesome art, and the nostalgia factor was off the charts. To cut a long story short, we went from abusing staff discount to crack packs to going to local events, and eventually progressed to tournaments. While my friend remained mostly a kitchen-table player, I’d gotten the competitive itch, and I was travelling around the country to shuffle up multiple weekends a month.
