to backtrack from the damper of a seemingly inextricable social pressure, i want to say that i am still, at heart, a romantic idealist. when i was younger and people asked me what my religion was, i would say that i was a romantic idealist.
this can spark off in several different directions. the one that surprised me most is that the reason i no longer do this is that people don't ask me what my religion is. i think this epitomizes the increased barriers of meeting people with age; when you're a kid, you have not yet conformed to social conventions, and so nothing is out of bounds as far as asking people you meet. so you very quickly get a sense of their true character, which they show everyone. but as you grow older, people develop diverging faces more and more: you have your true self, which you show to your close friends, and a smile-and-nod "persona" that you give to people you just meet.
the facts become less facts about you, facts that reflect who you are, and more demographic facts -- where you live, where you work, etc., instead of what you believe. you don't want to offend people, so you don't whip out the potentially controversial stuff, but of course that's the stuff that's most interesting. some of this ties in with the stability stuff i was talking about before; as you grow older, what you're looking for becomes stability. either you've made your place in the world, and you want to keep it, or you haven't found that bedrock and you're looking for it because your peers have and you're losing your attractive qualities.
a cynical way to look at it is the following: it's been a theory of mine for a while that relationship length is roughly constant. in other words, let's say i have a 200-hour relationship with someone; the relationship will last 100 days if we spend two hours a day together, 50 days if we spend four hours a day together, 20 days if we spend ten hours a day together. that's just the amount of time that it will take before we lose interest. ("forever," of course, is a valid relationship time.)
but this time refers to substantive time. as we grow older, we want things to last longer, so we fill as much of the time as possible with non-substance to drag things out until death. with less intensity, the chance of enduring for many years is greater. so we hold back our punches; we don't reveal everything about ourselves as once, because we need to keep some bait to hold people to us for the rest of our lives.
i don't really believe this, of course; i think what's going on is that people become more socially perceptive, and can pick up on other people's displeasure/offense more easily. we become better at seeing what we're not looking for (it's a useful skill) -- we always look for pleasure in other people, so we can see that even at a young age, but as we grow older the amount of displeasure we perceive increases and so does the displeasure/pleasure ratio. which makes us more timid (since timidity creates neither extreme pleasure nor displeasure.)
obviously these aren't inescapable generalizations. for instance, i'd like to think that i haven't become more timid over the years, or less willing to reveal all of myself (not literally, of course) upon first meeting someone. but one result of this shift towards conformity is that people turn from friends to acquaintances as they grow older; people generally don't make close friends past a certain age, or such is my impression.
come to think of it, the chicken-egg relationship may be the other way around. after a while, you accumulate enough close friends that you don't need to take any more risks; at that point, you can focus on making casual friendships with the people around you to make your day as pleasant as possible. you won't find a confidant, but you also won't make an enemy; the marginal utility of a confidant goes down, while the cost of an enemy remains the same, so the balance shifts towards being more risk-averse.
i think i'm doing okay. it doesn't seem like the pace of making lifelong friends has gone down terribly in my life; i hate to whip out the list again, because i'll offend half my readership, but i think i can get away with it since i've guilted you with what i've written already (and/or explained myself.) of the lifelong friends i believe i have, i met them (in a meaningful sense) basically one a year starting with my age-14 year; it doesn't look bad. (note that i may be lying to ensure that everyone i've met falls into one of those categories.) on the other hand, one could just as easily say that by symmetry i won't meet any more. i'm not sure what i can say to that.
i think i've reached an end here, so i'll stop. i urge you all to not tone down your act when you meet people; there's a lot to be gained from it, even if it appears that i've rationalized that payoff away.