The day after Donald Trump’s inauguration, Women’s Marches across the country mobilized an estimated 4.2 million Americans to the streets in protest. It’s believed they were the largest demonstrations in American history, even surpassing the anti-war protests of the ‘60s and early ‘70s. The Trump presidency has riled up so many Americans that even the science community is leaving the laboratory and picking up signs in protest.
On Sunday, hundreds of scientists and geeks alike assembled in Copley Square in Boston, Massachusetts for the Stand Up for Science protest. The tone of the event was laid out the day before by Gretchen Goldman, Research Director at Union of Concerned Scientists, in a meeting for the American Association for the Advancement of Science. “They’re looking to dismantle the very process by which we use science to inform decision-making,” Ms. Goldman told the group. “If we walk this process back it’s going to do irreparable damage.”
America’s scientists have good reason to fear Trump’s presidency. Immediately after taking office, the departments of Agriculture and the Interior faced an information lockdown. Scientists at the USDA’s Agricultural Research Service were told to stop releasing “any public-facing documents... news releases, photos, fact sheets, news feeds, and social media content... until further notice.” And tweets from Badlands National Park in South Dakota were deleted for referring to climate change.
Trump himself is a climate-change denier who once said that it’s a “hoax created by the Chinese.” He has also made some alarming appointments to prominent cabinet posts. His choice to head the Environmental Protection Agency, Scott Pruitt, has long worked in opposition to its environmental regulations and is a climate-change denier as well. Plus, his Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, is a former oil executive and the new Energy Secretary, Rick Perry, once claimed he would eliminate the agency altogether.
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Will your current friends still be with you after seven years?
Professor shares how many years a friendship must last before it'll become lifelong
Think of your best friend. How long have you known them? Growing up, children make friends and say they’ll be best friends forever. That’s where “BFF” came from, for crying out loud. But is the concept of the lifelong friend real? If so, how many years of friendship will have to bloom before a friendship goes the distance? Well, a Dutch study may have the answer to that last question.
Sociologist Gerald Mollenhorst and his team in the Netherlands did extensive research on friendships and made some interesting findings in his surveys and studies. Mollenhorst found that over half of your friendships will “shed” within seven years. However, the relationships that go past the seven-year mark tend to last. This led to the prevailing theory that most friendships lasting more than seven years would endure throughout a person’s lifetime.
In Mollenhorst’s findings, lifelong friendships seem to come down to one thing: reciprocal effort. The primary reason so many friendships form and fade within seven-year cycles has much to do with a person’s ages and life stages. A lot of people lose touch with elementary and high school friends because so many leave home to attend college. Work friends change when someone gets promoted or finds a better job in a different state. Some friends get married and have children, reducing one-on-one time together, and thus a friendship fades. It’s easy to lose friends, but naturally harder to keep them when you’re no longer in proximity.
Some people on Reddit even wonder if lifelong friendships are actually real or just a romanticized thought nowadays. However, older commenters showed that lifelong friendship is still possible:
“I met my friend on the first day of kindergarten. Maybe not the very first day, but within the first week. We were texting each other stupid memes just yesterday. This year we’ll both celebrate our 58th birthdays.”
“My oldest friend and I met when she was just 5 and I was 9. Next-door neighbors. We're now both over 60 and still talk weekly and visit at least twice a year.”
“I’m 55. I’ve just spent a weekend with friends I met 24 and 32 years ago respectively. I’m also still in touch with my penpal in the States. I was 15 when we started writing to each other.”
“My friends (3 of them) go back to my college days in my 20’s that I still talk to a minimum of once a week. I'm in my early 60s now.”
“We ebb and flow. Sometimes many years will pass as we go through different things and phases. Nobody gets buttsore if we aren’t in touch all the time. In our 50s we don’t try and argue or be petty like we did before. But I love them. I don’t need a weekly lunch to know that. I could make a call right now if I needed something. Same with them.”
Maintaining a friendship for life is never guaranteed, but there are ways, psychotherapists say, that can make a friendship last. It’s not easy, but for a friendship to last, both participants need to make room for patience and place greater weight on their similarities than on the differences that may develop over time. Along with that, it’s helpful to be tolerant of large distances and gaps of time between visits, too. It’s not easy, and it requires both people involved to be equally invested to keep the friendship alive and from becoming stagnant.
As tough as it sounds, it is still possible. You may be a fortunate person who can name several friends you’ve kept for over seven years or over seventy years. But if you’re not, every new friendship you make has the same chance and potential of being lifelong.