Why Everyone Always Seems to Be Out of Town
In a discussion of the article on the DC Urban Moms and Dads message board, a poster wrote, “I don’t know why my neighbors are always out of town on weekends,” before adding that, as a consequence, he or she also travels frequently, and thus contributes to the weekend desertion of the neighborhood.
Key points
- Hall, a University of Kansas communication professor who studies friendship, told me that he encourages people to visit out-of-town friends to keep those relationships alive.
- Elsewhere on the internet, the “out of town” phenomenon is a recurring grievance wherever women, people over 30, and particularly women over 30 gather.
- The week of, several people canceled because their kids had out-of-town sports competitions the morning after the gathering.
Additional details
- Out of town is where all of your friends are when you’ve finally decided to host a playdate.
- Because people are so geographically spread out, even a modest wedding or baby shower might require high-school friends, college roommates, and extended-family members to all fly in from different cities.
- If people are always going away, they can’t be around for preplanned meetups or be run into casually, interactions that are the glue holding together friendship and social life.
- [ Read: The friendship paradox ] Several demographic trends help explain why so few people ever seem to be home on the weekends.
- The most common reasons that Americans gave last year for not spending more time with their friends were their own mental-health issues, not having enough money, and being too busy; travel didn’t appear anywhere in the top six.
How this summary was made: extractive summary — built from the sources' own reporting. It is drawn only from the reporting of the sources listed below — read the originals for full detail. How we summarize →
Advertisement
Every article behind this summary — 1 article from 1 outlet
Get stories like this in your inbox.
Subscribe — it's freeOne free email at 6am — your topics, deduplicated, five minutes. No account, no paywall.