What follows is a bit of a rant, but I imagine some here may have been in a similar spot, so I'm hoping it's productive.

***

I value my long term friendships, and I think all of the research showing that day-to-day friendships matter for happiness is more or less intuitive. (This is where, out of laziness, I cite a Huffington Post article for evidence for something well established.)

What, then, does one do when all of one's friends have kids and promptly flee to the suburbs, becoming almost entirely unavailable for any and all face-to-face interaction? Any suggestions for how a person maintains friendships when the other halves of all of those friendships seem perhaps not uninterested, but totally unwilling to put anything concrete into the friendship?

To be clear, my wife and I don't have kids. We aren't going to have kids. But we'd like to maintain friendships with all of our friends who do have kids. We just have no idea how.

And, to be clear, we've been flexible. When we bought a new house last fall, and there were 3-4 other couples also moving at the same time, we offered to move to a single, central location where friends who were also moving might congregate. We had no personal interest in leaving the city, but we would have done it -significantly altering our lives - if anyone else had been wiling to make some compromises to create community.

Nyet. Nothing at all. Everyone went to hell in their own way, miles and miles apart, in a McMansion of their own suburban hell. Nothing matters anymore but school districts, property taxes, and kids' activities.


***

What is to be done? How does one create adult community in a world of local-property-tax-funded, segregated-school-district, anxiety-over-inequality, snowplow parenting?