People-ing and socializing in Cuenca

We were at lunch recently with good friends we haven’t seen for awhile. In response to a question about what she’d been up to, the female of the couple replied, “Well, I haven’t been people-ing lately.”

Her unique phraseology caught me off guard, but I get it.

Our own social calendar purposely has a lot more blank days than it used to. I’ve been reading through my posts from our earliest days here (an exciting new project is in the works) and I am amazed at the frenetic pace we somehow maintained for years! Once, we actually took a long red eye flight back from the States, hauled our suitcases up the stairs, changed clothes and freshened a bit, then zipped off to a big party until the wee hours.

At the Ecuador Cares Spring Fundraiser

I often found myself saying to Cynthia, “We’re acting like we’re in our 20s. And we didn’t act like this when we were in our 20s!!”

After each trip home we would vow to cut back on our socializing. And we did, but going out five times a week instead of all seven wasn’t getting the job done. Finally we settled on no more than three engagements per week (Three a week? In the “old days” it was more like three a year!) and lately it hasn’t even been that frequent.

Another change is we rarely go out at night except for dinners in the homes of friends, choosing instead to prepare an early meal and watch a movie or favorite TV show before going to bed at a reasonable hour. Meeting for lunch is our go-to social venue these days and has proven to be a stellar choice — it’s usually cheaper, everyone’s fresh, and the temptation to overdo the alcohol is less likely. In conversations with other expats who have been here for some time our social downsizing appears to be quite typical.

Sure, we’re seven years older than when we arrived, but the main reason for us reverse-metamorphosing from social butterflies into caterpillars is that we now have a life. In the beginning we were trying to figure out what expat life even meant. New culture + new language + well, new everything is highly stimulating. And we were discovering after an adult lifetime of work/chores/errands that meeting lots of new people is really fun!

Now, there is at least a semblance of order to our days, and people-ing for us is much more about quality than quantity. Of the hundreds of people we’ve met in Cuenca over the years, I wouldn’t characterize a single human being as evil (maybe “special” but not evil), but being honest there’s simply better chemistry, however that is defined, with some folks. Nurturing those relationships is how we choose to invest our social time and energy.

Hey, guess what? We’ve got friends coming over for dinner in a few hours. I’d better get down to the kitchen and pitch in. See, we aren’t completely cocooning.

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