I owe my marriage to a 16+ club in St. Paul that doesn't exist anymore.

It was 2003 and the club was called Stargate. The room was huge and always packed, the kind of crowded where you couldn’t really move so much as exist in proximity to other people moving. The music was late 90s and early 2000s hip hop, loud enough that you stopped trying to talk after a while and just communicated by leaning in close, half-shouting, half-reading lips. And almost every night, when the room had been going for hours and everyone was sweating through their shirts, they would close with K-Ci and JoJo’s “Crazy.” The lights would shift and people would pair up out of the crowd. If you were lucky you’d have one slow dance with whoever you ended up next to before the night was over.

My friend Kevin had invited me to come along that night, and his friend Maryza had brought a friend of hers named Heather. Nobody was trying to set anyone up. They were just bringing their people, the way you do at that age. I spent most of the night thinking she was out of my league and saying as little as possible to confirm it.

We didn’t exchange numbers and I didn’t have a plan, and in any other version of the story that would have been the end of it. What actually happened is that a few weeks later, in a roundabout way through the internet of that era, we ended up talking again, and somewhere in that conversation she reminded me we’d already met. Our first real date was back at Stargate, and I’m not sure I would have crossed paths with her at all if that club didn’t exist.

A pattern worth noticing

The club wasn’t where I made friends. It was the wrapper that gave the friendships I already had somewhere to go. And because it gave us somewhere to go, things happened there that none of us planned.

The complication

I’ve been thinking about this lately because I can’t remember the last time I went somewhere that worked the way Stargate worked. And I don’t think it’s because I’m older. The category itself thinned out. Stargate, Waterworks, Tropics, the Gold Rush over in Cottage Grove. They were everywhere when I was nineteen. Most of them are gone now.

The thing about a place like that, looking back, is that it required almost nothing from you. You didn’t have to plan it, besides what you were going to wear. You didn’t have to be in a good mood. You didn’t even have to be the one to suggest it. Someone in your group would text or call and say they were going, and you went. The place did the rest.

Most adult connection runs the other way now. You text first. You find a date that works for both of you, three weeks out. You pick the place, suggest the time, confirm twice. You bring all the energy yourself. That’s a lot of friction for something that used to be free.

There’s a name for what we lost. Sociologists call them third places. Not home, not work, but the somewhere else where life happens. Barbershops and diners. Bowling alleys. The bar where the same people showed up every Thursday. The category has been thinning out for decades, and most of us didn’t notice because we were busy.

And the people coming up behind us aren’t even grieving rooms like Stargate, because they never had them. The wrapper for their social lives is a phone. Which works for some things, but the kind of collision I had with Heather, the kind where you didn’t know you were going to meet someone until you did, isn’t really what apps are built for. Apps are built to remove the randomness. Stargate ran on it.

When the third places go, the things that used to happen in them go with them. Not just the friendships you might have made. The collisions you couldn’t have engineered if you tried.

A way forward

I’m not nostalgic for Stargate, exactly. (Although the thought of renting out a space to recreate one night of my youth has crossed my mind!) The point isn’t to bring those rooms back.

The point is to be honest about what they did. A lot of what people call “drift” in adult friendship isn’t really drift. It’s the absence of the rooms where staying connected used to be automatic. The wrapper went away, and most of us kept blaming ourselves for the result.

If you want connection at this stage of life, you might have to build the wrapper yourself. A standing Tuesday. A monthly poker night. A bi-weekly thing at the same house with the same people, no matter what. Not because it’s romantic to do, but because the alternative is waiting for a room that isn’t coming back.

A question to sit with

What was your version of Stargate? And if you had to build something now that gave your friendships somewhere to go without you having to invent it every time, what would that even look like?