some thoughts on friendship

Friendships are a very strange type of relationship. There are a lot of proscriptions for how you’re supposed to act with your romantic partners, family members, and superiors/inferiors (whether you follow them or not), and people generally seem to have some implicit sense about what they’re supposed to be doing for those relationships. 

Maybe I’m just being a complete unsocialized alien, but I’m not aware of any sort of similar guidelines for friendships. You’re supposed to be nice, you’re supposed to care about each other, but there doesn’t seem to be any sort of generally accepted framework for how a deep, lifelong friendship works. 

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about the people I’d like to keep in my life and specifically how I’d like to keep them and why I’d like to keep them. Here are a few shower thoughts on the important patterns of friendships, with the major caveat that these are very specific to my preferences and I don’t really understand how other people think about their friendships and what they get out of them.

[My Supreme No-Nonsense Editor pointed out that this post is missing a lot of detail around friendships like how to maintain long distance friendships, what to do with your friends and how often, how to decide when someone is worth developing a deeper friendship with or when it’s time to move on, and how to manage group friendships. That’s why I called these “shower thoughts” - they are necessarily incomplete. I will just say that I think people are on average too quick to drop people when they should really be trying to deepen the friendship. And that the way to deepen things is to be vulnerable and to ask questions that force them to be vulnerable. Or if you could somehow find yourself in a life or death situation with that person, that will probably do the trick.]

Good friendships have to be specific to the two individuals involved. This is much harder to achieve than it sounds. Think of all the people you’ve met who are a generic “that kind of person.” For example: the kind of person who gets everyone amped up, the kind of person who likes going to art museums, the kind of person who shares gossip. If you are friends with a that-kind-of-person, it’s not a deep friendship. It may be fun and they may fill a useful social role, but in the end it has nothing to do with the individual behind the function. 

If you could shift some significant aspects about the person you’ve befriended and you would still have a similar relationship, it’s just not that deep. This framing comes straight out of ideas I liked from the book Beginning of Infinity: the quality of an explanation depends on how robust they are to all the details of reality, if you have to be constantly changing details of the explanation to fit new events, it’s more of a duct-taped solution than something real. If the basis of your friendship is not deeply coupled to who the person really is, if it only applies to a shallow segment of their personality that could exist regardless of who that person is deeper down, you don’t have a high quality friendship. 

This brings up the question of lifelong friendships - people presumably (and hopefully) change a lot over their lives, so if you remain friends with a person as they go through major life changes is it not that deep? I think the answer is that the relationship grows just like people do and has something of its own life. There’s continuity from moment to moment, but at any given point in time it is very specific to the people at that point in time.

It’s easy to test this one against old childhood friends who you still care about, but don’t have a deep in-the-moment connection with. You probably drift into having the same conversations you did back when you were in high school instead of the conversations you prefer to have now, with your closer friends, as an adult, with a much richer life. 

The relationship improves with increasing levels of honesty. This one may be very specific to my own relationships and I can’t claim that it generalizes. I have several relationships I deeply value where we went through periods of feeling awkward and strange and then we finally broke through and told each other the things that were driving us insane or making us angry (these often came out in a really painful way) and after the dust settled it felt like we’d leveled up in some way (yes, I got this from a Sigrid song).

 I don’t think I fully realized this until recently, and it makes me more willing to go through some pains with the people I really care about without walking away.

Also - I worry that people these days are too worried about “toxicity” in their relationships to get anywhere deep in the shit with each other and I’m determined to not make that mistake. All people are awful at times and you gotta figure out how to love them anyway. And really deeply appreciate the people who are able to do that for you. 

Maybe I am too young to talk about lifelong friendships, but I do have some people that I am absolutely certain will be a part of my life going into the future and the tenor of those relationships is just so different. For better or worse, I could be a complete asshole to them for months and they would just tell me that’s how I was acting, shrug it off, and get us back to good. I am more open with them about my insecurities (not completely, never completely, because I am insecure). I don’t feel like I’m playing some role when I am with them. Or more specifically, I can tell things are shitty with them when it feels like we’re falling more into playing roles with each other than being the real people we are. 

 In other relationships, I might be the person who listens or the person who tells stories or the person who laughs along at the right time - that-kind-of-person. But in the best relationships, we are both just ourselves and we have this little unique way of interacting that isn’t scripted but we somehow understand it in some intuitive way. 

I have no idea how to actually build those relationships from scratch. I have been lucky enough to fall into them with people I love and we happened to make it work without realizing what we were doing. But I’d like to have more, so I’ll have to start working on that. 

Also important (and a note to myself): If you haven’t reached this point with anyone yet, don’t despair. You can get there - no deep friendships are spontaneous. It takes real effort and lots of time. The best thing you can do is look out for people who you think you may want to share that connection with and then get to know them as well as you can, forgive them for their assholery, and sacrifice your time to be with them. Expect results over the course of years rather than minutes. 

Lastly, I think there is a significant gender difference in how people approach their friendships and the types of friendships they form. From my own observations, I feel somewhat agnostic as to whether that is driven by genetics or something cultural.