Friendship First, page 1
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For my friends
Every single one of them
Contents
Foreword by Rachel Wilkerson Miller
Author’s Note
Introduction
1 Meet Cute
2 The Friendship Recipe
3 Family Matters
4 It Takes a Village
5 The Care Factor
6 In the Group Chat
7 Working It Out
8 Breakups and Breakdowns
9 Loved and Lost
10 Letting Go of the One
Conclusion: A Promise
Notes
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Foreword by Rachel Wilkerson Miller
I recently went for a walk in my neighborhood park after work. It was an idyllic late-spring evening, and everywhere I looked, I saw pairs and groups of friends bathed in magic-hour light: young women in nearly identical athleisure making plans for their next workout class; two white-haired men sitting on a bench, chatting in Polish; a recent Brooklyn transplant talking on the phone to a pal back home. There were friends lounging on blankets, pushing strollers, drinking iced coffee, and walking with dogs (a whole other category of friend!). It all looked so cozy, so easy.
And that’s how friendship often appears from the outside, whether you look to popular culture, social media, or old yearbooks and photo albums. It can feel like everyone is hanging out with their ride-or-die, or taking another enviable girls’ trip with their tight-knit group of five, or throwing a fabulous surprise party for the BFF who has been their number-one for the past decade. There’s a conspicuous lack of conflict, jealousy, simmering annoyance, petty exclusions, and the kind of loneliness that can still exist when you’re surrounded by other people—an absence of any sort of work.
In reality, though, forging and maintaining these ties isn’t as effortless as it appears from the outside. I think we all know this, on some level, but it can be hard to remember when you’re the one worried that you don’t have enough friends, or that all the friends you do have secretly hate you.
Making and keeping friends takes work. It just does! That was true when I wrote The Art of Showing Up in 2020, and it’s just as true now. What has changed in the years since then is that people are even more comfortable talking about—and being vulnerable about—the work of friendship. It’s a welcome change, as I firmly believe that obscuring the effort we make in life—whether we’re talking about our career ambitions, putting together an outfit, or planning meals for the week—does everyone a disservice, and pushes us all further away from one another (which is the last thing we need). And what good is effortlessness anyway? Of course these relationships shouldn’t feel like a toxic slog, but, as Gyan writes in Friendship First, some of the most difficult friendships are the ones “shrouded in ambivalence.” As someone who prefers earnestness and directness to irony and chilly detachment, I couldn’t agree more. I love rolling up my sleeves and doing that good, worth-it kind of work. My guess is that, if you’re reading this book, then you do, too.
We all have the ability to be part of beautiful, affirming friendships, whether they last for a summer, a decade, or a lifetime. This book, written by someone I couldn’t be prouder to call a friend, is a great place to start.
RACHEL WILKERSON MILLER is the author of The Art of Showing Up: How to Be There for Yourself and Your People and Dot Journaling—A Practical Guide, and she’s the editor in chief of SELF magazine. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, VICE, and BuzzFeed, and she’s been a guest on NPR, the Today show, and Good Morning America.
Author’s Note
For the most part, I have used people’s real names throughout this book. However, due to the personal and deeply intimate nature of our friendships, especially those that come to an unexpected end, some names have been changed throughout as indicated with an asterisk.
Introduction
“All anybody wants is to be outside and to be with friends,” I huffed into my phone, watching small groups of two or three gather, distanced, on the grass.
In 2020, when our worlds became infinitely smaller in a matter of weeks, I remember walking along New York City’s West Side Highway, sending a voice memo to a friend in Australia, where I am from. In that moment, I felt my own basic needs whittled down to two things: fresh air and friendship.
The world was two months into the pandemic before I saw anyone I knew, other than my partner, with whom I shared a one-bedroom apartment. Two friends were cycling upstate for the day and realized their route could take them along West 21st Street, right by our place. I woke up early, washed my hair, and put makeup on for the first time in weeks, all to wave at them out of our third-floor window. They may have been the ones getting the fresh air that day, but that injection of friendship brought me back to life.
Weeks later, in an act of pure desperation, I bought a bike of my own and cycled across the Williamsburg Bridge to Brooklyn to meet a friend. We sat, masked, on opposite sides of a six-foot white circle, which had been painted on the grass. I couldn’t see her entire face, but she was there. Right there. I have a photo from that day on my phone, my friend smiling under her mask with the New York City skyline behind her. I might have assumed I would look at that photo one day and feel the sadness of that time, the isolation and loss that was happening all around us. But all I feel is happiness. Fresh air and friendship: I had been right.
By 2020, I had already spent a large portion of my career as a journalist writing about the relationships we have with ourselves and others. It didn’t matter where I worked, who I wrote for, or what my job title was, I always found myself coming back to friendship. At first, it was a magazine feature I’d write in my spare time, in addition to the monthly beauty pages I’d already been assigned. But years later, friendship would become my focus for weeks then months at a time as I carved out new spaces at the websites I worked at.
Still, the pandemic signaled a turning point—not just in myself but within people around the world. By the time I started writing this book, it was as though everywhere I turned, there was a story about friendship waiting to be told.
Today, four years on from those early months of the pandemic, I’ve wondered if my realization about the importance of friendship was in fact an inevitable conclusion that I would have eventually reached, one way or another. Virus or not, there are turning points in all our lives that open our eyes to the people who are there to hold us in moments of crisis, whether from a distance or up close.
Eventually, I would like to think we would all have found the value in caretaking and efforts to maintain relationships with people who are isolated. Because regardless of what’s going on around us, our friendships, much like the air we breathe, are necessary for our survival. It just takes some of us a little longer to realize.
And for those who are yet to understand, I hope this book can be a catalyst.
The pandemic created a microcosm in which the importance of friendship became clear. It was this global event that encouraged many of us to look back on our histories, and forward to the future, and see the powerful impact friends can have on our lives. Connection, after all, is a human need, necessary for our well-being.
A 2005 study titled “Effect of social networks on 10-year survival in very old Australians: The Australian longitudinal study of aging”1 looked at the friendships of older Australians living in care facilities. After ten years, researchers found that people with large networks of friends lived longer than those without, even if they had social connections with children and other relatives. Even when demographic, health, and lifestyle variables were controlled, it was clear a decade later that friendship was fueling survival. A 2018 study,2 which took place in China, found that breast cancer patients with close social and emotional ties in the six months following their diagnosis had both better survival rates and fewer recurrences of cancer in the following three years. Most surprising to researchers was the finding that physical well-being was less important than friendships when it came to the future of their patients.
But despite everything we know about the impact of loneliness on our well-being, and the emotional-caretaking roles friends often play in times of ill health, we live in a society that doesn’t seem to understand friendship as a matter of life or death. There is no leave policy that allows us to take time off work to care for someone outside our own family who needs us. In the US, there are no federal laws that require workplaces to offer bereavement and compassionate leave to employees, and states that do offer this kind of leave generally only do so in the event of a family member’s death. Many of the rules under which we live consistently ignore the facts.
When considering what we lose when we stop valuing our friendships, our minds may wander to sadness, isolation, and even moments of helplessness. The reality is that as we grow older, and all work for longer, the connections we rely on for survival become more important than ever.
Working on a sto
“As I say to my granddaughters, at your age, collect a lot of friends. You don’t have to be close friends, but acquaintances, because when you get to my age and people start falling away, it can become quite lonely,” she said.
It was Sylvia’s mention of acquaintances that stood out to me most. There is value to be found in all kinds of friendships, from our deepest and most life-affirming relationships to relatively casual connections. I’m lucky to still have friends from childhood, whom I hold on to dearly, thankful for our shared history. But I also know and appreciate the joy of new friendships—some of which I hope to nurture until they evolve into old friendships, and others that I appreciate for the fact that they are fleeting.
It is terribly clichéd to say that strangers are just friends you haven’t met yet, but when I think of Sylvia and her group of friends, I’m so thankful someone knocked on her door when she moved to that street or that she waved from her front lawn to theirs. Regardless of how those women came together, there was a single moment that turned two strangers into acquaintances, who turned into friends who have stayed together for the rest of their lives. I’m constantly reminded that most clichés have their foundations set in truth.
When I think about my life so far, a montage of moments shared with my friends drifts before my eyes.
I can see myself walking home from school with a best friend, stopping halfway to sit on the grass by the creek. I remember that same friend sitting across from me on a park bench outside our high school art class and coming out; then, in a flash I see him years later, dancing beside me in the crush of a music festival dance floor. I can feel the warmth of a friend’s blond eight-week-old daughter, whom I met just hours after finding out another friend had lost her son. I remember the way her lightness buoyed me in my grief. I am huddled in a walk-in closet with my coworkers, taking turns to cry, after we found out we could all be losing our jobs. I hear myself weeks later, telling a bartender that my friend and I had got new jobs and, for the very first time, not balking at the sight of a restaurant bill.
What I find most interesting about the memories I share with my friends is the many versions of myself I see within them. While the sets and characters in these memories have remained the same throughout the years, the flashes I see of myself are sometimes unrecognizable. Like the soundtrack to a film, my friends are the chorus behind the crescendos that have signaled every moment of growing up and succeeding, of healing and of changing. My friends have always been there, vital and necessary. Together, they are the only people who could build a complete mosaic of my adult life. The best parts and the very worst—together, they’re the ones who know me best.
There are many feelings specific to friendship. There’s the way a friend’s name can bounce around your head as you wait for them to reply to a text, when you think they might be mad at you. The ache the morning after a former friend appears in your dreams, even though you haven’t spoken in years. The pang of seeing two friends hanging out without you. The emotional whiplash of seeing a friend fall in love with the right person, while another falls in love with the wrong one. The painful shock of a friend doing something you never thought they’d do to you. The regret of doing something to a friend that you never thought yourself capable of. The hurt of being told, in an email of all things, that somebody doesn’t want to be your friend anymore. The shame of finding out someone needed you the day you forgot to reply to their text. The disappointment of canceled plans, the warmth of long phone conversations, or of being introduced as someone’s friend for the first time.
While it would take more than a lifetime to read every romance novel, listen to every love song, or sit with every piece of art made for a lover, the books, films, and music dedicated to celebrating friendship are limited. Without the same diversity of literature and cultural touchstones, how are we supposed to understand friendship as deeply as we do romance or family? When you take the time to sit closely with friendship, it’s surprising what’s still left to uncover.
So this isn’t a book about lovers, parents, siblings, or children. It’s just a book about friends. It’s a book about the way friendships can be both a rock-hard wedge and a cushion of comfort in the relationships we have with others. It is about the way our friends can hold us when those bonds fall apart. Above all else, it’s about the friendships themselves, and how they can become the most important and influential relationships we have in our lives.
Regardless of how much each of us believes we already understand about friendship, there are always more steps to be taken, more depth to explore. By learning about other people’s friendships and delving into these relationships, we will be able to reflect on our own friends, their roles in our lives and society, now and into the future. I hope these chapters open your eyes, mind, and heart as much as they have mine.
1
Meet Cute
One of my favorite things to do in public places is try to spot friends meeting each other. Two people furiously waving at one another from opposite sides of a busy road, waiting for the signal. At a restaurant, a man’s eyes glancing up from his phone before widening, his whole face breaking into a smile, as he sees a friend pushing open the heavy door. In Washington Square Park, a pair of teenage girls hurtling toward each other with such gusto that they almost fall over with the swing of their backpacks. Every day, if you’re looking for it, it’s easy to bear witness to friendship. What’s not so easy to see are the intricacies that exist within each of these relationships.
Having written about friendship for close to a decade, I’ve used the word “friend” more than most people. I’ve spoken to my friends about their friends. I’ve talked to people about the friends they wish they had. My friends. Your friends. Our friends. For someone so obsessed with a single word and all that it represents, I can understand why it may be assumed I also have a single definition for what it really means to be a friend. But the truth is, it’s complicated. For some of the people I have interviewed, a true friend is someone to plan a life alongside, be vulnerable with, and provide for. To others I’ve spoken to, a meaningful friendship has existed without even exchanging names. Dictionary definitions point to words like “trust,” “bond,” and “affection,” as if those words aren’t equally open to interpretation. It’s difficult to talk about friendship in the way it truly deserves without more precise language to do so. For all the words we have to describe the varying stages of dating or falling in and out of love—whether you’re seeing each other, taking things slow, exclusive, engaged, married, on a break, broken up, separated, or divorced—we are short-changed when it comes to language about friendship. Despite our collective obsession with inventing new words and phrases to describe the way romantic relationships unfold—from ghosting to breadcrumbing to love-bombing—friendship has been largely neglected. While I believe the magic of each type of friendship is impossible to perfectly capture in words, I also understand our desire for labels, which are, as the writer Sable Yong stated,1 how we tell the sugar from the salt.
I’m not the first person to reflect on our lack of language around friendship. In their coauthored memoir Big Friendship,2 Aminatou Sow and Ann Friedman present their own definition for the most “affirming— and most complicated—relationships that a human life can hold.” To them, the label “big friendship” has come to replace terms like “best friend” and the somewhat infantilizing “BFF,” which they believe don’t do justice to the emotional work they have put into their relationships. For readers of their book, and former listeners of their podcast Call Your Girlfriend, “big friendship” is a useful label for the relationships they spend their lives tending to. But if “big friendship” sits at one end of the scale and complete strangers dangling their feet off the other, what labels, nicknames, and words dot the space between? In romantic love, the gap between so-called “soulmates” and “just friends” is stuffed with labels that describe everything from “friends with benefits” to “high school sweethearts” to “holiday flings.” To leave the space between best friend and near strangers as sparse as we do—save for vague and unimaginative terms like “good friends” and “acquaintances”—is to ignore the complexity of all friendships, whether they be big or small.
