For Adult Eyes Only

FRIENDSHIP

When I was a sweet baby teen, my terms of friendship were very simple: we talk every day, and if you cancel our plans you are dead to me and I hate you.

Obviously, there were a few grey areas. At 16, I had a crush on my friend’s boyfriend, so when they broke up, I made sure she had a new boyfriend before he and I started hooking up in secret. In grade nine, I befriended my still-current BFF because the boy I liked had a crush on her and I assumed that if he saw how cool she thought I was he would fall in love with me. Ultimately, I decided that I could do what I wanted as long as I didn’t cancel my plans or forget to return a phone call. And in my twenties, this ethos carried over with a little more zest: friendship was everything, and if any part of your life took one of us away from our tried and true traditions, it would never be forgotten and yet not addressed directly. Instead, we would all just talk shit about each other and then stop talking altogether and forget why.

And then you get older. And more tired. And priorities shift because the idea of going “to the bar” every night (or else!) will make you break out in stress hives. People get married. People break up. Pals have kids. Pals do not. Others get jobs that take them far away from where you once gathered, and the rest are really bad at making phone calls (me). Subtext begins to disappear. Overnight (or years — because that’s how long it actually takes), you stop reading into whether someone’s “okay cool!” text meant something else, and you replace the snide “we don’t really talk anymore” with “oh shit, I need to drop them a line!” Mainly because you genuinely want to drop them a line. The other night, my BFF (of the crush-I-hoped-to-seduce-and-failed-miserably-at story) and I had dinner after not seeing each other for about half a year, and we picked up right where we left off. “I don’t actually know what it would take for me to be mad at you” is something I told her, and she agreed before I interrupted: “Maybe if you were really mean to my mom?” (Well, duh.)

I grew up thinking that my adult friendships would resemble Sex and the City in that we would see each other all the time, prioritize our comings-and-goings, and the rest of our worlds would be a backdrop to the real drama: our dynamic. I aspired so much to this that in my teens and twenties, nothing else was allowed to exist outside the realm of my closest friendships, and I think a lot of them suffered for because of that. I put so much pressure on my pals to be key players in my Main Character Life Story that it became impossible for them to grow out of the roles I’d assigned them. Every advance of their own trajectories felt like something personal. If it didn’t include an ending in which we congregated regularly and hashed out the smallest details of our lives, we weren’t really friends. If they didn’t know exactly what the guy I liked and I talked about in our weird run-in at the gas station, they didn’t know me.

I’m not sure when that elementary school approach to complicated-as-hell human dynamics began to shift, but I know my own life developments (see: having my head forced out of my own ass) certainly helped. Plus the pandemic. And the inordinate amount of losses we all began accumulating, both physical and emotional. Vulnerability, something I only allowed when I was in control of it (so: not vulnerability) began seeping through Instagram stories and random texts or voice memos or photographic proof I was listening to a terrible Kid Rock song that’s become a longstanding joke with one of my pals. It became too exhausting to put up pretences or to maneuver through conversations by dropping or deciphering hidden meanings — as if telling someone you’re proud of them admits that you’re somehow not doing nearly as well and are failing. Life was being proven as something remarkably and heartbreakingly short. Why would any of us waste precious time inventing and perpetuating bullshit when you could just drop all acts and shoot the shit?

It can be scary to be yourself, especially if that self has been in the company of other selves who know almost everything about you. In my twenties, I found it way easier to form close bonds with people I’d just met versus nurture the bonds with pals I’d grown up with and could prove that at one point, I swore I would marry Jimmy Fallon. And alternately, some grown-up friendships were defined by my tendency to repaint my history as something I was in on the entire time (as opposed to a past rich in the most embarrassing and un-self-aware behaviour in the world). For a great many years, I was afraid to be exposed as a fraud: not as cool, not as authentic, not as funny, not as worthy of the wicked, solid, good, wonderful people I couldn’t believe wanted to be friends with me. And then the car accident. And then the pandemic. And then the dad death. And then I learned that the people I loved the most and feared would finally see me as a very flawed and insecure human being all gave so many shits, even if we only got to hang out once every three years.

I don’t love that it took literal tragedies for me to see friendship as something that doesn’t acquire social etiquette (minus, like, being mean to my mom) (and the hooking-up-with-a-friend’s-ex is super-bad form, too). And I hate that I assumed that because I was so hard on myself, the people I loved were the exact same. Over the last few years, I have never been so certain that platonic love is something so powerful that it’s free from the stupidity of cutting someone off because they couldn’t make it out one night, or that weekly check-ins are mandatory if you truly care about a person. I’ve spent the last few months finally emerging from my cocoon and seeing friends and reconnecting and genuinely shooting the shit, and I’ve always felt better after we hang or talk or are simply just honest. I don’t need to know intricacies about their day-to-day lives that they don’t want to share, and they don’t need to know who I have a crush on right now or what he and I talked about at the gas station for them to really know me. Friendship is so much more than face time and “so what’s new?” It’s the feeling of knowing that in that moment when you’re stuffing your face with all-you-can-eat sushi or having an impromptu heart-to-heart via Insta DM that you are loved.

Is this to say we don’t need to check in every so often or fail to ask our nearest and dearest about what’s going on in their lives? Of course not. But as one of my best friends once said to me, friendship isn’t linear. It’s not a running tally of who did what when. The more we grow up, the more we need our friends, but not in the way we thought we did as wee infant angels. In this moment, I know that the people in my life, I can call up and tell them something’s happened, and they’ll do what they can as soon as they can do it — and they know I’d do the same for them. I don’t know what 99% of my friends do every day. I have best friends whose job titles scare and confuse me. But I do know that when I get to see them, the ultimate test is passed: we can exist in each other’s company without having to dress up as characters. We can breathe. We can be flawed and weird and confess to being petty ghouls about one thing or another because some of us will always be petty ghouls. (Me. I will be.) And that is something so much better than meeting for the sake of meeting, or going out for the sake of avoiding a confrontation. Adult friendship is comfort. But I do need to get better at using the phone.

***
Last week I wrote about what makes me a flawed and problematic person, and I told all of you to tell me your shit so that I feel better about myself. Guess what: someone did! I don’t know if I’m allowed to use a full name, so I won’t. Instead, here’s "M” (not Meghan Markle) sharing their shame:

I relate to both the too many parentheticals and the nosiness. My bad habits are similar, in that I send too many messages to the group chat - 7 when 1 would do - and I love to read the comments. All the comments, on everything. I will expand the replies on a tweet I don’t understand by someone I don’t know, and lose an hour reading the comments on an advice column in the newspaper, or on a substack. I don’t even have to have a comment of my own! I just want to know what people and the bots think.

I LOVE READING A THREAD THAT HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH ME. Oh my GOD, one of the sheer pleasures of online life. What can I say? I AM THE WORST. (And I will never change.) Send me more, everyone! Let us all be ghouls together!

Talk soon!
- A.