How People Are Making Friendship Work *Right Now*

28 Friend Group Interviews and Counting

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For the last month, I’ve spent between one and three hours a day talking to people about their friends. This first round of interviews is the result of people who emailed me directly after the announcement of my current book project, Friend Group, which is all about the various ways that we build community and enduring friendship amidst a cultural obsession with optimization and individualism.

Reporting doesn’t come naturally to me. The thing I loved most about writing my dissertation was just hanging out with old magazines all day, or poking around in an archive, and then spending hours writing about it. Imagine my terror when my first editor at BuzzFeed News told me that if I wanted to write a big feature piece about TMZ…..I’d have to talk to people who’d worked there. And guess what! The piece was so much better! Analysis plus talking to people yields a better piece of culture writing — that was a real revelation.

I’ve told this story many times before, but that’s because it’s so formative to my way of thinking about the work I do here on Culture Study — which I think of as a mix of my various backgrounds as an academic (trying to apply/come up with theories of why we are the way we are), historian (trying to look to the past to understand why the way we are) and a reporter (talking to people about their own experiences with the way things are — which also includes asking them to theorize or think historically).

Even though I know the value of reporting, I still get a little pit in my stomach each time I pick up the phone or get on a Zoom call or knock on a door. Most of the time you’re asking someone to talk about something that’s fraught in some way. Sometimes you’re trying to convince them to talk to you, period. You’re asking them to be public about something that’s often private. Putting them at ease when you’re not at ease yourself is a hard task.

But these friendship interviews — they’re unlike any other type of reporting I’ve done. It is an absolute joy to talk to people about their friends and community. Some people are extroverts, some very much introverts, but they all love their friendships and the way they’ve cultivated home. I get to ask questions like “do you feel like you have a social safety net” and “do you feel cared for and beloved” and people get to say yes without hesitation or bullshit. I leave every conversation happier and more hopeful than when I started it.

This is all very preliminary, but I wanted to offer a glimpse of some of the themes emerging from these interviews (with the caveat that these are all significantly condensed snippets of the rich stories you’ll eventually find in the book).

1) Your Story Doesn’t Have to Be Spectacular

As I was reading various books about community and friendship ahead of this reporting process, I encountered an abundance of spectacular stories, often centered around a charismatic community leader who managed to make everyone feel welcome and psychologically nourished. I find stories like those inspirational…..well, sort of. Mostly I find them intimidating, like I’ll never be able to put these things into practice in my own life, so I guess I’ll just spend the rest of my life reading about people who can do shit like this in theirs.

One of my goals with this book is to talk to people who’ve done relatively spectacular shit (like move back to their very rural hometown and start the skatepark project they never finished as teens, a story I can’t wait to tell in the book) but also people who’ve done quiet and small stuff that still makes a massive difference in their lives. Like: the woman who moved across the country to live in the duplex next to her best friend, and when that best friend got married…..and nothing changed. Or the couple who’ve wanted to live closer to their best couple/family friend for years, but the closest they got was the same state — but when the house next door to them in SoCal came up for sale, they immediately started the campaign for the other family to move next door (they did!)

Making the decision to live this intimately with friends doesn’t have to be a big, splashy deal. It just means having slightly different priorities — and understanding that what you gain in intimacy almost always offsets whatever you “lose” in space or aesthetics or floor plan.

2) Close Means REALLY Close

A few weeks ago I talked to a guy, Tom, who’d recently bought a place in Brooklyn with two of his friends. He grew up as one of many children in Australia, and spent much of the pandemic here in the states podded up with big groups of people who’d pool their money and rent a massive house in a super remote place for a month at a time. He’s one of those people who just loves being around other people basically all the time, which you might expect to be true of a lot of the people I’ve interviewed, but I’d actually say is true for only around a third.

Everywhere Tom’s lived, at every stage in his life, he’s tried to get his friends in as close of orbit to one another as possible. In San Francisco, where he lived before the pandemic, the max was about a ten-minute drive. Any more, he said, and the spontaneous hangouts that create intimacy just wouldn’t happen, or would happen with far less frequency. If you have to get in the car — or even if you have to get on the train — it’s so easy to lose the ability to just “stop by” and let the day or night unfurl.

When Tom and his two friends started looking for a place in Brooklyn, they wanted somewhere that wasn’t just “near” to the train, but on the route that their friends in the neighborhood would take to and from the train. They wanted to make their place as convenient to others as possible, so that “just stop by on your way home!” would be a very real option.

Since moving to New York, Tom’s revised his ten-minute proximity rule to a block away, maybe two. It’s not that he wants everyone to come to him — he’ll come to their place, too. But any further away and you’re the friends who run into each other once a month and laugh about how you should really hang out (we live so close!!!) but never do.

I heard similar sentiments from people in so many different sorts of living situations. One woman and her partner purposefully moved to downtown Longmire, Colorado — even though they could have much more indoor and outdoor space living just a few miles away — because they knew the walkability to others’ homes (and community events) would dramatically increase the likelihood of actually hanging out. Same for a woman who convinced the friends she’d met at events for people on the ace spectrum to move into a four-bedroom apartment together. Sure, they could try to move closer to one another, and occasionally have each other over for dinner. But wouldn’t it be even better if they lived with each other, meal-planned together, and someone made dinner for everyone else at least four days a week (and also always accounted for the need for leftovers)??? Yes, yes it would indeed be better!!!

I spend a lot of time with my friends on the island, but we also live around two miles apart. That’s a very quick ride in the car or a leisurely twenty-minute walk through the woods. And don’t mistake me, I realize that’s great. But sometimes I think about how it would be even easier to go jump in their hot tub or steal a spice or have their kids come over to show us something if we lived just down the road. Close is good; closer is even better.

3) Community Isn’t Just Best-Friendship

There are going to be a lot of stories in this book about best friendship — and what it means to make big decisions that prioritize the people who aren’t your romantic partners (or related to you!) in ways that make your life richer and better. But finding community can also mean being open to scenarios that might surprise you. I talked to a woman who works in children’s ministry who hasn’t quite found community at the church where she works — but has found it in a group where they pick a cookbook every month, everyone cooks a recipe and brings it, and they spend a whole night just talking about making things.

There’s the Gen-Z grad student who was driving down the freeway and saw a sign for “WOMEN’S GROUP” on the billboard for a beautiful old building, then went home, googled the group, showed up at the first meeting — and is now on the board, along with a bunch of women many decades her senior. And there’s Brianne, who spent years declining her friend’s invitations to go to the Los Angeles Breakfast Club — a 99-year-old institution, born in the silent age of Hollywood, now flourishing after being brought back from the brink of extinction in the 2010s.

Brianne was so addicted to her burnout job that she couldn’t even conceive of going to something that would eat a portion of her Wednesday morning, every morning. But then she quit her job, showed up to a meeting, fell in love with the organization — whose members span many, many decades — and now she’s also on the board. Some of her good friends are also members, but that’s not why she goes. She goes for the other people who, every week, are happy just to see her. She goes for the ritual, and the familiarity, and to feel a part of something. Loose ties hold a different purpose than strong ones. But they can make you feel just as held and cherished.

4) Routine > Calendar Madness

You know those parenting groups based on neighborhood or birthdate? Sometimes online, sometimes in your neighborhood? Cynthia joined one of those in Austin after she gave birth to her first daughter, only this one was organized by the friend of one of her middle school friends. They’d always talk about parenting, but the secondary (primary?) purpose was straightforward: being away from their kids. They’d meet every Wednesday night — always at a restaurant — and then the next week, their partners would go out and have their night.

That was fifteen years ago, and the group is still going strong. People have moved away and moved back, they’ve done all-mom retreats and all-dad sleepovers, but the core of meetings remains. Every other week, same time, and often at the same restaurant — a place where they knew there’d be enough room for them, the food would be fine-to-good, and there’d be something for everyone to eat. Oh, and they wouldn’t have to worry about childcare, because the other parent would be doing that back at home.

If these parents had to coordinate to find a time every month, it would never happen. But the predictability of it — the fact that it is set on their schedule, the same way a holiday or a dentist appointment is — makes it happen. (There’s also eight of them, so if a few people can’t come on a given week, it doesn’t mean they have to reschedule)

Wylie, who lives in Los Angeles, told me he uses a version of this strategy to see his friends with kids. He knew he needed a scenario where 1) his friends’ kids could come too; 2) it’d be an incredibly low lift for everyone involved; 3) it wouldn’t interfere with afternoon naps or the witching hours and 4) people wouldn’t feel the weird pressure to RSVP (or cancel).

So Wylie and his partner started a monthly Sunday brunch (with a great name you’ll hear about in the book) at their place. They didn’t have kids, but there would be kid stuff and kid food, and the entire vibe was casual. Come if you can, don’t stress if you can’t, but we’d love to see you. Sometimes dozens of people showed up. Sometimes it was only one. “And you know what,” Wylie told me, “we had such a good hang.”

Nothing about these events is exceptional or novel or innovative save the fact that they actually happen and these friends actually see each other.

5) Make It Happen

When I was talking with Tom, the Australian who bought the house with friends in Brooklyn, I told him that he seems to be the kind of guy who finds something he wants to make happen….and then he makes it happen. “People get bogged down by logistics,” he said, “but I find logistics pretty easy.” Even, well, pleasurable.

His reply prompted a moment of revelation for me on the other end of the Zoom: I, too, love logistics! I told him I like buying plane tickets for other people (with their money, but you know what I mean) and he started nodding furiously. He also loves figuring out other people’s plane tickets! It’s so satisfying! (for our weird brains!).

You don’t have to love logistics like me and Tom to make friendship happen. You just have to stop kicking the can down the road. More to the point: when you meet someone who seems like the sort of person you’d like to hang out with again, you can’t just say “we should get coffee sometime!” and then nod furiously when the other person says “I’d like that!” When you reach that point of agreement, that’s when you nail down a date and time and place, even if it means taking out your phones and looking at your dorky calendars. Grab the momentum and run with it.

“Make It Happen” is how Karen, who lives in Portland, figured out how to follow through on a year-end reflection exercise where she figured out she wanted and needed more quality time with the friends she cherished (and who were scattered across the U.S.). She found an Airbnb in Mexico City with several bedrooms, sketched out the pricing for a nine-day stay, and sent an email to a bunch of friends from different parts of her life with how much it would cost a night, per person, and the ask: Will you come hang out for all or part or even two days of this? I’ve got the logistics down, all you have to do is buy your ticket. She had the friend trip of her wildest dreams. But she had to make it happen (and has plans to do it again).

Making things happen can get exhausting. Every person who’s the cruise director in their group of friends (or for several groups of friends) knows this. There’s a reason I’m friends with not just one other cruise director but, like, a solid dozen. But because of those friendships — and the relative ease of logistics within them — I’m pretty bad at taking the initiative with new ones. If you’ve found yourself in a situation where friendship and connection feels hard for the first time in your adult life, you know what I’m talking about. We’re out of practice! Which is why my ongoing goal, particularly on the island, is to stop talking about making plans and actually making them.

6) It’s Impossible to Optimize

Dating apps were supposed to optimize dating but mostly just made dating really, really hard. Social media promised to optimize friendship (keep connected to anyone you’ve ever met!) and has mostly weakened it. There’s a lot more to say about how that happened, how texting culture contributes to it, and whether we actually should try and keep connected to as many “friends” as social media promotes….but that’s a different post. Right now, I’m most interested in an idea borrowed and twisted from online dating (and, let’s be real, popular romantic narratives) that if you can just “match” with the right person, you’ll immediately recognize your compatibility and become instant and intimate friends.

This is not how friendship works 99% of the time. I think most of us do know this, but that doesn’t stop us from being dissatisfied when ease and comfort don’t materialize after hanging out, oh, four times. Fledgling connections are too vulnerable to grand expectations, and it’s easy to abandon them when they’re not developing quickly enough.

I get the frustration. If you’re out of new-friend practice, figuring out how to hang out even one time is hard, let along four or fourteen or forty. But there’s a commonality running through all of these conversations about making and keeping friends as an adult. It cannot be optimized or hacked. You can buy membership at a club but you cannot subscribe and receive instant friends. We made friends so quickly in college and at camp because we lived together; you make friends at a job (particularly a certain type of job) because you spend all day together. If you’re living or working with someone, friendship operates with a different clock.

I spent an afternoon last week talking to a woman named Sara who spent the last decade digging a deep well of intergenerational community in rural Iowa. Last year, she and her husband decided to switch industries entirely — which meant moving to outside of Nashville, Tennessee

They knew her in-laws, but that was about it. So what did Sara do? She started casting a very wide net. She called the volunteer firefighters to see if they needed a chaplain. She joined the chamber of commerce. She joined the PEO and the PTA. She got involved at the local church. She joined a local Crossfit gym. She knew, from her experience in Iowa, that friends could come from all generations and places in life. She basically set her parameters to “everyone” and started going for it.

When she met someone who seemed even sorta interesting, she asked them out to lunch. Sometimes, she’d know it was not a great fit at the beginning of the lunch, but whatever — it’s only a lunch! Some people wouldn’t follow up after her first request, and she just thought: that’s okay, this isn’t the time for this in their life right now. She was hanging out with so many potential friends that a single rejection just didn’t sting. But now, with a handful of the people she’s met — a kernel of real friendship is there. It’s not anything like what she had before, at least not yet. But she knows how to play the long game.

Sara’s is the sort of story that borders on “spectacular”: she’s an extrovert, she’s not working full-time, she has robust experience with building friendship. But there’s nothing that remarkable about the steps that she’s taken — nothing that would seem alien to anyone moving to a new place fifty or sixty years ago. We’ve just become incredibly impatient with the stubbornly slow work of community formation.

As I was editing this draft, I paused for a conversation with Nora, who lives in a four-unit apartment building in Long Island City. A perfectly nice couple lives on the first floor; Nora and her partner live on the second floor; and then two of their other good couple friends live on the 3rd and 4th floor. It was still being built when they found it, and they all moved in together (and were able to negotiate better terms because of it). They garden on the roof; they share a car and tools; they distribute leftovers. All of them are getting ready to start families, and have future plans to share baby stuff and cover caregiving gaps.

When the group was looking for a place, there were things about this particular apartment building that weren’t ideal, or exactly what each family had on their “perfect apartment” list. There were several points, Nora told me, where someone was ready to just throw in the towel and go it alone. It’d just be simpler that way. But they knew that whatever they gave up in small conveniences, they’d gain tenfold in convenience and care.

That’s what I keep hearing in these conversations. There are always sacrifices to making these friendships and communities and living situations work. It’s so easy to get hung up on the immediate, tangible inconveniences instead of the long term, ineffable gains. And that, I think, is why so many people have been eager to talk to me: they want to tell everyone they encounter how good it can be. They’re hype people for a different way of organizing our lives. The more they and others talk about it, the more imaginable it becomes.

I say it in the book and I’ll say it here, too: Not all of these scenarios are possible for all people. Not even close! But they don’t need to be. You don’t need to be able to follow any or all of these particular paths to create more care in your life. All you need is one. ●

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Postscript: I want to emphasize that I’m talking to people from different class, education, relationship, family, religious, and professional backgrounds, living all over the United States and the world. Friendship and community aren’t bourgeois privileges; in fact, bourgeois people are often the worst at both. Just be mindful of what you might assume from these *very brief* summaries of people’s stories.

In that spirit, I’d love to hear about how *you’re* experiencing any of these themes — what’s been working, what’s been a struggle, what feels like a stopping block that you want to keep working to remove but it still feels so stubborn.

And finally: I’m still scheduling EVEN MORE interviews! I can’t talk to everyone, but I’d still love to talk to more. I’m open to all iterations on co-housing (in so many different forms!) buying or renting property together, queering the family structure, intergenerational friendship, guys figuring out friendship, religion-adjacent community that isn’t Christianity-adjacent, and communities around single-parents-by-choice. The book is also getting published in the UK, Australia, and New Zealand, and my publisher has requested even MORE stories from those countries, too.

Just email me (annehelenpetersen at gmail) with FRIEND GROUP in the subject line, tell me a little about your story, and we’ll take it from there. 

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And some recent community and friendship reading I’m enjoying:

On Pride

When Friends Move

I Regret What's In My Camera Roll

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