It’s Time To Rethink Our Friendships
I was FaceTiming a longtime friend after having not reconnected in months (I’m sure we’re all revisiting lost connections with all this quarantine time). We were hours deep in intense conversations—after all, those are the best kinds of phone calls to have. We talked about everything from how we’re handling staying and working from home to career things to milestone moments and small victories to even getting heavy with childhood trauma and family issues, most of which neither of us knew greatly existed in each other’s lives. And through all of these topics, I learned something new about her despite having had known her for almost two decades. That’s the beauty of true friendship and the magic of consistent nourishment—it evolves with you as you both grow more into yourselves.
True friendship. What does that really mean? I think about how we spend most of our lives creating friendships based on convenience and circumstance. We form bonds with those who share common ideals, personalities, humor, and hobbies or are attracted to those who possess qualities we see ourselves in slash aspire to acquire for ourselves. And yet, these are all within the realm of circumference and physical closeness or by some event that brought us together, otherwise what other reason would there be for us to converse with one another and find solace in this mutual connection? Because let’s face it, making friends is hard and it’s even harder the older you get, so it’s no wonder that when you’re struggling to balance all the trepidations of adulthood, you form relationships along the way to make every avenue of our lives a little easier to manage and a lot more fulfilling to give our energy towards something rewarding. That’s just human nature—we need human connection to thrive.
But have we truly thought about why we sustain the friendships we have? At some point in your life (probably mid to late 20s, then I’d imagine most of 30s), you begin to question the friendships you have and why you have continued to keep them. You imagine your life like a pie chart where you divvy up your time and energy to your varying priorities that each seem to demand more and more of yourself, and you realize the part of yourself that used to dedicate so much to socializing and keeping up with friends begins to dwindle as you focus on things like careers, passion projects, community involvement, side hustles, mental wellbeing, physical wellbeing, dating (haha me.), etc. And while we’d like to believe friendships can be on cruise control after you’d put in the initial work to build and eventually sustain on their own, they very much require constant work and genuine effort from all parties involved. That’s how any relationship works, really. There is no autopilot. There is intention and there is care, and neither of these things work without your full intent.
As my friend and I got deeper and deeper into our conversation, we began to see how fated we were to be in each other’s lives. Like a series of mini epiphanies that hit us at the same time as we realized the things we were saying to each other were perfectly coated and smoothed to each other’s words and thoughts. I guess you could say it’s the friendship equivalent of sparks flying between two people when they are so perfectly in sync. Yes, this happens in friendships, too, not just in romantic relationships. And when this happens, consider how wonderful it is that the world conspired to make sure you had the right people in your life to learn more about yourself. Pay attention to these moments in your interactions with friends and revel in the deep humanity of it all.
If you ask anyone what their top 3 key factors are to a successful relationship, you already know “communication” is one of them. Because it’s true, communication is extremely key to a long-lasting relationship, friendships included. But if analyzed even further, I find that conversation is what gives communication depth. And I don’t mean conversation as in talk to each other everyday, update one another with life things, blah blah blah (I’m sure that’s already a given), but I mean conversation as in digging up perceptions, giving one another time and space to speak freely, responding with intent of learning and not solely for the sake of saying something. Conversation that is deep and expansive, heart-wrenching, tear-jerking, of magnitude that leaves you pondering for days are ones worth savoring. Think about it—how many times during a friendship have you truly asked one another what you both value from this friendship, what you both expect from this friendship, and what goals do you see this friendship growing towards? Really think about it. Probably not much, if at all, right? And that’s just the thing, we haven’t had that conversation about how we value a friendship beyond how we’ve initially met because while it’s easy to answer “how’d you meet?”, it’s not the same as “what do you value in one another?”
It starts with “friendship”
Have you thought about what friendship means to you? Like truly define what it is, how you’ve lived it out, and why you care about creating friendships? Because when you can get as definitive as understanding what you value most in friendships, then your exploration unveils the invisible thread that has attracted you to the people in your life. You begin to see what makes each one of your friends worth fighting for, worth caring for, and entirely all-loving, and then you’ll understand how you want to create new ones based on what you’ve learned. It becomes easier to cultivate the ones you value but also easy let go of the ones that were made simply from convenience and circumstance, which isn’t to say that is a bad thing because everything is meant to happen and be for the person you were at that specific time and place. But as you change throughout your life so will the ways those friendships may no longer work. You can still appreciate and value them for what they were to you at that time.
For me, I’ve understood that my friendships have shown me ways in which I can expand and grow and how I see myself aspiring to becoming. I love being surrounded by people who teach me life through their lens and the resilient ways they’ve navigated their own lives. I love hearing how others have gone through things similar to my experiences that make us akin and ever-human. And I absolutely love knowing that I can learn something from everyone around me—that everyone has a purpose in my life—making me hopeful for the life I’m building.
Friendships have also shown me parts of myself I don’t see or celebrate enough that my friends willfully present to me. It’s this idea of being able to view myself through the eyes of those closest to me because I tend to be someone who automatically sees the worst in myself, sees all the ways I am lacking, or all the ways I am “not enough.” They show me that I am much more than what I give myself credit for and they applaud the parts I don’t. I think this is what truly marks great friendships—constantly showing, even unknowingly so, each other’s best selves without obligation nor responsibility but because it is simply that natural for us.
Here’s a great piece about friendship written by David Whyte
How it works with 1-on-1 friendships
As I mentioned, these deep friendship questions were born from my catch-up FT call with my longtime friend:
What do you value from our friendship?
What are your expectations of me to show up in our friendship?
What goals do you have for our friendship to work towards?
Mind you, we’ve known each other since we were 8 years old and yet, we never even considered asking ourselves these, let alone believe we needed to. And as we shared our answers, intently listening to one another, we realized there was still so much we hadn’t known about each other. I remember our childhood days together so vividly and yet, re-hearing her accounts of specific moments made me realize I had only known my perspective of them all, but there were still parts I didn’t know through her perspectives, and would have gone my whole life not knowing. These questions helped us see how much we valued each other as individuals but also as a significant roles in our lives. She was able to hear how she meant to me and I was able to hear what I meant to her. Sometimes, we just never really hear that enough.
From that night on, we vowed to always be that mirror for each other. We learned that we both hold very parallel lives and that we were meant to be in each other’s lives to remind one another that the things we go through, especially the dark moments, are never alone and that there is someone else who will woefully understand us on the deepest level. From that night on, I knew that I would never have to be afraid to show her every facet of myself, openly and unapologetically, because she ensured me it was never a burden for her, in fact, it made us closer. And that felt like the biggest release of personal worries.
How it works with group friendships
The conversation with my friend had me so awakened that I wanted to share it with other friends. And I specifically wanted to try it with my friend group, you know, the kind of group where you can’t imagine it existing without each person of that group not being a part of it, like it would always feel incomplete if one of us was missing. And while our group is strong and long withstanding because we managed to find the right combination of character dynamics that complemented each other well, we never really thought about it on an individual level—how and why each person was a significant piece of our group puzzle.
So I asked everyone to think about these questions for each person in the group and then we’d reconvene to hear everyone’s responses. What resulted thereafter was this magical blend of realizations from listening to what others valued in one another and understanding how unique each friendship was in our little group. It opened all of our eyes in seeing that it wasn’t just the individual that made our group natural and sustainable, but that it was also the friendships within that grew synonymously so we could witness through support and gratitude.
For the longest time, I thought I was the kind of friend people would come to when times got hard, that I would be the one someone would call in the middle of the night for help because I always believed I was the “fixer” in any friendship, and when I didn’t received those calls or felt confided in, I thought I failed as a good friend. But that night, when I heard how each friend valued me, I realized I wasn’t “the fixer”. In fact, I realized I only believed that because it was something I needed in friends. But just because it was something I needed from friends didn’t mean it was what some friends needed from me, or specifically this group of friends. Instead, I learned that I was their friend for inspiration, for open vulnerability, for challenging their thinking (aka introducing this exercise). I wouldn’t have understood that and would have continued beating myself up for not being a “good friend” or constantly questioning my belonging in the group, when in fact, I was just a different kind of friend for them. In this way, I saw myself through the lens they saw me as and it was beyond my perceptions. In fact, it made me value myself even more for seeing how much I’ve done for them without realizing I had done it at all. Meanwhile, it also cleared the air of any misalignments of expectations from one another as friends, and allowed us to focus on nurturing what is specifically valued in each other’s friendships.
When it doesn’t work with some friendships
And that’s okay. As I said before, there are people who are meant to enter into your life for the specific person you were at that time and place. They are presented to you to teach you parts about yourself, through the good and the bad. I always say that I don’t regret meeting any of the people throughout my life, even the toxic ones, because they reflected who I was in that moment. I also think a large part of reflecting on past relationships is also recognizing how different we used to be than how we are now. Sometimes I cringe so much when I think about all the different me’s I was because I look back thinking how I should’ve been better knowing what I know of myself now. But I think the only reason I can cringe now is because I feel the significant growth I’ve had to experience to recognize my past mistakes. We were the best we could have been during those times based on the circumstances, knowledge, and experiences we only knew then.
When you do this exercise in understanding your current friendships or reflecting on past friendships, remember that you can appreciate people for who they are as a person but that doesn’t mean that is all that keeps them in your life as a friend. Some people are meant to stay, some people are meant to go, regardless of the circumstance or fate of the friendship, everyone in your life, from past to present, is deserving of compassion and gratitude and healing. With or without you.
So here’s my challenge for you: whether it’s in friendships, relationships, or even your own deep connections to the things you value in your life (i.e. music, art, writing, etc.), ask yourself these questions:
What do you value from our friendship?
What are your expectations of me to show up in our friendship?
What goals do you have for our friendship to work towards?
I promise you that you will learn so much more about yourself, you will find greater value for growth, and you will be confident that the work you put into the people and things you care about really is the best you can do from what you already know, and never because of misaligned expectations.
