A Primer on Friendship
Tips for semi-private, relationally-passive people
“Under the magnetism of friendship, the modest man becomes bold, the shy confident, the lazy active, or the impetuous prudent and peaceful.”
– William Makepeace Thackeray
I’m interested in the idea of friendship as a generative, creative relationship. In some ways friendship is the least voluntary thing that happen to someone: you can’t force a true friendship, rather you notice one’s begun, observe its expression, feel its effects. Yet how many accidents produce meaningful personality changes? Friendship is one of the main ways you can reliably expect new aspects of your personality to emerge organically, without affecting a pose or self-nudging oneself into being a new way.
At the immediate moment I find myself having both lots of friends and unusually high-quality friendships with them. I wondered whether it might be worth untangling a bit how those friendships came to exist and why they’re so unusual. Are there any patterns to forming close friendships?
My one caveat that makes me feel especially able to write about this is that I don’t consider myself uniquely gifted at making new friends. In more insecure moments I’ve remarked to people that sometimes I felt as if all my friends adopted me off the side of the road, like a lost puppy. That means I’m uniquely suited to talk about forming close friendships even and especially for those people who don’t “make friends wherever they go.” (One of my sisters is like that and while I admire it, I certainly don’t resemble it).
So here’s my best thinking about friendship (in no particular order) that could maybe help semi-private, relationally-passive people like me to deepen and strengthen secure and healthy relationships with your own friends (and those friends to come):
Friendship is tough when you’re entirely illegible: no discernable interests, no community to narrate commonality, no “hooks” on which people can hang their friendship-hat. So it’s worth starting with yourself, to at least begin the work of defining who you are, what you want, and what you like, so as to create a bat-signal that others can respond to.
“Interesting people like to spend time with interesting people.” I like this conception because “interesting” is vague enough to mean all kinds of things. Super-ambitious in tech circles? Then being a founder-turned-VC might strike other super-ambitious-tech-people as “interesting.” Doing cool work in creative endeavors? Other creative people might find you “interesting.” And the best friendships aren’t even professionally defined: you find yourself amused by someone’s political rants, or engaged by their spiritual seriousness, or wooed by their charming joie de vivre, or whatever else. Whatever lights you up, take that seriously. And let your light shine (i.e., your uniqueness) 20% more than may be comfortable to give others a port to sail into.
Friendships thrive in trust, and trust requires (metered, non-deluge) self-disclosure. “Eros will have naked bodies; Friendship naked personalities.” You can’t (or rather, shouldn’t) goal-seek naked personalities between two people, but you can gently inch your way there. How? Through relating to what others are saying, acknowledging risky moments (for them) with earnest empathy or humor (from you), by taking occasional risks yourself of sharing yourself. Small risks are better for everyone than big risks, in my opinion (though reasonable people can have different opinions on this).
A special aspect of certain friendships is finding a safe home to have certain conversations, or discuss certain topics, or share parts of yourself within. But that specialness is unique – not everything belongs in every friendship. So learning tact and appropriateness (knowing what not to bring up) is an important counterbalance.
Related: Not everyone will be your closest friend. That’s perfectly fine, to be expected, and not to be forced against. Remember: friendship should be something you notice has emerged, not present-tense will into being. The watched pot doesn’t boil when it comes to friendship.
A friendship is not a performance. I remember reading Jonathan Franzen describing his friendship with David Foster Wallace as a friendship that seemed to create some anxiety – to be funnier, to be smarter, to be quicker. A little compulsion to rise to someone’s occasion isn’t bad, but outright anxiety to impress isn’t the mode (or frame) you want to be approaching friendship with.
A shared culture – memories you can callback to, stories you’ve shared together, troubles you’ve commiserated about together, recurring jokes, “characters” (aka other friends) from your life, etc. – is part of when friendship becomes fun. Creating a culture of two is essentially what any good relationship’s about. And it can be as simple as sharing memes regularly – it doesn’t need to be complicated or meet some esoteric standard.
Adult friendships basically don’t just “happen.” Someone is usually a little more of an initiator. I’m useless for sharing thoughts on initiating because I’m legitimately terrible at it. But one thing I am great at is being super friendly and welcoming to others initiations. Do that, and you’ll find that others much better at initiating – who lack hangups or insecurities around relational risk-taking – will do some of the heavy-lifting.
A big part of being conversationally interesting is consistently intaking interesting content. Whether podcasts, or Substack posts, or a solid Twitter feed, or good books, or whatever, it definitely helps conversations if you’ve got a well-stocked pond of ideas to draw upon. Though my friendships tend to skew ideas-oriented, plenty of friendships are centered around seasons of things – TV show seasons, sports seasons, etc. – and watching/listening provides fodder for conversation.
Related: share interesting stuff that connects with people in your life. Do this tactfully: if the relationship isn’t inflected in a self-help direction by way of common interest in things like that, then probably don’t send a new friend a weight-loss podcast or something weird. But if something reminds you of someone, or could be helpful, or might be interesting to them, then definitely share it. Even something as simple as a good quote adds to the culture of the relationship and expresses the combined personality of your unique togetherness in a different way.
Ask good questions, from a place of genuine curiosity. If one person’s asking all the questions, that’s no good. Questions are the stepping stones of conversation, and for talking-centric friendships, sort of the lifeblood. Sometimes the best questions are super general: “What’s on your mind these days?” “Any big plans for the year coming up?” Other times super-specific questions for catch-up’s on prior discussions are helpful: “Whatever happened with XYZ you mentioned last time we talked?” Genuine curiosity kind of can’t be faked, so learning to cultivate actual curiosity about people is the better route here, rather than googling “How to ask good questions.”
It’s hard to imagine knowing someone for a long time and that familiarity not generating a sense of knowing them better. While I think fast friendships can occur, I think plenty of friendships happen slowly over time too, as familiarity supercedes newness as the baseline comfort level that sets the tone of the relationship.
It’s hard to overstate how much common purpose or ambition can supercharge friendships. When you become co-conspirators in a greater quest to better your station in life, broaden your horizons, improve some aspect of life, or whatever – it’s a powerful motivator, can smooth differences in personality, and just generally can create a cool dynamic where you’re helping each other along your paths. The varieties of similarity here are manifold but the question is whether someone else is on the same path as you, and you can walk it together and experience the result as greater than the sum of its parts.
In my opinion it’s impossible to parse pure chemistry between two people. It’s sort of mysterious, it’s so particular to those individuals, and the innumerable ways in which people deeply connect defy generalization. Despite that belief, I also think the tips I’ve shared can broadly apply to helping people like me – again, non-initiating, semi-private people – find more and better friendships in this world. “Friendship is born at the moment when one man says to another “What! You too? I thought that no one but myself …” The ability to be selectively vulnerable – when safe, when worth it – is ultimately an important engine of deeper and deeper friendship, and one worth learning to do more readily. Altogether, thinking about friendship in these ways can help you be more receptive, more open, and more engaged with those opportunities for friendship that come across your path. And perhaps you’d be surprised at how frequently they appear, when you’re looking for them.