With friendship, more is more (pt 2)

combine your people, form a crew, start a weekly ritual

Absolutely no offense to any of my incredible and often far-flung friends—but a regular hangout with a group of women here in the Bay Area has made me feel more secure, happy, and abundant in friendship than I’ve felt in years.

Sometimes our gut knows what we want before our brains do. And my gut kept telling me to bring more people together. One Friday night, maybe 18 months ago, I invited over a few women who I thought would all probably get along. A few were old friends, and others were newer acquaintances. It was an experiment, and it was fun—but more importantly, what came out of it turned out to be exactly what I needed. Since that evening, a smaller group of women formed. We made it official when we named our group chat. But I could see we had something special even earlier, once we made the shift from Friday nights being a frequent plan to a default assumption—so much so that the husbands of the two of us who are married now make other Friday plans accordingly. 

It feels like at some point in our late 20s or early 30s we blink, and suddenly we’ve stopped going to Saturday night pregames and started going on lots of Sunday morning coffee walks. For years, I accepted that adult friendships becoming more 1:1 over time was simply the natural way of things. It made sense that large friend groups eventually split along fault lines of more authentic closeness once people moved away or entered different life stages. It seemed reasonable that as people paired up, there would be less random friend hangs and more couples’ dinners. Busy careers, kids on schedules—add it all up, and coordinating even two people starts to feel like an accomplishment. It all makes sense. And yet somehow I can’t help feeling like the friendship status quo needs a heavy shaking by the shoulders.

Individual friendships are wonderful. But standing alone, I don’t think they’re enough. Instead, we should be prioritizing group friendships far more than society tells us is normal for 30-, 40-, or 50-year-olds (and on and on). Here are a few things I’ve noticed now that a group hangout is the anchor of my social life every week.

Hanging out in a group is where the biggest laughs happen

At some point I noticed that even with very funny friends, we often spend our 1:1 time together in a way that leans serious. We talk about the real and hard things happening in our jobs and our relationships. We confide, unpack, and empathize. To be fair, I think that’s partly because of what I bring to the table as a friend: a certain “go-deep” energy. But that’s not necessarily the version of myself that I love most, or maybe better said, who I want to be all the time.  

In a group, humor has more space to bounce off the walls. When you’re all together, tiny mishaps and happenstances can become friend group lore. There are more possible clowns and also more straight-men depending on the day and the mood. These days, every Friday I laugh so hard that I’m gasping for air. It might be the single “metric” in my life that I’m interested in “optimizing.”

Hanging out in a group moves you from being a voyeur to a participant in each other’s lives

Time spent together 1:1 with friends often means narrating your respective lives to each other. The format doesn’t help: it’s pretty unlikely that anything memorable is going to happen when you’re sitting across from each other at a restaurant or in your living room. The focus is purely on the conversation—the past and the future, but not the present. You’ll leave with a full report on what’s happened to each other since the last time you met, but you weren’t included in any of it and vice versa. That feeling reminds me a little of what’s hardest about living across the country from my mom, where “How have you been?” is sometimes the only foothold we have.

In a group, you’re more likely to make plans to, you know, actually do something. Going dancing feels like an event. A weekend at the river feels like an excursion. Even playing with a friend’s kids has a shot at being more interactive and rambunctious. There’s more texture.

By doing things as a group, you become a part of each other’s “life narration.” You’ll have context for each other’s stories, and memories of your own to contribute. I don’t know about you, but when I hear, “Wait wait wait, that’s not what actually happened!” I scoot my chair in closer.

Groups lighten the load of trying to be a great friend to a lot of people

Sometimes I feel like Sisyphus, and my friendship to-do list is my boulder. Text back B, buy a gift for S, plan a time to meet D and K’s baby. It’s never-ending, I’m always doing a sort of mediocre job, and it’s not for lack of caring. That dynamic is already the default mode with long-distance friendships. Which is even more of a reason to figure out how to lighten the load by combining some of your local friends into a group(s).

In my mind, my 1:1 friendships look like individual silk threads: hard to see and easy to lose track of. Once even some of these friend threads are woven into a friend group they become fabric: stronger, flexible, and interconnected. This creates a feeling of durability that I’m always working hard to manufacture when I have only a single line to a friend.

A group takes some of the burden off you to plan everything: you can see a handful of friends in one night, instead of for 3-4 individually scheduled hangouts. You can default to including everyone instead of optimizing for the vibe on a case-by-case basis (Oof! I tense up just writing that). A group lets you off the hook when trying to remember everything: if one person remembers that a friend’s big presentation was today, the others can quickly and gratefully dogpile in on the enthusiasm in the group chat even if they had completely forgotten.

Less like ... more like... (art by Bailey Elderberry)

Rituals matter: the higher the frequency, the better

There’s nothing more intimate than day-to-day closeness. Group friendship rituals (like our Friday night hangs) make it as effortless as possible to spend time together.

There’s an article in The Cut where author and chef Samin Nosrat talks about a Monday night dinner that started when she found herself with six pounds of pork chop and no mouths. She put a call out for friends, and soon enough, it became a weekly ritual. She doesn’t always cook: sometimes they order in. But it’s a chance to ensure being in each other’s lives consistently.

A plan with only two people is slippery—vulnerable to a bad day at work or a rainy evening. A plan with three people becomes a little more solid. Four or more people and it gets really sticky. Even if you’re feeling really drained, the others can maintain the momentum. Chances are, you’ll leave with more energy than you had walking in. 

Single gender friendships hit differently, especially for women

You know how at dinner with (heterosexual) couples, the conversation often gets divided between the women and the men? There are plenty of more cynical interpretations of this, but I take an optimistic view: friends of the same gender understand each other’s experiences on a different level. “Getting each other” is an important feeling, and one that we all deserve more of.

The authors of the Framingham Heart Study, who did research on how happiness is essentially contagious and all the ways that people benefit from being around happy people, found that this effect was more significant with same sex relationships than opposite sex relationships. The researchers found that many heterosexual women felt the most intimacy in their lives with their female best friends—sometimes even more than with their romantic partners. I’ll again choose to interpret this not as damning but rather as guiding: platonic relationships rock, and we consistently undervalue them.

This feeling of intimacy inside male friendships wasn’t expressed by heterosexual men, which I take to mean not that men are worse at friendship, but rather that men are more used to being supported by women than men. In my opinion that’s all the more reason to bring together a group of guys, or join an existing men’s group, and explore what you might be missing out on. 

Kickstarting new friendship dynamics takes a burst of work, but it’s only downhill from there (Uphill? Whichever way is the good way!)

If I had hoped that someone else would pick up the baton after that first experimental evening getting a bunch of people together, I might have been disappointed. As the galvanizer, I treated it as my job to keep things moving. I was willing to stick my neck out a little bit.

Huge news: it’s cool to be earnest! I’ve found time and time again that people appreciate when you say how much fun you had or express excitement about spending more time together (critically this only works if the feelings are authentic). Send everyone that funny TikTok. Ask a favor in order to make it more normal for someone else to ask a favor. Suggest going to a concert soon—like, next weekend. Immediacy means the feeling of fun and closeness is still fresh in people’s minds and easier to act on again. 

PS: If it doesn’t work, that’s okay. Sometimes a combo of people doesn’t have the spark, but different ones will. If there’s anything I’m 100% sure about, it’s that you haven’t even met some of the people you’re going to love most in this lifetime.