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3 days ago
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Ragnar Sandberg, Resting women, 1933.
HOUSEKEEPING: We’re doing a version of Bookbear Express matchmaking that pairs people based on their three favorite Substacks. It’s free, you should participate, and you can fill it out here :) Check out the site, Sam made it and I think it’s very cute!!
The idea that I’m the “average of the five people I spend the most time with” feels self-aggrandizing. I think my friends are discernibly better than I am, and that means I’m doing something right. The people I love most are wildly smart, but they also have a moral character that I aspire to—I see them being kind and forgiving at the exact moments I’m tempted to be snarky and mean.
As a matchmaker, people often articulate to me their desire for a partner whose judgment they trust. It’s easy to know what you’re looking for when you trust your friends, and the way they make decisions big and small. I’ve learned that it’s impossible to be truly intimate with someone when you’re privately judging their decisions while politely nodding along. I decided last year that I would always say what I really thought as tactfully as possible. Maybe not three times, but at least once. When I lie to my friends, even merely through withholding my true opinion, I’m making a decision for them instead of letting them choose.
We all have blind spots. People who love and understand you can point things out to you that you don’t see. I find talking to Claude useful for the same reason—having the facts distilled and reflected back to you can help you accept reality. We all think we know ourselves the best, but having too much context can actually distort your perspective on the situation.
To some extent, your ability to be in a healthy romantic relationship is predicated on your ability to be in healthy platonic relationships. To be fair, a lot of people have the latter without the former, but I think relatively few have the former without the latter. Friends and family are what enable our partners to be a lot to us without having to be everything.
Everyone agrees with this conceptually, but most people have relatively little interest in living it. Making friends is impossible as an adult. It’s impossible, I don’t have time. I just don’t connect with anyone in the city I live in. We’re taught that we should work hard to get into and sustain romantic relationships, but friendships are supposed to be automatic and effortless. If you have to try, aren’t you doing something wrong?
Of course, the reason why most people don’t have friends isn’t because they never made them, but because they lost them over time. Maintenance is always the battle in love and in work. Asking your friends for advice doesn’t just serve you—your vulnerability and trust serve the relationship, as long as you make space to pay it back in kind.
The rewards and challenges of romantic relationships are so much more prominent in our culture than those of friendship. We’re presented with a straightforward narrative: meet the right person, marry them, and you’ll have figured out a major part of life. It’s no wonder that people often neglect close friends or renounce them or a partner. I’m certainly guilty of dropping off the map for long periods of time because I’m preoccupied or conflicted. But friendships can be amazingly robust and consistent, life rafts in times of need—several of my closest friendships are about to hit the 10-year mark, which means they have outlived any romantic relationship I’ve ever been in. My friends have slowly and gently changed me, like water gradually shaping a shoreline.
In the past couple years, I’ve experienced plenty of upheaval and change in my personal and professional life. It’s been amazing to witness the way my friends have held and supported me through it. I am not strange to them: I am familiar, known, and loved.
