#2: Relearning friendship in your 30's, Part I

The evolution of friendships, things I'm trying to be better at as a friend, milestones, and really good soup.

This one is a long one, y’all— so you may have to hit “view entire message” to see the full newsletter!

I turn 33 today (or at least by the time this newsletter is being read).

When I turned 30, I shared 30 Things I’ve Learned in 30 years (about self, love, and life), and felt more settled into knowing who I was, understanding what fulfilled me, and feeling more confident in my perspective on a lot of different things. Today at 33, I still agree with all those points I’ve shared; however, life feels more nuanced than ever, and there’s one part of life that has been at the forefront of my mind A LOT during the last couple years.

You know that feeling when you watch a show or a movie that you’ve watched repeatedly since you were young, yet each re-watch has you relating to different characters that are in your current stage of life (when did my life start to feel more relatable to Lorelai’s than Rory’s?) and coming to different conclusions about why you appreciate (and simultaneously, maybe now get the ick from — like many of my beloved late 90’s- early 00’s romcoms) said show or movie? Like how we all enjoyed Carrie in 2000, but have since realize she was actually THE worst friend.

My husband and I recently rewatched FRIENDS (yes, all 10 seasons). It’s always been a feel-good show for us, when we are having a stressful day and want to half-watch a show that we both know by heart. As we breezed through the seasons, we both realized that the reason this show has us feeling wishfully nostalgic this time around: the show depicts a model of friendship that I’d wager the majority of us do not have in adulthood in current times, but long for and had…expected? I’m not talking about the part where they have 5 other relatively attractive friends that all somehow were to be able to spend hours at a coffeeshop every day in NYC, with rent-controlled apartments to boot; I mean the physical proximity to your best friends (all living in the same city) and the unplanned amount of quality time together.

A confluence of factors make friendships in adulthood more challenging to sustain, let alone create new ones. It’s impossible to fully untangle the woven ball of friendships, romantic partnership, parenting, adulthood, money, and careers. Each of those things have effects on each other and can dictate our bandwidth for each entity— and in particular, our ability to maintain friendship; yet, for what seems like a long time now, many of us expect our friendships to not only be maintained, but proliferate in the absence of the effort that we sink into all those other aspects of our lives. Friendship and community in whatever form that takes, is vital to our lives and physical health, yet many struggle with maintaining old or creating new bonds— so much so that the surgeon general has declared that there’s a loneliness epidemic. But at varying junctures in life, effort into friendships is also much easier said than done— but by no means any less necessary, even if it’s an ebb and flow of the balance of effort between both parties.

It’s not feasible to alienate one of these topics to pinpoint a singular way to better navigating friendship, but let’s dive into a few factors that I’ve been grappling most with recently: