How to make friends in the real world
Prologue
In the year 2000, I am in kindergarten. I don't remember many details about this story but everybody embellishes, so. The classroom tables are hexagonal. My seat is at the table in the center of the room and it faces the door.
It is recess. All the other kids have scurried outside but I stay at my desk to read More Tales of Amanda Pig. I hear the incessant screeching coming from the playground. At five, I already think that children are the fucking worst.
The teacher looks up from her desk and notices that there is only one student still in the room. She walks up to me.
"Hey," she says, as she slides onto one of the seats across me. "It's recess. Don't you want to play with your friends?"
I look up from my book.
"I don't want friends," I remark haughtily. "I don't need them."
I rate and rank my friends
No preamble; I'm just going to get to the point here.
For the past four years, I've maintained a spreadsheet that lists my friends. I update it once a year. It's pretty much exactly what it sounds like: an Excel document listing all the individuals that I consider my friends. These individuals are sorted in descending order by their total score out of 100. Each individual's total score is the sum of their scores in 10 different categories, each scored out of 10. The 10 categories are really 10 questions scored such that 0 would be "not in the slightest", 5 would be "sometimes/somewhat", and 10 would be "extremely, very much".
I came up with the following 10 questions back in 2014 and continue to use them for scoring:
1) How close do I feel to them? Do I share a lot of personal things or memories with them?
2) How comfortable do I feel articulating my true thoughts to them?
3) How much do I think they understand what I mean, including my intentions and views, even if these are unsaid?
4) How much do I think I understand what they mean, including their intentions and views, even if these are unsaid?
5) How much do I care about them? How destroyed would I be if something happened to them, and how invested would I be in helping them?
6) How much do they care about me? How destroyed do I think they would be if something happened to me, and how invested would they be in helping me?
7) How much is there for us two to talk about on a personal, "beyond small talk" level?
8) How respectful are our disagreements, or how respectful would our hypothetical disagreements be?
9) How good do they make me feel about myself?
10) How much do they challenge my perspective in a constructive way?
Every January, I pour over my notes, text messages, Facebook messages, and Snapchat messages from the previous calendar year to establish a pool of people that I would consider friends. I start off with the 5 or 10 friends that I consider closest to me, and score each of them based on these 10 questions. People in this group generally score at least 8, but mostly 9 or 10, in every category.
Next, I fill in scores for another 10 people that I would definitely consider as friends, but also definitely not super close friends. People in this group are friends I would go out of my way to get lunch with on a 1-on-1 basis once or twice a year, friends I would send brief but personalized birthday messages to.
With my best friends and solid friends down on the spreadsheet, I find that the remaining people fall quite neatly into place. I find that having friends on both the high- and mid-range of scores allows me to easily judge where the "fairly close" and "fairly distant" friends stand in relation to everyone else.
After I complete scores for the entire pool of friends - no easy task, for I am extremely popular, and/or delusional, and/or have low standards for friendship - the SUM function totals up each person's scores and sorts my friends into descending order by their total scores.
I create borders on the spreadsheet to separate my top 5 friends, my top 10 friends, and so on. Additionally, I color-code each person's row by where we met: college, high school, church, Tinder, internship from the summer of 2016, internship from the summer of 2015, etc.
I can’t take credit for coming up with the idea of having a spreadsheet that quantifies friendships. This all started when I was talking to an old friend from high school years ago. I devote a lot of thought to my friendships and had a loose list of my best friends on my laptop, but I was absolutely fascinated when he brought up the idea of quantitatively measuring friendship and decided that I needed to do the same.
I decided to create my own formula for friendship because I did not think that his formula best represented what mattered in my own friendships. I don’t fully recall his formula now, but I do remember that he considered the duration of the friendship to be worth 40% of the individual’s total score. By his standards, most of his very best friends were people he had known since middle school, and he generally valued the friendships of old classmates more than new ones. The duration of a friendship wasn’t super important to me; I can click quickly and become good friends with some people in a relatively short amount of time, and I don’t really enjoy catching up with old friends that I no longer feel a connection with.
Articulating the things that mattered to me most in a friendship came intuitively: feeling a sense of closeness, feeling understood, feeling cared for, feeling like I could speak my mind, and also, importantly – feeling like the friendship was clearly a two-way street. Feeling like I understood and wanted good things for my friends, feeling like my friends were comfortable being themselves around me.
I am still not entirely satisfied by my condensed, generalized summary of what matters most to me in a friendship, but if I had to try to boil it down to a few sentences, I’d say that for me, a great friend is someone I feel comfortable reaching out to at any time of the day and getting straight to the point of what’s on my mind (“I want chicken nuggets” or “Do you think that morality is purely defined by those in power at the present moment?”), and knowing that I’d receive a response within a reasonable amount of time that demonstrated consideration for my thoughts and where I was coming from. And vice versa.
This isn’t a perfect definition, of course, because sometimes we genuinely forget to respond to messages. Sometimes people text me back saying, “You’re so full of shit.” The point is that around good friends, I feel comfortable continuing to do this, knowing that my words are unlikely to be taken as intrusive or violating some bounds of appropriateness, knowing that I don’t have to package my thoughts in a ton of pleasantries or veiled statements. And my good friends know they can do the same with me.
This led me to think that, broadly speaking, there are two different paths in which individuals become friends: by doing, or by talking. Doing friends are people we begin to like through a shared hobby or common space. Talking friends are people we begin to like through the exchange of words. Needless to say, there is some overlap here: most talking friends are still people we met by circumstance before any conversation happened, and we can still have good conversations with doing friends. The nuanced difference here is what makes up the moments that define the peaks of our friendships, the moments that make us think, wow, you might be my best friend in the world right now. (Or to be more specific, my ninth best friend.) It was no surprise to me that all of my best friends were/are talking friends, based on what I personally value so much in friendship.
Regardless of individual rankings, I like to think that I treat all my friends well. I rarely bring up this approach of rating and ranking friends, much less tell someone where they fall on my list. I really like this framework because it puts all my friendships from different social circles into perspective, and I have a vague idea of each friend's relative strengths and weaknesses in terms of the qualities that really matter to me. Plus, at my wedding and/or funeral, someone can just refer to this spreadsheet when putting together a guest list.
Then I moved to a place where I knew no-one
But of course, this (already) long essay must have some sort of compelling narrative. Nobody likes to read shit, and the bar I set myself for these things is "not shit".
My approach to thinking about friendship was fine and it worked for years until I graduated from college and accepted a job that required moving to a new state in a new part of the country.
I met my first friend in town on a Friday night in the middle of last September, five days into my new job. A mutual friend had introduced us over text, and we planned to meet up for dinner. As I changed out of work clothes and into casual ones, I found myself feeling super nervous. This feeling surprised me, because I thought I had become very good at meeting new people as a result of going on so many Tinder first dates. In retrospect, I think I was nervous because I so desperately wanted this to work out; I really hoped we would get along and that this would be my first step in building a whole network of friends in the area. I was living alone. This was possibly the first time in almost two decades in which I had to completely start over when it came to friends:
I attended the same school from the ages of 3-10
Plenty of my elementary school classmates switched schools the same time I did and moved to the same one
I attended another school from the ages of 10-17
There was one other person from my high school graduating class who enrolled in the same college, and I entered college already having made some friends from our class Facebook group
The dinner went fine. We seemed like pretty different people, but we had enough to talk about and I was grateful to meet someone outside the office. We celebrated my twenty-second birthday later that month; my new friend was very gracious in arranging a nice dinner and even got me a gift. We hung out another time after that.
And then...things went a bit south from there. The new friend cancelled on us multiple times in a row. We would make plans for dinner, to go to a museum, or to get drinks, but then something would always come up hours before we were supposed to meet.
Was it me? Did I do or say something wrong?
What I'm about to share is rather personal and I rarely discuss this (she says, as she writes for all to see) but I think it will give some more context for how I felt: adolescence is a hard time for many, but even now I look back and believe that most people cannot relate to my experiences. While I (a) was privileged in many ways, (b) would never claim that I had it harder than everyone else, (c) was also probably blind to some of my friends' troubles, and (d) know that it doesn't give me a free pass to treat other people poorly, it was still a very trying time for me. I witnessed or experienced separation, health scares, physical illness, mental illness, conflict, instability, trauma, fear, deaths, plural. I was attending one of the city's most prestigious international schools with the children of the city's wealthiest; people in the linguistic and cultural spaces that I inhabited did not talk about, or seem to have, any personal problems on this scale. I learned to conceal my personal life very well. I say all this not because I need your sympathy (though that would be nice too, if we're being honest) but because it gives you a brief insight into why/how I spent several formative years of my life literally and figuratively alone. I'm not glad I had these experiences, but for better or for worse they shaped who I am today. Under layers of laughter and affability, I suspect (however unjustified this feeling might be) that not many people really understand me. Sometimes, I have trouble understanding other people and can be suspicious about their motives. I'm used to being on my own and in my head.
Now that you know all this, it wouldn't surprise you that I responded to my new friend's flakiness by hardening my heart and convincing myself, with less aplomb than I showed in 2000, that I didn't really need new friends. Life was fine. I liked my job and was starting to get closer to some people at the office. I wasn't going to live here forever, anyway, I reasoned. I was traveling a fair bit for work. I learned how to cook for more than just sustenance. I went on more runs and did push-ups and saw faint ab lines on myself, for once. I bought the most expensive pair of antisocially-large headphones I've ever owned and began listening to full-length albums, intentionally picking apart lyrics and beats and identifying similarities between artists. When my ears wanted a reprieve from hours of wearing said headphones, I ordered bath bombs and bottles of bubble bath liquid, sat in my tub, and continued to listen to full-length albums. I frequently called and texted the people I loved - who were scattered around the country, the world, and my Excel spreadsheet - and even got to hang out with some of them during my travels. It wasn't ideal, but it wasn't that bad, and I came to accept it as what this stage of life looked like for me.
The Lyft Ride
On a day-to-day basis, if I didn't think too hard about it all, my new life was fine the way it was. I was healthier than I had ever been, and I was really pleased with my ability to keep up with old friends.
I did not, however, prepare for perceived judgment. At the beginning of every week, I would go into the office and have to engage in small talk about how our weekends were. My answers sounded fine in my head but sounded pathetic when spoken aloud:
"I listened to five albums!" No.
"I followed this interval training workout video!" No.
"I tried out this chamomile and cucumber face mask!" No.
"I made enough meals to last me the rest of the week!" Oh, for fuck's sake.
I began to dread this weekly question and my coworkers' reactions - looks of pity? concern? - even though I knew they meant well and that I was totally projecting whatever insecurities I had on myself.
One day, after the leaves had fallen from the trees, I was on a Lyft ride to the airport for a business trip. I mentioned to the driver that I had moved here recently and didn't know many people. He asked if I was interested in going for brunch with him.
Was he asking me on a date?????????
I don't know the answer because I came to my senses in time and decided, on principle, that it was not the smartest move to meet up with a Lyft driver post-ride. (I admit I would have jumped to different conclusions if the driver was not male.) I made some excuse about being really busy and not in town the following two weeks, which was true. But as I wheeled my carry-on suitcase past the revolving doors of the airport, I realized an uncomfortable truth: I was pretty damn close to saying yes. Not because I was interested in him in that way, but because I was lonelier than I wanted to admit.
How do other people make friends?
When I came back from that business trip, I wanted things to change. I couldn't keep living a life in which I had no friends in the local community.
My inclination towards talking friends was unhelpful when, in my daily life, I had few opportunities to even meet people and be on their radars as candidates for good conversations. As much as I disliked the concept of group exercise classes (and why should I pay for an instructor to shout at me when my inner critic already does that for free?), I begrudgingly decided that this might be necessary to fulfill my goals.
I joined a barre studio and liked the lessons, but didn't exactly fit in with the clientele; I was not white, not a wife, didn't have a two-year-old child, and wasn't trying to lose imaginary post-pregnancy weight.
I was super bummed about that.
Fortunately, on my way back home from a barre class one night, I noticed that there was a kickboxing studio even closer to where I lived, and they were doing a special offer for newcomers. I signed up that day. Things went well; it was much closer to what I was looking for and the people there were very friendly.
Of course, there were still glaring differences between making friends through kickboxing and making friends in my first week of college. These differences included:
1. The kickboxing studio drew people from a much wider range of backgrounds than were represented at the small, private liberal arts college I attended: age, socioeconomic status, profession, educational background, political views, interests, lifestyles, values, senses of humor, etc.
2. I would argue that most people start off their time in college actively seeking to make friends; I believe this is especially true of residential, rural, and/or predominantly undergraduate campuses (and my college was all three). This desire, as well as the knowledge that people around them also think the same, motivates people to have more conversations or deviate from their established routine. I had no idea what other people's levels of interest in making new friends were at kickboxing were, and I realized I was most likely facing an imbalance between myself and others in this respect. This got me to reflect on whether I had missed out on potential friendships over the last few years when I felt content and wasn't actively seeking to expand my social circle.
3. There were many opportunities to talk in college; meals, classes, group projects, in line for the seedy underage bar downtown, in organizations that stood for something, in organizations that stood against other organizations, etc. At kickboxing, we came, punched and kicked for an hour, and left. How was I supposed to make other people want to become friends with me when the activity at hand wasn't structured for dialogue?
I was also eager to avoid being seen, in the friend-sense, as thirsty. I didn't want to swallow my pride and say, "hey, I don't really have any friends in the area, so can we hang out?" even though that was true. To me, it was not as bad, but almost as bad, as going to church for the sake of trying to get with someone.
And let me tell you, I HAVE DONE THAT BEFORE.
I came up with a plan. I was going to go to kickboxing with gradually increasing regularity (where possible). I would figure out how early the first person to a class would show up and always arrive later than them, but be early enough to have three-, five-, seven-minute conversations with the people around me. I would linger at the end of each class and chat with the instructors since there were fewer instructors than members and their presence was more predictable than that of most members, but also try not to be the last one out of the door. Totally not thirsty for new friends.
I continued to eavesdrop into conversations all around me - at the office, at the grocery store, at the kickboxing studio - to figure out what people in these circles liked to talk about. It became apparent that there were three main topics when it came to small talk here: dogs, sports, and the weather. I dislike small talk, but at least I knew what I was working with. Commenting on the weather was easy enough. I regularly did Google searches for upcoming sports games in the state as well as for the results of very recent games (all dismal), and perfected a look of textbook delight upon being shown pictures of someone's cousin's wife's new dog.
Three months into this plan, after I became a familiar face, I was added to the studio's Facebook group, which was super helpful. I studied the posts in the Facebook group to identify who the "key players" were - people who posted frequently, and/or people who seemed to get more likes than others. I read over several months' worth of posts to identify examples of humor that people responded well to, as well as the tone and language that people tended to employ. I used the members list to identify people I had talked to and stalked their profiles all the way back to the start of the decade in order to glean tidbits about them. Once I knew their last names from Facebook, I did Google and LinkedIn searches of them to find out more about their lives outside of social media in order to ask more tailored, but not-too-tailored questions in conversation.
After making a few jokes and one heartfelt post which got more likes than any other post I've ever seen on that page (in no small part due to my research) in which I shared my gratitude for the people at the studio, I received and sent a number of friend requests. I discovered that a lot of my new Facebook and Instagram friends post very often, which gave me even more insights into their personalities.
At my job, I was taught to probe for and identify the need behind the need of our clients, which is sometimes left unsaid intentionally or unintentionally. I figured it could apply here too: if I could correctly identify the needs behind the needs of people at kickboxing and somehow address them, broadly packaged as friendship, I might have some friends offscreen, too.
I narrowed down the pool of people I thought I might approach (people I was beginning to text/message), and began to speculate on their individual needs behind the needs.
Why do we make friends?
I know I was just about to get into the individual needs behind the needs of people I was thinking of befriending. But what did you think I was going to do, just share such personal details on the internet?
I posit that there are a few broad, somewhat pessimistic, self-serving reasons as to why people make and maintain friendships, even ones in which there are no obvious dependencies and/or both people are well-adjusted individuals. People's needs behind their needs fall in this general vicinity. None of that "we like each other" or "we really connect" bullshit. I'm going to be cynical here. These reasons are not mutually exclusive:
To escape loneliness/boredom (which I think are two very different things, even if they sometimes manifest themselves in similar ways)
To escape the perception of having no friends/to project the perception of being liked and popular
To associate ourselves with people of a certain caliber and believe/show that by extension, we are also of that caliber
To work towards a common goal that is beneficial to both parties, or to work against an outcome that is detrimental to both parties
To have someone who will (at least outwardly) affirm your decisions and actions
To have someone who gives you something you wouldn't have otherwise (can be tangible - like free drinks or gifts, or intangible - like access to a community)
To be clear, I am not saying that the enjoyment of someone's company in and of itself is a farce. I think it is perfectly normal to have preferences and genuine appreciation for someone. But I have yet to personally experience a friendship in which none of these six things were true to any extent.
The good thing about all this - if true with other people, too - is that I could think about the ways in which I could deliver on these broad self-serving reasons. In other words, what could I bring to the table?
I am/can be very responsive and accessible as a friend
I can be a reliable liker of social media posts
Unclear re: being of a certain caliber. I consider the following attributes as the big four contributing factors to someone's baseline likability: kindness, intelligence, humor, and physical attractiveness (because let's face it, we give attractive people the benefit of the doubt and assume better of them for no reason). I don't have these qualities in spades: I'm not particularly bright or hot. I was beginning to realize how much my ability to make someone laugh was contingent on them being from a certain background, which was something I could no longer confidently assume. I'm not that nice, so I don't even have that going for me.
I can identify what people stand for (or against) through my research and find ways to seem relevant to their causes
I am very good at affirming people
Unclear re: giving anything. I'm pretty stingy.
Reflections
Over the following months, as the snow melted, as people traded their big puffy coats for raincoats and then traded their raincoats for bare elbows, I began to properly befriend a few individuals from the kickboxing studio. The plan worked! All in all, much more successful than my endeavors at church. On Monday mornings, when people in the office asked me how my weekend was, I could give substantive answers. I was smug as fuck about this, and then it made me wonder to what extent I had wanted new friends just to project the perception of having friends.
In the end, I believe that I managed to make new friends because I was very purposeful in how I positioned myself in this space and what I could do to demonstrate interest in other people's lives. Lord knows my personality is insufficient on its own for this.
I have some reflections to share from this year of intentionally developing friendships in an unfamiliar territory:
I am extremely grateful for the people who opened up their hearts and schedules to me, for the people who probably thought I was super different from them but chose to focus on our similarities.
I believe that my new friendships developed faster than if I had been more passive about the process. When I felt that rapport had been established with someone else, I quickly asked to hang out in person, which can foster closeness.
What I sought in friendship or an interaction might not be exactly what the other person sought, which wasn't necessarily a bad thing at all - just something to keep in mind.
When I was in doubt about what kind of jokes to tell, I directed them at myself.
At times, it was hard to put effort into my friendships when I didn't know how long I was going to be living there for - a year? two? five? - but I also saw it as an opportunity to be more direct with people. What did I have to lose?
I really believe in this "need behind the need" shit. It worked in the context of making friends. I believe that we all have some mildly selfish needs, but most people are receptive if you can first address or tactfully acknowledge said needs.
I still like the idea of having a spreadsheet of friends and I think there's no harm in knowing what you value most in friendship. However, this whole experience was so valuable: starting all over again took away a lot of the luxury I had in thinking about what people can give me and forced me to think, instead, about what I can give them.
My interest in going kickboxing waned after I established (what was to me) a satisfactory number of friends, which shows you where my priorities were.
How do we decide when we are satisfied with the number of friends we have? I realized I personally hit this point when I was starting to have plans every weekend, which once again made me wonder to what extent my self-serving motivations were escaping loneliness/boredom, and/or being able to project the perception of having friends. Is this a bad thing?
I will definitely be entering some names into my spreadsheet in 2019.
Epilogue
The story ends a little unexpectedly. Just as I was starting to not be a social pariah, I was offered a very cool position in - wait for it - another part of the country.
I was thrilled. I was also like, you're fucking kidding me. I have to do this all again?