When I went off to college back in the 1900s (side eye to gen Z), I had three expectations: I would graduate with the knowledge and skill I needed to thrive in my chosen profession; I would meet the man I was going to marry; and I would build lifelong friendships with the people who would be core to my identity until we took our last breaths. Three out of three would have confirmed me as the rockstar I know myself to be. But as life would have it, two out of three ain’t bad. Being at a small, liberal arts PWI in Iowa did not set me up well for that whole meet my husband thing. Black men were in short supply.
Before you start to offer me pity, just know that I chose the school with the top magazine journalism program in the nation, and I had a great college experience. I will admit that my friends had an outsized impact on why my days at Drake University were cherished memories. We had a time. But what I cherish most is that our friendship didn’t end at graduation. We became the lifelong friend group that I always dared to hope for in my dreams.
As hard as it is for me to believe—and if I’m being honest, accept—we are coming up on 25 years since we graduated. How? When? What is time even? A lot can happen in 25 years, and friendships can go through the ringer. Life happens to everyone but not always in the same stages or pace. That can mean we go through things at different times and those shifts in life and its priorities can mean friends feel left out. Sometimes they fall out with each other. Sometimes they grow apart from each other. Sometimes they lose touch. Sometimes they grow closer. That is not true for my friends and me. While not perfect by a long shot, we are thicker than thieves. Life threw its curviest of curve balls at us and in the end, we grew closer together.
It is not just college friends that I have maintained my relationships with – I can add a few from childhood to that list. And I have continued to make new friends at every stage of my life. I make friends through hobbies, organizations I am a part of, church, and interacting with my neighbors. I have made friends from talking to people around me at events, volunteering in my community, or hanging out at local third spaces. I am a friendship girlie. For me, friends make life worth living. The older you get, the more you realize that your chosen family is just as important as the bloodlines that birthed you. They are just as core to your identity.
This reverence for friendship used to be cemented in pop culture. I can’t count the number of movies and television shows that centered around doing life with friends across all life’s stages. Off the top of my head: Now and Then, Stand by Me, Clueless, Boyz in the Hood, The Wood, Living Single, Girlfriends, Golden Girls, Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants … I’m sure you have your list of faves. But if the discourse on social media is to be believed, technology is swiftly eroding friendship culture. People don’t know how to friend any more.
I am intrigued by this noncommittal friendship that we are peddling in these virtual streets. When I think about the people I call my friends, I know everything that is going on in their lives. I know when they don’t feel well, when they had a stellar performance at work, when they are traveling out of the country, and when they are dealing with hard things with family or finances or whatever. These aren’t really things you can glean through social media. We actually talk to each other. We show up. We support. We do life together. If I don’t know those intimate things about you, I would venture to say we are not really friends. We can absolutely mean something to each other and be part of each other’s extended village. We care about each other. But we aren’t friends. Friendship is sacred. Without connection and consistency, like all other important relationships, it dies. So what gives? Why are we abandoning friendship?
From friend to follower
At the onset of social media, back when it was all blogs, Black Planet, and Myspace, we had friends. Shout out to Friend Tom for setting the tone. We had carefully curated top 8 lists of our very best friends and it was a cherished position reserved for only the truest of true friends. I say this with heaps of sarcasm of course, but you get the idea. As social media increased in popularity and societal prominence, the friend slowly evolved into followers and with it, an unspoken invitation to care less about connection and community and more about counterfeit influence and fame. Friendship be damned.
It might seem like a lot of weight to give social media, but I simply have to look to the growth of subtweets and social media beef to drive the point home. We stopped talking to each other and working out our grievances amongst friends and instead hopped on our mobile devices to blast each other, call each other out, and air the friend circle dirty laundry for the virtual town square to see. My feed was riddled with variations of “I peeped game and I see who my friends really are. From now on, I’m doing me” or “It’s funny how people can be fake to your face. I see your true colors and I will move accordingly.” The early 2000s were a wild time.
On the flip side, social media also convinced us that because we scroll through a steady stream of perfectly curated photos and posts that we know what’s happening in each other’s lives. We randomly run into each other at the grocery store, exchange a few words based on the latest posts we saw, and feel like we have done enough to maintain a friendship. But if that’s friendship, I want no parts! As for me and my friends, we are going to go deep.
Why are adult friendships so hard?
Going deep is where things get messy in friendships. I guess that is what makes adult friendships hard. We have lived through some things. We have experienced real heartbreak and loss. We might have even hurt each other in some way. We have high stakes priorities like marriages and children and aging parents. There are stressful careers and mortgages and endless bills. There are crisis of faith and identity. Life is demanding and unrelenting and all consuming. When you have to show up for yourself through all of this, it can feel impossible to show up for someone else in the same way. For me, this is where friendships add the greatest value.
Friends are like the secret success sauce of life. They literally make it possible for us to show up! There is not a hard thing in life I can’t face when I have my friends by my side. Our friends carry us. They are present when we are new parents and need someone to come do the laundry, clean the kitchen, or grocery shop. They are there to hold you and wipe your tears when a relationship falls apart and you don’t know how you’ll make it through tomorrow. They show up to surround you with love when you lose a parent and you’re far from home and all alone with your overwhelming grief. They are in the audience cheering you on as you walk across the stage to get that degree that you wanted to abandon many times but they wouldn’t let you.
Yes, real friendship requires you to show up. But real friendship shows right back up for you. It is not transactional. It is not tit for tat. It is not an if/then statement. Healthy friendship is reciprocal. As the seasons of life ebb and flow, friendships require different things. But in none of those seasons is a healthy friendship ever low maintenance or hands off. Because the moment we stop caring for something, it dies.
Perhaps what people are really negotiating when conversations of low maintenance friendships come up, is who do I want to do life with? Who do I want to invest in? For those lucky individuals who make the list, those are your friends. Everyone else might be someone you deeply care for, but at the end of the day, they aren’t your friends. And that’s ok! After all, not everyone can be in the top 8.
Do you agree? What does low maintenance friendship mean to you?
