friendships in your 20s
a love letter of sorts
This is my 10th blog post — which I think makes it the most I’ve written consistently on the internet. Today when I checked we made it to the #150th newsletter in the fashion & beauty leaderboard on substack. I’m so grateful for all of you for reading. For subscribing and messaging me bits of my blog. Thank you for being here and letting me do something I love. I love you all.
I’m not too proud to admit that I never finished reading a little life. There’s a threshold for how much beautiful and tragic prose one can endure — mine is about 600 pages, give or take. I stopped mid chapter, hurled the book across my williamsburg apartment one day and never looked back. But there’s this paragraph from the book that haunts me — where jude is talking about friendship:
Recently someone wrote to me and asked me to write about making friends in your 20s (side note: if there’s ever anything you want me to write about, please let me know in the comments).
It’s so absurd to me because I feel like for most of my life, having enough friends has been something I’ve been anxious about. But then somewhere along the road, I made friends that make me feel like I’ve experienced true, genuine, pure love, and I forgot I had been so insecure about friendship. Isn’t that how it always goes? You go your whole life praying so desperately for doors to open and then one day you walk through them without even realizing.
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It’s the middle of july and I’m on another trans-atlantic flight. This time, back to new york city, and thankfully, staying for the forseeable future. I’ve just finished reading tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow — and find it a happy little coincidence that I finish a novel about friendship the day I’m meant to finish my blog about the subject.
Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, is marketed as “a love story but not one that you have ever read before.” But in the end, I didn’t find it that novel because the idea of friendship being a love story is a cliche I know well.
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There’s this thing that lindsay and I say to each other about friendship — that it’s the purest form of altruistic love. That if god forbid, something bad ever happens, I will have lived knowing that I have experienced true, genuine love on this earth.
I’m an only child, so maybe I’m unnecessarily sentimental when it comes to friendships because I never had any blood counterparts growing up. But to me, there’s something so beautiful about people being bonded together by absolutely nothing but the shared commitment to be there for each other day after day.
Relationships are higher in intensity but there’s a fragility to them — everything is always on the line, it’s always all or nothing. The longest relationship I’ve had has always been my friendships. My friends and I grew up together — the continuous coming of age. Natalie jokes that we’ve seen her through so many different personalities. Isn’t it funny to think that our friends have loved us through every version of ourselves?
I think about the past 7 years with lindsay, how our friendship has endured every single shitty boyfriend and heartbreak, the crying in the passenger seat while she drives me around in tahoe, the days running at the track in the mid august humidity, the 9 hour ferry rides from mykonos. It’s the familiar steadiness that I find the most beautiful.
Towards the end of tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, Sadie says to Sam, lovers are common, but true collaborators in this world are rare.
Lovers are common. I used to be afraid of dying alone but a former colleague once said to me, dismissively: Tina, if you wanted to get married you could get married, and it rewired my brain. Finding someone in the game of marriage musical chairs isn’t hard, but finding true connection — whether romantic or not — is rare.
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On compatibility
It’s our last night in portugal and lindsay, natalie and I are laughly too brazenly for a trendy restaurant with a prix-fix menu. We’re convinced that everyone else in the restaurant is an npc because no one else is even pretending to have a good time. We’re having the time of our lives, nonstop blabbering, trying not to interrupt each other as we wax poetic — about feminine energy, boys we’re seeing, recurring arguments with said boys, standing up for yourself, dream jobs, dream cities. We’re everywhere and no where. We’ve been in the restaurant for 4 hours and no one wants to call cut.
I think the place is going for a michelin star because the wait staff is unusually attentive. I count the seconds between when they replace the jugs of water on our table. It’s never more than 30 seconds.
There’s this story that we laugh about where a guy one of us once dated claimed being blindsided by the breakup because of the way we had poured water for him before pouring our own water, signifying an act of love. It’s absolutely comical that the most basic forms of etiquette can now be mistaken for love but it’s one of my favorite stories to tell. I make sure to empty the water jug into their tiny glasses before pouring my own. I’m showing you that I love you.
I make a trip to the restroom and can hear natalie and lindsay laugh from inside the four walls. It makes me feel warm the way being in your childhood home at night with your entire family inside makes you feel warm.
Lindsay says that compatibility in relationship is way more important than chemistry. I turn this idea over in my head, and realize that this is the difference of making friends in your 20s versus as a kid. I spent a lot of time when I was younger filling my time with plans with people that I didn’t actually enjoy spending time with but felt some surface level obligation to keep seeing. While I do think there’s something to learn from people who are vastly different from you, I think that feeling a true connection with someone is predicated on some form of compatibility over convenience.
But everyone has their own definition of compatibility — when I was younger it was about liking the same west village bars and buying tickets to the same artists that were coming to brooklyn mirage. Now I think it’s something along the lines of shared values and intellectual depth and good banter.
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Attracting not chasing.
There were nights when I first moved to new york city and felt like everyone else had arrived in the city with the most enviable friend group and I was scrounging around for people to fill my time. Scrolling on instagram exacerbated this. Sitting alone in my bedroom feeling sorry for myself exacerbated this. Obsessing over it exacerbated it.
I wish that when I was in my early 20s I wasn’t so obsessive about curating the perfect friendships. Sometimes I get messages from other 20-something girls asking how to make friends in new york city — they talk about the feeling surrounded by people and feeling so lonely and want to know how they can make friends in a city of 9 million people.
The reality is that most of my dearest friends came about gradually and over time. Which on one hand might be discouraging, but it doesn’t have to be. I think we need to reframe time spent alone — we only get a few free hours in a day that we aren’t spending at work or sleeping or doing human maintenance. And for those few precious hours, there’s value in doing things that help you grow — being comfortable being by yourself.
So go to a cafe by yourself. Get really into running. Learn to surf. Start making tiktoks. I think the more time I spent cultivating interesting habits, the less fixated I became on finding the perfect friendships, and the more I was able to meet people organically.
I joined an investment club last year and made some friends that I absolutely adore. I joined a track club and met some really cool people that I can get a coffee with. It’s not about curating the coolest hobbies to meet the coolest people but to understand yourself better and what you find interesting and in turn, attracting people who you can find communion with.
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Being grateful for what we have while working towards what we want.
I remember being 15 and writing down a list of every single person I knew and considered a friend, ranked by how close we were. As an only child I needed validation that I was well liked.
But even now sometimes, I feel this urge to pin my feelings of validation based on vanity metrics of friendship. Last month I locked myself out of my apartment at midnight and without a super available, stared at my list of contacts wondering who I could call that would feel the least burdensome to crash on their couch.
Even though I consider myself much more secure in my friendships now, I don’t think there will ever be a time where I feel like my friendships are perfect and my social calendar is brimming and I have enviable plans every week. The most important thing in making friendships in your 20s is recognizing that, it will never be exactly how you envision it, and it’s okay to appreciate your life as is it while working towards the one you want.
I know this post turned out more conceptual than tactical on friendships — please let me know if you want a part 2 to this or if there’s anything specific about friendships you would like me to write about. Again, thank you for letting me be your most incessant and navel gazing internet friend:)
Loved this so much! Thanks for sharing ✨💗
a fellow only child here. i see you and this piece resonates well with me. thank you for writing this!