I don’t particularly need another person I can call at 3am.
I’m lucky enough to already have people for that. People who know the history, know the context and know enough about me that I don’t have to begin every story somewhere around 2009 just to explain why the thing that happened on Tuesday is significant.
What I could occasionally use is someone who’s free at 7pm on Thursday.
And I’m starting to think those might be two entirely different problems.
Because it’s possible to have good friends, genuinely good friends, and still sometimes have nobody to do anything with.
Your friends haven’t disappeared and you haven’t fallen out. Life has just become considerably more complicated than it used to be. The friend you once called at five to see if she fancied dinner might now need three weeks’ notice. Someone else has moved an hour away, another has children, and finding a time when two people’s calendars happen to line up can feel like an achievement in itself.
They’d still turn up if you really needed them.
Getting them to turn up for a glass of wine is another matter.
And when that starts happening, it’s easy to think: I need more friends.
I’m not sure we always do.
Maybe friendship is doing too many jobs
There’s a strange hierarchy to adult relationships. We understand what a close friend is, and we understand what a stranger is, but everything in between can feel slightly harder to define.
There’s the former colleague you still occasionally meet for dinner. The woman from the exercise class you always end up talking to. Someone you know through another friend and genuinely like, although neither of you has ever quite crossed whatever invisible line turns knowing somebody into being their friend.
We even tend to describe these relationships apologetically.
“We’re not really friends, but…”
I’m beginning to wonder why the but is necessary.
Perhaps you’re not close friends. Perhaps you just really enjoy going to the cinema together. That still seems like a perfectly worthwhile relationship to have.
Researchers tend to call people in this wider circle “weak ties”, which sounds rather like a criticism. But the research on them is surprisingly positive. Studies have found a relationship between these everyday interactions and greater happiness and feelings of belonging. One study that followed more than 800 adults aged 40 and over also found that having a larger network of weaker ties predicted positive changes in emotional wellbeing over time.
So perhaps these aren’t lesser relationships after all. They may simply be doing a different job from our closest friendships.
The interesting part is that we often seem to treat these relationships as unfinished. If we like somebody, there can be an assumption that the relationship should progress until, eventually, we become proper friends.
But perhaps becoming close isn’t the only successful outcome.
The person you meet for a walk twice a month might remain the person you meet for a walk twice a month. You might still really look forward to those walks.
That doesn’t make the relationship a failed friendship. Maybe it was never trying to become one.
Having friends and having a social life aren’t quite the same thing
I think this distinction becomes more noticeable as we get older because emotional closeness and practical availability begin drifting apart.
Someone can be one of the most important people in your life and still not be the person who’s available when you decide you’d like to see a film tomorrow.
That sounds incredibly obvious written down. I’m not convinced I’ve always treated it as obvious.
If the people I’m closest to aren’t available, my instinct has generally been either to wait until they are or do the thing alone. Asking somebody I know less well can somehow feel strangely significant, as though inviting someone to see a film requires me to first decide whether this person qualifies as a Friend.
It really doesn’t.
And maybe that’s the part worth reconsidering.
Instead of deciding that somebody needs to become a proper friend before we start including them in our lives, perhaps sometimes we can simply ask.
There’s something quite freeing about that. It removes the strange pressure from new adult relationships to become something more than they currently are.
You can enjoy somebody’s company without knowing where the relationship is going.
In fact, it doesn’t have to be going anywhere.
Maybe “more friends” isn’t actually the goal
None of this makes close friendship less important. Having people who really know you is one of the best things life can give you.
But perhaps we’ve become too accustomed to expecting those same people to provide most of our social lives as well as our emotional ones.
When they become less available, the obvious response can be to wait for a gap in their calendars or conclude that we need to make more close friends.
There is another possibility.
We could get better at valuing the relationships that sit somewhere in between.
Maybe occasionally you ask the former colleague you like seeing, or the person you always talk to after a class, if they fancy doing something instead of automatically scrolling through the same few names in your phone.
Some of those relationships might eventually become close friendships. Others won’t.
That isn’t necessarily a failure.
I think I’ve spent a long time assuming that if I wanted a fuller social life, I needed to make more friends. The more I think about it, the less convinced I am.
I’m fortunate enough to have people I could call at 3am.
Maybe what I need is to get a little better at valuing the people I could call at 7pm on Thursday.
Those people count too.