After my post detailing my history with therapy, a reader wrote back to ask if I had personal relationships in my life beyond just the networking-type of relationships that are necessary and helpful for chasing prestige and accolades. They expressed concern that I often wrote about my struggle with chasing traditional indicators of success but never seemed to write about my friendships or other relationships (valid). And they linked me to an article in The Atlantic, “What the Longest Study on Human Happiness Found is the Key to a Good Life.”
Spoiler: good relationships. Relationships are the key to a happy, healthy life.
This isn’t mind-blowing by any means—countless books and movies echo this sentiment, and countless YouTube videos and TikToks contemplate how to make friends, how to deepen friendships, how to find a loving romantic partner. Relationships are tricky to figure out, and it’s easy to prefer the relative predictability of school and work over the messiness and arbitrariness of another human being’s emotions and attachments. One adage often quoted to me when I was a teenager was: “People will leave you, but your work will never.1”
In other words, I deeply understand why people—particularly Americans, particularly immigrants in America—prioritize work over people. Work relationships involve people, yes, but they are carefully mediated by shared (usually capitalistic) goals, workplace norms of emotional distance, and having an escape hatch (i.e., quitting).
At social gatherings, I often try to recreate these workplace comforts—looking at the guest list to see what the attendees might be like ahead of time and thinking up conversation topics they may enjoy, constantly asking others about themselves so I don’t ever have to reveal much about me, saying “I’m gonna get another drink” or “I’m going to go to the bathroom” way more than I actually need to complete those tasks (and drinking more than I usually intend).
Despite (or maybe because of?) my social anxiety and over-preparation for social situations, I have solid friendships. (I can write more some other time about my friendship recipe, but this essay isn’t about making friends as much as it is about structuring friendships.) I don’t write or talk publicly about my friends or partner much because of comments like:
And I’m not even highlighting the comments about my partner, parents, etc. The internet is full of assholes, and even though I’ve arguably implicitly agreed to be endlessly picked apart and criticized by strangers, the people in my life haven’t. I try to protect them by not mentioning them. So the problem isn’t that I have too few personal relationships.
The problem with friendship that I’m facing—that a lot of post-college adults face, really—is even if I have friends, I don’t spend as much time with them as I want to.
People marry into nuclear units and move to the suburbs. They have kids and retreat further into their nuclear unit. What limited time they had before children becomes even more limited by the never-ending demands of childrearing. Whereas we hung out with our high school friends ~700 times in high school, we might only see them ~ten times in a decade now. Percentage-wise, by 34 years of age, we’ve already spent 93% of all our “high school friends hangout” time. There’s only 7% of “high school friends hangout” left.
For some, this realization is whatever. They recognize it as a part of life, accept it, and enjoy the time composition of their suburban, rural, or urban lives. That is fantastic—for them.
But for me, this makes me incredibly sad. My vision of the good life involves more people and more hangouts. I am nostalgic for college dorms, where I regularly stopped by friends’ rooms on my way to and from my own. I don’t miss the bunk beds and the shared bathrooms, but I do miss the seamless camaraderie and unstructured togetherness.