We're Losing the Plot on Friendship

Friendship might be the most underrated relationship a person gets to have. We build entire shows around it. We quote them for decades. There's a reason Friends isn't called Couples.

A good friendship can carry you through a stretch of life you had no business surviving. A new city, a job that's eating you, a year you'd rather not discuss. Friends bring support and loyalty and a staggering amount of honesty you didn't ask for.

They're also just fun, which we talk about far less than we should. Knowing someone is there on the bad days and up for something on the good ones isn't only nice. It makes you measurably healthier. These relationships are a large part of what gives a life its shape.

So here's what I keep noticing. Search "friendship" and see what comes back.

Almost all of it is about managing difficulty. How to set a boundary. How to tell if a friendship is one-sided. When to cut someone off and how to word the message. Why adult friendship is so hard now. I've read a lot of these and many of them are genuinely good, written by thoughtful people with useful things to say.

But put them together and the picture you get is bleak. If your only exposure to friendship were an internet search, you'd come away thinking it's primarily a risk to be managed.

The whole conversation has drifted toward technicalities. Conflict resolution. Damage control. Survival.

And I understand how we got here. Adulthood is a conveyor belt of transitions that eat your time and attention, and friendship is the thing with no deadline attached, so it's the thing that slips. Friendship has had to adapt to stay alive at all. We're all collectively working out how to be around each other again, how to show up, how to simply be in the same room with any regularity.

But the hard parts were never supposed to be the main event.

Look at this piece in The Cut, filed under unpopular opinion: "I Should Be Allowed to Cold-Call My Friends." Kathleen Walsh argues that over the past twenty years, phoning a friend out of nowhere has quietly become something close to rude. We text first now. That's the rule nobody voted on. What's left is memes, light updates, and the scheduled "catch-up call," which has all the warmth of a standing meeting. She points out that plenty of friendships run for years on nothing but a rotating exchange of reels before quietly dying, and that an unexpected call now reads as an emergency rather than affection. Your phone rings and your first thought is who died.

That's the part that gets me. Wanting to call your friends is an unpopular opinion.

When did the rules start outranking the relationship?

I want to be careful here, because boundaries are not the villain. They're what makes a friendship sustainable instead of corrosive, and most of us learned about them far too late. Open communication, honesty, respecting the limits someone tells you about: none of that is negotiable.

The problem isn't that we talk about boundaries. It's that we've stopped talking about anything else.

When the entire discourse is risk management, the standards start to warp. We begin auditing our friends for small failures. We expect a kind of consistency and emotional fluency that no actual person maintains, and we treat every lapse as information about whether this friendship deserves to continue. Friendship starts to feel clinical. Procedural. Something you administer rather than enjoy.

People are not perfect. Your friends will forget things, say the wrong thing, disappear for a season and come back sheepish. Some of it will be genuinely annoying. That mess is not a flaw in the system, it's what makes the relationship real.

And if everything a person finds when they go looking for friendship is a problem to be solved, I don't blame them for concluding it's more trouble than it's worth.

In my own life, the friendships I'd describe as the real ones didn't get that way because we were good at it. They got that way through trial and error, mostly error. They're close because we kept forgiving each other and kept going. The depth came from the repair, not from an absence of things needing repairing.

None of this means ignoring your limits or tolerating someone who repeatedly steamrolls them. Some friendships should end, and knowing that is a skill worth having.

What I'm saying is narrower. The hard parts shouldn't be the whole conversation. And they definitely shouldn't get so loud that they stop us actually enjoying the people we have.

Call your friend. It's allowed.