Friendship Advice That Might Surprise You
The case for moving away from your friends, and other unexpected pieces of wisdom from Atlantic writers
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Say you have dinner plans with a friend on Friday night. You’ve already chosen a spot and made the reservation. Just as you’re about to head out to meet them, they text you to cancel, saying that they’re exhausted from the week. You feel hurt, but you’re not sure what sort of reaction is within your rights. In other words: What do we owe our friends?
The answer, of course, is “It depends”—on the specific friendship and the expectations you’ve set within it. But most of us don’t have the hard conversations necessary to define what we want out of our non-romantic relationships. As my colleague Olga Khazan wrote this week, the nebulousness of friendship is precisely what makes it “so enchanting—and exasperating. We find ourselves depending on people who didn’t know they were being depended upon.”
It’s common to spend more time thinking and talking about romantic relationships than friendships, but the latter are equally in need of exploration—and some of the best friendship advice contradicts our deeply held assumptions. Below are a few of my favorite pieces of surprising wisdom from our writers.
On Friendship
Just make more of them.
By Olga Khazan
Pay a Little Less Attention to Your Friends
Intensity might seem like a fast track to connection, but shared distraction might be more powerful.
By Richard A. Friedman
Want Closer Friendships? Move Away From Your Friends.
Distance, as it turns out, isn’t the barrier to deep relationships that some may think.
By Maggie Mertens
Still Curious?
- “Best friends” are a surprisingly recent phenomenon: We weren’t always so taken with dynamic duos. But in recent decades, we’ve come to expect that people should have one closest companion.
- Should friends offer honesty or unconditional support?: A “culture of passivity” makes many people reluctant to question their friends’ decisions.
Other Diversions
P.S.
Last week, I spoke with the hosts of our podcast How to Talk to People about friendship and social isolation. During our conversation, Julie Beck shared a lovely C. S. Lewis quote from a letter he wrote to a friend while mourning his wife’s death. Lewis suddenly had a lot of free time, and wished he didn’t. He wrote, “One doesn’t realise in early life that the price of freedom is loneliness. To be happy one must be tied.”
— Isabel
