as we grow older, i realise we need people and not just friends in our life. what tickboxes are we still hoping to fill with one sole person, and how open are we to building a community instead. i’ve learnt how to make and maintain friendships only in my adult life. some wise friends along the way have (unknowingly :) taught me two valuable things. one: quality time is supreme, but quantity time leads to more quality time too. two: expecting reciprocation is the death of a friendship.
one of my favorite pieces i’ve read recently. lots in here that resonates! like “let me know if there’s anything i can do” is the most well intentioned and also the most useless thing to say to anyone you care about. take it out of your vocabulary. it does nothing.
Look, we’re all tired and over-scheduled and burned out. But canceling as a form of self care is definitely something that perpetuates this dynamic we all seem to hate. There is an element here of snapping out of our Covid-era cocoons, leaving the house when we don’t feel like it, and allowing people to see us when we’re not at our best. I think this is especially relevant if you’re dancing with depression. Depression will always tell you to cancel, but sometimes the most caring thing you can do for yourself is power through that feeling and go anyway. You might just end up feeling two percent better.
you’ll get good essay curations and inadvertent TMI in these weekly-ish dispatches <3
2. tell people you love them
have you ever sent a message to a friend simply telling them you love them?2 men < men tech bros < men tech bros with a podcast, such goes the lore of the hierarchy of how badly they fare at being intentional about expressing their love for the people and friends in their lives. perhaps if we framed it as an experiement. i wonder if the sender or the recipient will be more awkward in this case.
i find it fascinating that nearly all the males in my life are typically a lot more in touch with their emotions that the average man, and that may both be because we are friends or that we are friends because of this!
I try, to whatever extent I can, to be intentional about my friendships — including with men. Most of them get this. In fact, I don’t know whether we get this because we are friends or we are friends because we get this.
While talking about my introversion, I sometimes quote Sartre: Hell is other people. But the deeper truth is that without those other people, we would be in hell. Things: they will lose their value once you are used to them. Experiences: you will forget everything as memory fades; it is inevitable; and then what pulao can you make with experiences?
if i were a pop star in an alternate life, i would only write love/breakup songs about friendships because we sorely need more of those in the world because how else do i describe the loss and pain and grief of losing a best friend and how do you navigate that abyss without the support of cringe melodramatic songs?!3
i liked this piece for how it described the messy emotions around a friend who’s drifing away.
My grief tells me how little I cared of my own love for her. I allowed it to wither and die, I supervised it. The calendar has more space now. I am saved from experiencing guilt watching a text exchange fizzle out. There is one less direction of interaction that drains my energy.
What it does raise in me is panic. I panic at my own abandonment of a friendship, at my loss of interest in nourishing it. I panic at how easily I slipped this friendship into a slow death.
just read this whole essay, please. it’s so soft, thoughtful, reflective.
one of my favs is observation #8:
People who don't pause exist more in their head than their body. The mind is top-down, rigid, quick, enforcing an established view. The mind is waiting for the other person to be done so they can say what’s rattling around inside. The body is slower, needs more time, and then words bubble up organically, one after another, without planning. People who exist more in their body are generally better at connecting emotionally with others.
and also #6:
It is easy to tell how happy someone is to see another person enter a conversation. There is happy, and there is polite, and they look very different. Polite has a mechanical quality to it, like carrying out all the right movements to replace batteries in a remote.
my problem with a lot of dating advice is that it runs on the assumption that we actually know what we want or are looking for, while in reality we’ve no clue and are largely misguided and stuck in unhealthy attachment patterns.
which is why, is this the most on-point advice for when you’re looking to date or what?
That is perhaps the most solid dating advice I have, by the way—show the inside of your head in public, so people can see if they would like to live in there.
and then some more:
The type of person I’m assuming we’re looking for here is 1) someone that you will find fascinating to talk to after you’ve talked for 20,000 hours, 2) you feel comfortable with them talking through the hardest and most painful decisions you will face in your life, and 3) the conversation is wildly generative for both of you, in that it brings you out, helps you become.
That is a very particular kind of conversation. You want to sample it as soon and as much as possible.
really beautiful piece, that goes into a lot more on how to date (and has parts 2 and 3 in the series too):
still grateful for the friend who dragged me out of the house for a walk in the evening and the friend who drove me around just to see a sunflower and that friend too who physically lifted my depressively limp limbs to make the journey from the bed to the couch. on better days, i try and be that friend to myself
i’ve lost a decade-long friendship but that breakup has never felt “seen” and i don’t know if it’s ever been processed or just sits repressed deep down beneath all the romantic breakups that are so loud & needy for attention my god
