The Irony of Friendship
What does it take to make a good friend?
By that I mean someone outside your family that you know well, enjoy spending time with, and can count on for help and support.
I once watched an interview with Emma Watson that had a segment where she was asked about being “friends” with her costars (you can see the interview here- the video I found that clips the exact quote is a youtube short). Her response was that, although actors want to be friends and there is marketing and PR pressure to play up their friendship, the truth is that becoming friends takes energy and input that the cast simply cannot provide.
Emma’s exact words were that it takes time, trust, and presence. Three investments that must be made and maintained, for which the return is genuine friendship.
And I agree with her, I quote this so frequently when the topic comes up that it’s become something of a catchphrase of mine. But I also think these elements are only part of the picture and there are unaccounted factors. Exchanging time, trust, and presence can only happen in the right environmental conditions in the first place.
Emma’s interview wasn’t the first I’d heard about the art of friendship making. I remember the opening speech of 2024’s NCSS delivered by the lead lecturer, Richard, towards the end of which he asked the students to pause and look around. And for a precious, slightly confusing 20 seconds, they did. This assortment of nerdy 16 and 17 year olds, all twisting their heads around to see who their neighbours were and engaging in awkward bouts of eye contact. Because what was everyone looking for?
And then Richard slowly began (paraphased): “In life there are very few times you will be fortunate enough to be put in an environment that has been crafted for you to- and with the expectation that you will- meet people and make friends. There is primary school. And high school. And maybe one more time at University. And that is all most people get. Here you are, lucky enough to get one more. Do yourself a favour and make the most of it.” Richard put into words the idea that, yes, while anyone can become friends with anyone at any time, at any age, in any place, the prime friend making moments we experience are highly concentrated around little bursts of a few days where no-one knows anyone else, and everyone is equally prepared to approch and be approached. The startling part was that for the vast majority of your life you are not living in this mode and, conversely, will find it harder!
Reflecting on My Own Experiences
And for a while this was the model I maintained. Until now, after reexamining it with my additional life experience. Right now my closest friends are the ones I made in school. My next closest friends I made playing sports, badminton, that I started in year 8 at the age of 13. My next closest friends I made at work/uni (one group). And, somewhat separate from these three groups, is the friend network I made at my own summer school in Pecs. They’re separate because, while I want to think of the pecsi guys as close friends, the nature of our friendships was very honeymoon-esque and maintaining them now has some… logistical difficulties. I can never invite any of them to a birthday party or offer to help them move houses.
But that aside, what do all of these categories of friends have in common?
Most immediately they are all groups. People coalesce due to a mixture of social perception bias, evolutionary biology, a need to form a collective identity, and the benefits of distributed support. But that concept is separate to my current thesis.
They are also all majority male.
The red herring here is that they were all formed in one of those few critical instances where lots of people come together as strangers. This is true for my uni group and Pecs. But in school we all bobbed around for years before settling as a group. For sports, everyone joined at different times, sometimes years apart.
The thing I want to draw attention to is that, most fundamentally, none of these groups were created because we decided we wanted to be friends. Every single one of them happened because I found myself in an environment where everyone was committed to some purpose orthogonal to friend making, and the creation of the friend group was purely incidental.
What Makes Environments Good For Group Forming
The school group formed where the intended exercise was going to classes, doing homework, and studying for exams. We had to be in school, most of us didn’t have a choice. The uni group formed when we got to meet each other for the first time as part of an arranged mixer, and found out we would be sharing classes, and an office, for the next four years. We were all committed to studying, and importantly, to working. The badminton group formed while we were all individually training for badminton (not a team sport). Again, we were only there because we had to be. After we finished highschool at 18-20, our parents stopped pushing us to train and most of us left.
At one level, yeah, for any of these that have that “critical few days” period, everyone is definitely aware that making friends is on the cards. People do think of sport as social, and of going on exchange as a large friend making exercise. But at the end of the day, there was a reason for all of those people to be there that they were committed to prior to forming the group.
This makes for an excellent group forming environment because there is no pressure, no onus on anyone to like anyone else. Not to make a move, or reach out, or even be happy there. There is no pressure to have fun (if anything this makes the Pecs group the least genuine because in that case there was pressure to have a good time).
In these situations, your time, the time that leads to presence which leads to trust, is not being invested in a friendship from scratch. You don’t have to worry about how little momentum you have or how little you know each other. And there is no mental work required to find something to do, something that you enjoy, because this friendship always starts out as secondary to another objective. These are all things you would be painfully aware of if you tried actively to make friends at uni outside a class. Every half an hour of board games and every movie seen and every walk gone on would be time spent out of pocket.
In a sentence, you want to get the ‘time’ part of ‘time, trust, and presence’ for free because investing time when starting from scratch and getting no returns initially is really hard to do1.
The Irony
And this is where the irony is. Because the moment the friendship is strong enough to support itself, when it has the momentum to leave the place it started, the onus is on YOU to be happy with it2.
It is almost a moment of vulnerability, to acknowledge that you like the other person/people so much that you are willing to, for the first time, sink your actual free time into being with them. It is no longer you and them vs the environment, the common uniting factor is gone. And this is wildly more expensive, because we only have so much free time, especially as we get older. There is way more pressure on you to enjoy what you choose to do to justify continuing to invest in this friendship. This is why so many friendships die when people leave.
An attractive force is exerted while you are at school or sport or wherever, bringing you closer, and a repulsive force is exerted when you take your friendship outside that place, costing you time and energy. It is easier to be friends while your friendship is secondary to some other thing than it is to just be friends. So pessimistically, every time you make a friend they come with a timer ticking down till the day the thing that keeps you together ends.
The Takeaway
Use this system to your advantage.
To form a group you “only” need to put yourself in a situation where you are incidentally seeing the same group of people again and again. Framed this way it isn’t so revolutionary, it circles back to advice we hear all the time- do things where you see the same people again and again. Sure the time cost won’t be zero but it will be low if you enjoy that thing anyway.
The less energy required to be present the better, so roommates (like college dormmates) is best. This is followed by a low stakes minimum wage job. Oddly when the job becomes a higher stakes 9-5 and people get older, despite putting more hours in they also take it more seriously and this effect is weakened. And the gym would be next, which is the most obligatory hobby you can have imo. For a lot of people it isn’t something they enjoy but something they do out of discipline, which means they will commit to it in a predictable way. This sets it apart from hobbies that are more high maintenance which makes them more susceptable to variation in people’s routines.
Conclusion
Whether you agree with the irony or not, you must concede that you need to meet people to make friends. So bottom line, put yourself out there and try new things. Maybe your experiences will be different to mine3.
If the theory turns out to be accurate and more times than not these friendships reach their expiry, so be it. Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.
Or rephrased reductively, if you spend a lot of time with someone you might make friends with them. Way to go Einstein. ↩︎
The optimist might say that I am looking at this backwards, that you have to find someone you have fun with first and then you get this (momentum to start hanging out and doing things) for free and don’t have to think so hard about it. To them, the place you meet people is nothing more than an opportunity, and they might not give it as much importance as I have. But I think I’m being realistic- not sharing an ugly truth but just a truth. We code switch and behave differently around different people and until you find the right part of you that clicks with another person (if there is a part that does at all) you have to rely on this familiarity-based approach, which is more algorithmic and less intuitive rather than than hitting it off and becoming best friends right then and there. The former is completely valid, by the way, not at all inferior to the intuitive method which has its own shortcomings- namely the aforementioned honeymoon phase and secondly falling into the trap of acting buddy buddy without feeling anything. ↩︎
There was a hole in this discussion, which is my high school friend group. My closest friend group is one that is not united by an ongoing activity since we graduated in 2022. Well, it is complicated. I think everyone is entitled to one “exception” friend group because we are social creatures and need one friend group to survive. I think the case where a group of people collectively have no social presence and end up meeting can circumvent the whole argument I made and become a friend group. Put in non-diplomatic terms, because they are all equally desperate. Someone could join an existing friend group the same way. Also, my school group overlaps with my uni group, and I am closer to the few of them that I see at uni. So it’s a bit too messy to try to explain this one out. ↩︎