the spiritual practice of being boring
on making friends by doing stuff together
This week my friend sent me a TikTok of a guy reacting to that meme that says, "no one ever talks about Jesus's miracle of having 12 close friends in his thirties." Another friend sat across a table and told Nate and me about how he'd just found his people after five years in his city.
I'm forever fascinated by this dilemma that so many of us share--I think because on its surface it's such a simple problem. People want friends. Lots of us are lonely. Friendship doesn't inherently cost money or physical energy or require special skills in the way other intangible goods often do. So why don't we just...you know...get together and do the thing?
Somehow we deeply feel the lack of meaningful non-family connections in our lives, but the path to filling it is anything but straightforward.
There is one scarce resource friendship does inevitably require: time. I've come to realize the amounts of time true friendship takes would feel frankly extravagant if we were to honestly name them out loud. After all, friendship comes relatively easily to most people in their school years because they spend time with the same people every single day, five days a week. And even then, their best friendships tend to grow out of spending even more time at playdates, extracurriculars, or weekend hangs.
A quote I didn't expect to resonate so much with readers in My Body and Other Crumbling Empires was four words: "Coffee doesn't solve loneliness." Coffee doesn't solve loneliness any more than visiting Williams-Sonoma makes anyone a chef, because it's just not enough. Coffee is for networking, not for friendship. Coffee is where we see if we have the raw materials to build a friendship together. But no matter how much we have in common or how many details of our lives we talk about, we don't demonstrate a commitment to that building project merely by repeating the same appointment every month.
I had a friendship breakthrough several years ago when I was texting with a new friend about getting together outside the group setting where we'd met. "Where should we go?" I said. "I'd like to avoid the hassle and expense of a restaurant" she replied. "Let's have lunch at my house. I have some nuts and oranges and chips." I think she was on a tight budget. But for a woman in the South, this also amounted to a declaration as brazen as those people in movies who'll look someone in the eye and go, "Let's skip the pleasantries." Come eat my real-life lunch with me in my real-life house. Do you like me? Check yes or no.
That friendship continued to consist of weird snacky meals, walks, me tagging along to the playground when she was babysitting, her arriving early to parties to help me set things up. It was a relief that our relationship had never been polite. We spent as much time side-by-side as face-to-face, which facilitated more intimate conversations in that way riding in a car with even your own family can do. And it was far, far easier to find the time for each other when we took for granted that no one needed to be flattered or entertained.
Over time, I noticed the same pattern in my relationships with other chronically ill and disabled folks. Many of us are unemployed, but managing our conditions and our lives is a full-time job. It just makes sense to make more time and lighten the burdens by sharing rides, errands, and chores while we're hanging out.
Since we moved to a new neighborhood in a new state last December (and then immediately found ourselves overwhelmed by baby prep in a century-old house with a new job and a book launch to navigate), I've deliberately adopted this strategy. Do you like me? 'Cause I need help.
Of course I have to admit this has been easier in some relationships because they're old friendships entering a new phase. High school friends helped us move. A few months later, Nate helped them with a landscaping project and I joined the lunch-making, babysitting, and gardening duties.
A college friend came over and swept all my floors a while ago when I first realized my back would no longer participate in that activity. All our time with my family in the last few months--bless them--has been spent on house projects. And when my grad school friends traveled here to visit in early July, they reorganized my stuff to clear out the nursery closet and made us months' worth of freezer meals.
But daily life has also been the stuff of our most successful new friendships, too. "Come sit on my porch with iced tea" is my default invitation to new connections now, even though the porch is full of various outside crap and the lawn hasn't been mowed. One day I wandered down the street during a power outage and ended up at an impromptu cookout with some of our neighbors.
Another neighbor came to say hi when we moved in, but our real relationship has been fostered by our dogs and their dog-sitting needs. And one of my favorite memories of July was when I invited myself and one of those grad-school friends on (yet another) neighbor's evening walk, then ended up taking the whole crew to a short meeting down the street with a third new friend.
As cutesy and idyllic as all these moments sound, they have also grown out of fostering comfort with a level of real vulnerability that once felt impossible. Asking people into our drudgery, our messes they didn't make, and our less-than-awesome afternoon hours doesn't come naturally in the consumeristic model of friendship we've been handed.
As long as we think of friendship as a performance of "fun times" (or even of a certain narrow secret-trading brand of vulnerability) rather than a practice of life, it's going to keep feeling hard, because that's a pressure-filled and slightly unnatural way to relate to each other. As long as we are stuck in a narrow, shallow vision of what "hospitality" actually means, we'll get stuck in narrow, shallow versions of friendship.
I won't pretend Nate and I aren't also purely, embarrassingly lucky to know and love all these people. But the more I practice inviting people into my (real) everyday life, the more I notice this is as close as I'm ever going to get to a shortcut around the awkward, confusing dance I used to do, of "making friends" while endlessly dating them.
And I think, like I once felt at that text from my orange-lunch friend, it seems to come as an immense relief to others, too. How often do we want to help but not know what to offer or do? How much closer do you feel to someone once you've emptied their dishwasher or sat on their mismatched lawn chairs of a sweltering evening? How nice is it to hang out with people and not spend money?
When we talk about following Jesus by living simply, acting counterculturally, making radical change, or subverting systems of capitalism and White supremacy, sometimes it starts as small as this.
peace, love, bread, and wine,
Lyndsey
You know I love this, right??