what can we expect from friendship?

some questions

Paul Ganguin, Fleurs dan une coupe, 1901

I take K to Nari for his birthday and we end up in a Korean karaoke lounge with bisexual light. One bartender has micro-bangs, the other is wearing a hoodie with a bunny tail sewn onto the back. This is like Cloud Atlas, K says. We’ve known each other for almost 10 years.

I’ve been thinking lately that friendship to me is a term that encompasses everything—the familial, the romantic, the nostalgic. My friendships have helped me understand what I never liked about dating, which is that I don’t want to get to know people unless I’m going to keep knowing them. I remember being 18, a boy trying to pitch me on the concept of a “summer fling,” and being like… But I want to get married. I mean, probably not to you, but what’s the point of dating if we aren’t trying to be together forever? I was way too serious about everything. I have matching tattoos with three of my friends.

I’ve been wondering lately: what requests are we allowed to make of our friends? And what does it mean to really live those promises? Everyone loves the idea of intimacy, but not everyone loves the compromises that continued intimacy requires. Like, well, I’d like to live closer to you, but the rent is better in this neighborhood. Or, I know we were hanging out every week, but now I have a boyfriend I love, and he doesn’t really like you.

I think that relationships become good when we work on them continuously for a long period of time. Friends don’t exist just to make you feel like you have friends when you need them. There’s the work of maintenance, there’s the need to be there at the birthdays and engagements and breakups and dinners, there are the conversations that have to be had, negotiations and renegotiations.

You need some shared philosophy of what constitutes a meaningful life to sustain friendship over time. Why live here? Why work in this industry? What are we afraid of? What are we hopeful about? Do you know me, see me? Will you tell me when I’m wrong?

*

If I had to advocate for the benefits of friendship, I would say: you get to cry more, and you get to have more enemies. I’m constantly crying over good first kisses, therapy sessions, weddings, breakups, every kind of loss and gain that matters to the people I care about. And I wouldn’t say I’m personally vindictive but I hold extreme and persistent grudges against people who’ve wronged my friends.

I’m at a Bedstuy bar with D and she says to me, Well of course there’s something essentially romantic about friendship.

Friendship is romantic. I love to tell my friends I love them. There have been people I’ve dated or at least considered dating who’ve had a problem with that. Like, why do you go around telling people who aren’t me that you love them? My heart sunk when I heard those words. In my opinion, being opposed to platonic intimacy is the same kind of offence as “not getting” poetry. We may keep talking, but there is evidently nothing more to talk about.

*

I live in an “utopian enclave” filled with people who’ve known me for a very long time. We have similar backgrounds, similar worldviews. My friends tend to be talkative, excitable, read a lot, walk a lot. They understand my references, the context in which I transitioned from adolescent to adult. It’s true I’m in a bubble, but a bubble is also a kind of reprieve. I have chosen to seek out and keep close people who help me answer the question of how a person should be.

We don’t get to have so many real friends. If you want to see a friend at least once every two weeks, and you do four one-on-one hangouts a week, that’s a maximum of eight friends. But who really needs more than eight friends?

Relationships are insular worlds. The deeper the relationship, the more incomprehensible the world is to others. You have shared jokes, shared memories, you keep tunneling under.

*

I love you because you’re familiar in ways that remind me of my parents, but also because you’re new and strange. You have objects in your home I do not recognize. You like songs that I find confusing. You’re from a state I’ve never been to. We met on the Internet. We met at a group house. We met at yoga class. We are drawn to each for reasons that are both mysterious to me and entirely obvious.

*

Can you water my plants while I’m gone? Will you go to Los Angeles with me? Do you mind if my dog comes along? Do you like this dress better, or that one? Did you read the article I emailed you? Will you move to San Francisco? Can I pay for dinner this time, and you can get it next time? Can we go see the three hour long movie? What do you think I should text him? Do you think she’s mad at me? I’ll see you tonight at the party, right? This is boring, should we leave and get a drink? I’m sorry I didn’t reply to your text, can I call you? Are you mad at me? Why did you tell her that? Do you think we’ll be close like this forever?

what's up with modern love?

just asking

Shannon Lucy Cartier, Sex After Death, 2019

Girls on my TikTok feed are making “first date series” where they go on 30 or 50 first dates. The conceit of the series, obviously, is that there’s not gonna be enough content if you meet your soulmate right away. Luckily, no one seems to.

Everyone’s on Hinge or Tinder but no one seems to like it. Multiple male friends have told me they don’t want to move to SF because “dating is impossible.” But everyone in New York reports that “no one’s serious about dating until they’re like, 35.” Everyone’s apparently in a situationship and no one enjoys them. Hookup culture is a thing of the past, but casual dating culture isn’t. Apparently we’re not having sex anymore?

20+ years after Carrie Bradshaw announced the death of romance in Manhattan, I have to wonder: is love really over? Surely not, because romance seems to be all anyone I know talks about. After AGI, that is. I meet up with a subscriber at Bar Crudo and she asks me if there are any fictional couples I admire. Having just completed a streak of 19th century Marriage Novels, I admit that all the fictional couples I can think of are sad. She brings up Never Let Me Go. It’s funny, because a friend had just brought up the same book early that day… in the context of a potential apocalypse. Apocalypse and monogamy: the two conversations I can’t seem to get away from. Childhood OCD primed me for a lifetime spent amongst the rationalists—nothing feels as comforting to me as a good theory about the impending end of the world.

The infamous chart! I shudder at the thought of what the 2024 version looks like…

I keep repeating to people who ask: meet people through your friends. Not easy advice to give in a time when people have smaller friend groups, when we “look into people’s eyes through Twitter.” Match Group (owner of OkCupid, Hinge, Tinder, Match.com, among others) has become responsible for everyone’s dating lives simultaneously. I remember being obsessed with Christian Rudder’s blog OkStats in high school. I found it so charming, the idea that you could look at data and come to conclusions about love. Vegans give better blowjobs. More people will message you if you’re polarizing than if you’re universally likable. I was so seduced by the promise that if we just got a little bit more information, we could find everyone their pitch perfect partner…

There’s this joke I like to make, which is that everyone around me is trying to solve physics or intelligence or Something Grand and I’m just trying to solve heterosexual relations. Don’t begrudge me for believing the latter is the harder problem. Every week The Cut finds a new woman to tell us she knows how to have it all so we can laugh at her. But I don’t want my husband to have three other girlfriends and I don’t want him to die 15 years before me. I’m the kind of girl who maintains an iPhone Notes list of all the animals that mate for life… but isn’t that every woman you know? If women are pragmatic, it’s only because they’re forced to be.

If I could go on 30 Hinge dates for the bit, I would. You all will have to excuse me for my laziness. I think about how my friends have met their partners: at a psychedelic retreat in Jamaica. Twitter DMs. Over Facebook Message requests after they met briefly in Japan while he was shooting some kind of promotional video. At a friend’s Christmas party. First day of college. Job interview. Because her group house had geographical proximity to his group house. A hundred fortuitous encounters mediated by the humans around us.

The idealist in me would like to say that being ambitious about platonic love is how you start to be ambitious about everything else, including romantic love. The cynic in me points out there are a thousand and one articles telling people that they should have better friendships and very few telling them how. Just hang out, just touch grass. People are told they should have better ways of meeting people, but practically, they don’t.

When I was 19 the older guy (haha) I was dating told me that he didn’t think that people were biologically designed for serial monogamy. And I’ve come to agree: it doesn’t seem normal, natural, to pour everything into someone for two and a half years, and then stop talking to them afterwards. It doesn’t even seem natural to do that for two months. But again, we seem to have found no better way of dating than attaching and detaching until the right person is found.

I’d like to be a matchmaker but my early experiments suggest that might be substantially harder than writing a Substack. There are a million reasons two people might get not get along and one reason they will (pheromones). People on Twitter post descriptions of why love must be dead… “My friend, 33f, blonde and makes 150k per year at her email job, can’t find anyone to date her…” The divorce rate is going down but so is the birth rate. In 2016, women in San Francisco County became first time mothers at the age of 31.9. (New York and Marin County were second and third, respectively.) Accelerationism is the word of the moment, but when it comes to settling down we seem to take our time.