the crucible of friendship

This past summer, I watched the cringe comedy film Friendship, starring Tim Robinson and Paul Rudd. The story follows Craig, a mid-level corporate nice guy with an unfortunate lack of social awareness. Craig quickly forms a close friendship with his charismatic neighbor, Austin, until Craig’s zealous enthusiasm for this friendship gradually blossoms into obsession, and, finally, a profoundly uncomfortable attempt at a joke at one of Austin’s house parties. This squirmy joke leads to the demise of Craig and Austin’s friendship but also ends up destroying Craig’s entire life. Since watching the movie, I have frequently reflected on its lesson.

The story seemed to be a warning, a representation of that miserable tension between our desire for intimate friendships and our constant attempts to mask it so others don’t deem us insane. Make no mistake: Craig is not the kind of guy I or any sane person would want to be friends with. But when I looked beyond his inappropriate, narcissistic behavior, his sociopathic tendencies, and his blatant neglect of his family in pursuit of this new and exciting friendship, I empathized a great deal with his desire for—and failure to find—real connection in a friend. His character arc (or lack thereof) seemed to ask whether the adult friendships of our time are meant to endure, or if they are doomed to perish from the beginning.

It’s important to note that I’m not talking about the superficial friendships we form at work or in school, where periodic, surface-level conversations are enough to fill the social fulfillment tank. These kinds of relationships, in their superficial glory, add immense value to our lives, and not everybody needs or wants to be one of your best friends. But is life truly enriching when our friendships are composed only of these shallow bonds? Do we not also want close friends who will stick around through thick and thin, who are more consistent and reliable than your good-humored coworker who shares your political views? I’ve sought those kinds of friends throughout my entire life, and I’ve recently begun to notice patterns in some of my past friendships that really concern me.

I examined this problem very closely during my last semester at BYU. That painfully depleting final stretch of undergrad left me overwhelmed, overworked, and inexpressibly sad. Grieving an era that was coming to a close, I was processing the loss of friendships that once meant a lot to me. In one session with my therapist, I admitted that I was worried I had completely lost faith in my peers—in their ability to care about other people, and specifically in their ability to be good friends. I even insisted that I would sooner undergo a religious faith crisis again rather than navigate the more acute crisis of faith in friends and people. Losing faith in religion invited a plethora of reconstructive opportunities—meaning and purpose shifted but were never entirely lost. However, losing faith in friends felt less like a moment of reconstructive opportunities and more like the final blow to meaning as a whole. I was also beginning to see some of the first headlines about people outsourcing friendship to AI with deadly consequences. It was a horrific revelation to me that we had become so bad at friendship that the most desperate and lonely among us were finding solace in technology instead. In the depths of my cynicism, I realized that my concerns deserved more thought and reflection, so I went reading. 

In the past year, a host of news outlets, including The New Yorker, The New York Times, and The Atlantic, published op-eds on friendship with their own diagnoses and solutions for the loneliness epidemic allegedly plaguing Gen-Z. It’s not lost on me, however, that my parents don’t really have any friends. My aunts and uncles don’t really, either. In fact, most adults that I know seem to have an incredibly hard time maintaining friendships in general, so I’m not totally convinced it’s a problem unique to Gen-Z, but rather a problem specific to the transition from adolescence to adulthood. Many people that I’ve talked to in Provo have expressed frustration with what they feel is the prevalence of one-sided friendships in college. Having experienced these myself, I empathize a great deal with that frustration. Reading these articles, discussing these concepts with peers, and experiencing my own mistreatment in unhealthy friendships has ultimately left me wondering where we’re collectively going wrong with friendships, and, perhaps more importantly, what we can actually do to fix it. 

There are a variety of normative factors that complicate friendships in young adulthood: people grow apart, both physically and emotionally; interests and values change as frontal lobes concretize; the romantic and platonic go head-to-head with marriages and significant others almost unfailingly winning out, especially in Mormonism; early career-building efforts demand more and more of your time; having children often further deprioritizes friendships, relegating those relationships to a half-hearted afterthought at best and a nagging, unnecessary burden at worse; or, simply, someone can decide they do not want to be your friend anymore. As one author puts it, “The wonder, and the curse, of friendship is choice,” and the choice to end a friendship is thankfully—and sadly—always there. These are big and institutional factors that we may not have much control over. Some are oppressive, but others are important. As a married person, my spouse is my top priority, but that doesn’t mean she’s my only priority, nor am I hers. Investing some energy and attention into platonic relationships takes the burden of overeliance and codependency off of your romantic relationship. Attention is the currency of our time, though, and many feel too drained by other demands to take the necessary time and energy to still prioritize friendships. However, I believe that there are actionable, concrete efforts we can make to maintain our friendships and see them thrive, even in spite of these forces.

To begin, I believe much of our lack of good friendships finds its roots in our contemporary obsession with nonchalance and ironic detachment. At our worst, we suffer from a sweaty, desperate, debilitating need to be cool and be seen as such by our peers. We seem to be terrified of being cringe. Taking great pains to never identify with Craig, we find safety in performing aloofness for one another instead. But this pervasive and poisonous performance stifles our ability to genuinely care for each other. It takes a relinquishment of the fear of being perceived as melodramatic to regularly tell a friend you love them and appreciate having them in your life. It requires a certain level of energy mirroring, empathy, and attention to have a conversation with a friend going through a hard time. It takes active listening skills to hear and validate their pain. It takes sincere humility to recognize when you’ve hurt a friend’s feelings, and accountability to apologize for it. Above all, it takes being cringeworthy on occasion. 

All of these things require vulnerability—slowing down, opening up, and being present with another person. But it seems many of us are incapable of vulnerability because of our attachment to always having fun, our perpetual need to chill out and look good. I’ve had friends share suicide hotlines and mental health statistics to their Instagram story before ever contacting me during a period of mental distress, even if they knew I was struggling. These empty signals of virtue are easier to accomplish than the more meaningful and necessary work of offering direct support to friends who aren’t well. If we were clearer with our friends, in words and actions, about how important they are to us, they’d feel our love more immediately during their own periods of difficulty, and would hopefully return the favor when we ourselves are struggling.

When it comes to the topic of spending time together, it seems that asking a friend to hang out is an effort that many feel is too much to bear. In my own non-reciprocal friendships, I’ve been exhausted by having to carry all of the weight of setting the times and dates to hang out. I’d find myself always ensuring the plans “make it out of the group chat,” as some call this phenomenon, knowing that if I stopped being the initiator and planner, some of my friends would drift away. If you or your friend group regularly leaves the burden of planning on the shoulders of one individual, then initiate something with that person from time to time. You’ll be surprised at how much it may mean to them to be relieved of that responsibility. Not only does it unburden them, but it also tells them that you care enough about them to take up the effortful inconvenience of asking them to do something with you. Friends deserve the security of feeling as though you want them around. It’ll be hard for them to feel that way when they’re always initiating and you never are. That imbalance can trigger their fear of being perceived as clingy or desperate, a fear only exacerbated in a society smitten by nonchalance.

Ultimately, I think modern adult friendships would thrive if we cared less about how we are perceived by others and more about who we are and what we do for each other. I have watched people struggle to negotiate between those two paradigms—action and image—in the leftist spaces I’ve occupied in Provo. These spaces often pride themselves on emotional intelligence and empathy. Many of them have done an admirable job carving out micro-communities for those who are excluded and don’t fit well in the homogeneity of Provo’s and BYU’s mainstream culture. However, these circles are not immune to this kind of performativity of care, and they often risk becoming like the very culture they rightfully critique—dogmatic, ideologically pure, and exclusionary. 

In those spaces, I’ve seen activists champion the values of community and friendship while being unempathetic and uninvolved friends. Even the most well-intentioned, good-hearted people can insist upon socially beneficial political causes while forgetting or, in the worst cases, outright refusing to check on one another. Perhaps some feel that doing so is an act of self-preservation, but I think it’s a deeply misguided one. Effortfully maintaining friendships is itself an act of political resistance in an increasingly atomized world. I’ve noticed that many leftist circles in Provo and at BYU too often get lost in the weeds of signifiers of status and appearance (such as gatekept music tastes, clothing styles, and niche aesthetics) while neglecting to foster real, supportive networks of friendships. This particular genre of vanity supplants the work of community building with alluring, reassuring, yet ultimately hollow, visuals. Friendship isn’t about looking good. It’s about being good, specifically to those with whom we choose to commune. If we aren’t trying to be good friends, then we are failing to realize our liberation from the powerful institutional forces working hard to make us feel detached from one another.

Everyone is going to fail at this from time to time. Perhaps in an ideal world, friends would be unfailingly reliable superhumans capable of supporting you in all milestones and challenges, standing the unruly tests of time and distance with robotic perfection. But honestly, I am profoundly disinterested in having perfect friends. I don’t want flawless servants who fulfill my needs constantly at the cost of their own wellness and self-actualization. I am much more interested in realistic, reciprocal friendships. I want the kind of bonds in which we grow and change together, giving ourselves and others the grace to make mistakes and the opportunities to apologize and forgive. I want friends who are consistent in trying as much as they are consistent in failing. I think most of us want that, and I think most of us deserve it, too.

I have long believed that all we have is each other—ordinary people trying, sometimes failing, but never stopping in their efforts to be good friends to each other. I ultimately decided to stick with the religion of my upbringing almost entirely because of my faith in the divinity of ordinary people. Against this divinity, there’s a growing, widespread attitude that we do not owe each other anything. This attitude has normalized selfishness, insensitivity, and inhumanity, and the worst part is that it’s not even true. We owe each other a lot, and our closest friendships ought to be zones in which that “owing” truly flourishes. I worry that the self-care pendulum has swung too far into egocentrism. Spending all of your attention currency on yourself won’t make you happy in the long run. Putting effort into our friendships—even if we are exhausted, as everyone is—is also a form of self-care. We should not be doing things for each other with the sole intent of getting a return on investment. But we are failing to be good friends if we think that not keeping the score means never asking ourselves if we are bringing as much value, support, and love to our friends’ lives as we should be. While a renunciation of effort in friendships may make life feel easier, it also makes it a heck of a lot more lonely. If you feel antagonized by these assertions, I invite you to practice some introspection about your effort in friendships. 

On one hand, it can be a relief that some friendships only last for a season or two. On the other hand, I have found myself devastated by friendships that felt sincere, reliable, and lasting, yet ultimately fell victim to apathy, neglect, and, in the worst cases, abuse. If friendships forged in Provo are mere stepping stones designed only to get us through college and on to the next best thing, then what is the point in investing in them at all? Why funnel time, energy, trust, and care into friendships that won’t survive beyond the towering Rocky Mountains of this collegiate blip in eternity? We want to create warm college memories to look back on with heartfelt nostalgia, but do we actually believe that the relationships formed in this chapter of life shouldn’t last? The Mormon in me still believes that all relationships––not just those officiated over a temple altar––are eternal, and should be treated as such. Our scriptures tell us that the “same sociality which exists among us here will exist among us [after mortality].” The old adage says that friends come and go, but our theology declares instead that they ought to come and stay.

Are most friendships just not that deep, as the online cynics (and some of my past friends) have insisted? Perhaps, to them, in this disenchanted postmodern world with competing forces vying for our attention, it is too much to ask that we care deeply for our friends and show it consistently. But I worry that such a dismissive attitude only perpetuates the idea that friendships are thoroughly contingent and ultimately disposable. The harsh, essential truth—which I have seen too many resist—is that being a good friend requires mourning with those that mourn and comforting those that stand in need of comfort. That will sometimes require difficult, time-consuming emotional labor on our part. It may call for sticking by a friend even during seasons where they are less enjoyable to be around. It requires patience, long-suffering, and curiosity, a willingness to step into another person’s life in an attempt to understand them as much as you understand yourself. True friendships like this are perhaps even covenantal. Are you willing to be that kind of friend to other people? 

I pray I will not spend the rest of my life searching for these kinds of friends and failing, as Virginia Woolf writes, to “reconcile myself to the fact that all human relations are bound to be unsatisfactory.” For the first time in my life, I want Virginia Woolf to be wrong. I want to believe that we can be satisfactory friends to each other. In fact, I believe I’ve picked up a few of those friends here and there, and they have completely changed my life. They have proven to me that we cannot successfully survive or find lasting happiness in isolation and unabashed superficiality. If the wonder and curse of friendship really is choice, then there are a variety of decisions you can make about the kind of friend you choose to be. Regardless of what those decisions actually are, I hope they are at least thoughtful and intentional—made not only with your own best interest in mind, but also with careful consideration for the peculiar, special souls you call your friends.