Sixty-Five: Friends Reunion (05-28-2024)
This past weekend was 2024's much awaited Memorial Day Weekend. By most measures. it's the first holiday of the year for Americans. We were blessed with clear skies and cathartic heat, and three days free of life's monotony. Summer has started.
My girlfriend remarked at how uncrowded the city was this weekend. The usual expectation around any summer holiday or weekend is that America's founding city will be overwhelmed with tourists, large Iowans and Ohioans taking pictures of colonial banal-itecture and generally enjoying the Disney World adjacencies of a walkable city. The likely explanation for the lack of abundant crowds is that most Americans spend Memorial Day Weekend at home or at the beach, if possible. The year's first long weekend is cause for relaxation and avoidance of travel plans and homesickness. So America's professional middle class is not in Philadelphia for the holiday, but at home, barbecuing.
This is an assessment of the class of people who take trips to Philadelphia- middle class, suburban, probably white Americans. Enough disposable income to vacation, but only enough to visit Philly. They're also older, with toddler to teenage children to drag along and enrich with colonial histories. These people are not yet my peers, I'm too young to plan elaborate trips and I've no kids to torture. My peers spend Memorial Day Weekend among friends.
I live with my girlfriend, so to say I did not spend Memorial Day Weekend with friends is untrue, but I did not spend it socializing, with anyone I do not already see on a regular basis. I did spend the weekend out of the house, enjoying the city and weather, and reveling in time spent with someone I love and away from something I hate (a job). An old friend of mine (1) was in town, and we didn't get a chance to cross paths. I kick myself a little, for not pushing myself a little harder (after ten miles of walking, could I really go out at night to drink and converse?), so that I could catch a friend before the opportunity slips away, for months or longer.
Friendship as an employed adult is hard, and requires an intention and effort that it did not require as a student or minor. In school, friends are always there, by force, and in college, they're always nearby and relatively unburdened. As an adult, friends are far away, very busy, and tired. B.D. McClay did a fantastic write-up about friendship in literature, in part inspiring me here, but I want to discuss a more culturally central way of portraying friendship- not as a product of childhood and a tenuous relationship that serves as a vicarious way to re-live childhood, but as a constant, a physical element within life that is resilient to change and challenge, but does not truly exist. This is the friendship of Sex and the City, Seinfeld, Broad City, and countless other pieces of popular media.
I think TV friendships are more telling than literary friendships, not because they expose some greater truth or are more accurate portrayals of adult social life than books (2), but because they reveal our anxieties- they are idealized, fabricated relationships between people whose behaviors would not realistically sustain friendship. My girlfriend and I often remark at how insane Carrie is on Sex and the City, and how poorly Miranda is treated, and yet they all remain friends. The catharsis in watching TV friends is their ability to be busy, irresponsible, and sometimes mean to one another and still remain friends. We're sold a version of city life (3) where friends go out for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and party weekly (or daily), run errands together (GOAT way to hang out), and things remain this way well into the characters' 30s and up.
I often feel like I am missing out on those sorts of relationships- granted, I do run into people I know when out in the city, though the friendships there are limited and the interactions kept intentionally brief. I often wonder what I would do if my closest friends did live in the city- would I bike to them? Would we go out for breakfast or grab a Saturday lunch? Or would they be busy every weekend, or would we all be too caught up in the routine of life to make the effort to see each other? I often trap myself into seeing relationships as one-sided, that it's my fault and my fault alone that I don't see my friends, and that through only my own effort will we become closer and more frequent.
When I was early in college, through the beginning and middle of COVID, I spent a lot of time with my friends. It was a near guarantee that weekends would be occupied with one or more friends. I'd bike to different parts of the city, borrow friends' and roommates' cars, smoke in various neighborhoods and on various stoops, drink a lot of beers and liquor, and get into the various criminal and noncriminal mischiefs befitting an underclassmen. At the time my friends were either not in college (gap years) or were in limited schooling resulting from the pandemic, as I was. I had no real responsibilities, a part-time job so easy it'll be automated in a few years' time, and just enough self-pity to engage in reckless behavior that older, responsible me can look back on fondly. I also look back jealously- even accounting for the changes in responsibility and self-respect- I cannot accept that I spend less time around people I consider friends. I'm envious of the people I see out in the parks of the city, sitting and smoking with friends, the groups of bikes locked outside a rowhome and the sounds of small-group socializing inside. I want to be free, spontaneous, and unburdened, able to see my peers and waste days away.
If my life, which feels now defined entirely by my daily professional tasks and quarterly professional accomplishments, if I felt that I was exceeding the quality of life that I expected, and was fulfilled in some way, I wouldn't feel such envy of those who are more social. If I was professionally successful, my time spent working turning into rewards beyond a livable paycheck, I could excuse my lack of time and energy for friends. However, I make just enough, and work just enough, that I can feel the shame of not using my remaining time and energy, and disposable income, on friends. It feels like my fault that I don't get out enough, I can't even blame my boss.
I have to realize now that my desire is not for some great social cataclysm to occur, whereby all my friends and acquaintances suddenly decide they want to act out Seinfeld with me everyday at the diner, but for friendship to be effortless. Planning, coordinating, finding engaging things to do, budgeting, accounting for differed tastes, the sub-tasks involved in being friends with someone as an adult are tiring in of themselves, with diminishing returns. Or they aren't, and I am a pitiful miser who would rather have friend who do it all for him.
A lot of internet writers have discussed the decay of interpersonal relationships. Social media has degrading peoples' ability to socialize, and political polarization has irritated everyone to the point of social distrust and withering of otherwise valuable social institutions. I'll add to those issues a shifting in taste away from otherwise usefully neutral third places, young Americans don't eat at diners or engage in the kind of casual shopping that provide low-stakes opportunities for socializing. I have tried inviting my friends along on a trip to the store, they don't bite. I have a better success rate for inviting friends to diner, but there's geographical factors there.
McClay makes brief mention of how long friendships can become plagued by their length, becoming trapped in their past, looking back on what was instead of what is ahead. I am here making this mistake- relating my friendships to what they were in times of different circumstance rather than what they are now and what they can be in the future. I will admit I often imagine how my friendships will improve- once my friend settles in New York, I'll take Amtrak to see him (or will I?), once my friend and his girlfriend move in together in the city, I'll bike to see them (or will I?), once my brother moves into his college house in West Philly, I'll bring him housewarming gifts and spend time there (I actually will do this, very little doubt). Once all my friends settle into their lives, the time to see each other will emerge, I tell myself, we're all just in a period of change as we graduate and find our jobs and places.
I don't have a resolution to friendship woes, or any advice to give. I never was great at making friends, though I don't think I'll lose any, only see them less. I trust the bonds I have. I'm not starved of love, I have a girlfriend and never feel lonely or unfulfilled with her. I crave more time with my platonic friends, and I refuse to believe that I have to learn to live with a yearning. I need to find a way, I just haven't yet. I'll be romantic in believing that the Hollywood portrayals of friendship, however aspirational they were written and fabricated to be, can be achieved in some form.
(1) From high school, the last easy time to make friends. Most of my friendships are people I met in high school. Blame COVID for extinguishing my friend-making in college, but it was mostly my own pretentiousness and lack of trying.
(2) McClay covers mostly childhood friendships, for clarity.
(3) I will avoid diving into "the city-as-character" writing, which plagued my undergrad years, though this angle is important to consider for each mentioned media.