Friendship, Brick by Brick

The rituals of love, keeping closeness alive, heavenizing

For the past five years, I’ve called my best friend twice a month, a few hours on alternating Sunday evenings. It started when she was balancing a full time job and masters degree and I missed her so much I told her I’d happily sit on a call with her, even if we passed its entirety in silence.

We set up a recurring calendar invite and named it study hall. We might sit there, both catching up on work, reading books, spending time alone together¹. We wanted a system that would create regularity without feeling heavy, something easy to keep when we inevitably felt tired and overburdened by life².

Over time, this rhythm became as natural as brushing my teeth and washing my hair. Study hall today? we’d text on Sunday mornings. We’d check each other’s locations on Find My Friends. Study hall today? It looks like you’re in Vermont. In Japan. In Texas. Yes, study hall. A little earlier today. A little later. I have a barbecue to work around. I’ll be in the car. I’ll be heading to a wedding, coming back from a wedding, recovering from a wedding. I can’t wait to see you. I can’t wait to see you too. As each week ended, I would look ahead on my calendar and think is it a study hall week this week, or will it be the next one?

Though we’d given ourselves an out, once we joined the calls, we both found that we wanted to talk. We talked about how I might improve my Chinese, how I might call my mother more, the excuses that got in the way, about jobs started, ended, continuing, an endless slew of jobs and work in its many guises, too much work, too little, how both could be terrible in their own specific ways, what work promised, what it demanded, what function it should play, how it meant different things at different points in our lives, one thing at twenty-two and another at thirty and another thing, still, in the years that hadn’t happened yet.

We talked about people, the million and one ways they surprised and disappointed us, broke and healed us, what they meant to us and how all of it would change, how change was the only thing that was guaranteed, how hard that was, that gap between knowing and doing, how knowing the difficulty was coming didn’t exempt us from experiencing it. We talked about the distance between head truths and heart truths and I cried and she cried and I cried again. I reached for tissues, apologized for crying (to which she’d say “jar! no apologies allowed!”), apologized for apologizing, shared the worst and best parts of myself and laughed and laughed, until the crying and laughing were one and the same. We hung up but not before saying I love you³.

…

I believe that in its most basic form, friendship is about making the effort to show up in another person’s life. It is formed in the giving of time and attention, the asking of how are you doing, what are you going through and caring about the answer. This is no small thing when life demands so much of us at all times. Love is the act of caring enough to show up over and over again, regardless.

“Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.”

―Simone Weil

Some theories of friendship revolve around time spent together. They suggest that beyond a certain threshold, the relationship will reach a new level of depth⁴. I think the truth is more nuanced, that maybe closeness is about the density of experience, how far you travel in the time spent together, the depth of topics broached, how much of yourself you’re willing to give, the tender, vulnerable, ugly parts, the willingness to do this even if it might not be reciprocated.

I think that the best friendships are about the willingness to let another person witness you when you are not at your best. You drop your weapons, saying, this is who I really am, just another animal with a soft underbelly, nothing invincible, just a creature that often falls short of its own expectations⁵. Will you take me into your life regardless?

…

A few weeks ago, I ran with a friend to Radio Bakery at 7 a.m.. It wasn’t a long run, only four miles or so, and we’d run much further together before, but it was the first time in a long time we’d hung out one on one. I missed her.

It was pouring rain and we both hadn’t slept enough but we insisted it wasn’t that bad once we started moving. We ran down the east side to Queensboro bridge, talking about how long it had been, how busy life had been, how finally, finally, we were getting to do this thing we’d been planning for weeks. We talked about relationships, their beauty and difficulty and utter necessity, the Gottman Institute, therapy, how we talked to ourselves, how we wished to talk to ourselves, how we felt about running, past, present, future, all of its seasons, what it meant now and what it might come to mean later.

We talked about perfectionism and the desire for control in our lives, how sometimes it was a long conversation with a friend that loosened its grip, restored perspective the same way a walk after a long work day spent inside restored perspective, that simple act of stepping into fresh air and witnessing the endless upward stretch of sky.

As we crossed into LIC, she told me about a recurring hangout she had with another friend called heavenizing. They had a vegan dim sum place they liked to visit, every couple of weeks, a place where they could sit for hours and just talk and laugh and cry together. It sounded a lot like study hall. She called it heavenizing because to her, it felt like the closest thing to heaven, that in that sustained act of friendship, the dim sum place became a kind of portal to heaven, that engaging in friendship, in many ways, felt like an encounter with the divine.

We got to Radio Bakery and, as expected for 7 a.m. on a rainy Sunday, there was no line. We split a pistachio croissant and smoked salmon focaccia and they were good but what was more interesting was the long conversation we had about love, both love gained and love lost, and how sometimes love could lead to chess and mentorship, acts of generosity, the desire to get better at something, the beauty of trying.

We were standing at the front of the store, trying to make the pastries last as long as possible, and suddenly I was struck by how miraculous it all was. That a friend/coworker had told me about a run club, that I had shown up, that a friendly woman led the pace group I often ran with, how one day, we struck up a conversation about desperation dinners, both laughed about canned tuna on pretzels, how that conversation led to another one about work, another about burnout, another about relationships, how it was all one person taking a leap and another taking a leap and then we were leaping together. How all of that led to our Radio Bakery morning, the rain streaming down our faces as we ran, how it wasn’t really about the bakery or the run, how those things were just a vehicle for spending time together. When it was obvious that we were shivering from the combination of rain and air conditioning and both needed to go back to sleep, we walked to the G train together and got on. It was blessedly heated. We thought of the long showers and warm beds and all of the good things that lay ahead.

1. To this day, this remains one of the most important parts of my relationship with my partner! We often sit on the couch watching something together (usually a British quiz show, University Challenge, anyone?) and doing our own thing, periodically looking up to try and answer one of the questions.

2. Take it from someone who’s been going to 6-10 weddings per year for the past five years

3. These calls quelled my fears about leaving college—that we’d be living in different places, might be living in different places for the rest of our lives. I was terrified life would be what happened in between the calls, something to be summarized instead of lived together. The calls were a way of creating a shared life, keeping a twelve year conversation going, bi-monthly call by bi-monthly call. For me, there is no truer act of love.

4. To be clear, I don’t think that quantity hurts. In many cases, quantity will naturally lead to depth as you’re exposed to someone over a longer period of time which naturally increases the likelihood you’ll encounter them in a variety of contexts, critically contexts in which they’re not at they’re best. And being there for them when they’re not at their best and showing them that they’re still just as deserving of love is how trust builds, bit by bit.

5. I have a theory that this is why trips often accelerate bonding, because you share so many moments of the day together and inevitably there will be a moment when the other person is not at their best. Maybe it’ll be in the morning before they’d had a chance to armor up for the day. Maybe it’ll be at night when all the walls have been worn away. The key, I think, is encountering someone in a variety of contexts in which you can experience them more holistically, in the complexity that is inherent to being human.