A few weeks ago, my husband, Anand, and I were texting back and forth about this essay: I’m a Working Mom in My 40s and an Introvert. I Have More, Sweeter, and Deeper Friendships Than Ever in My Life. Here’s How I Do It. The title alone felt brave.
In a moment when so much writing is (rightly) focused on loneliness, Anya Kamenetz is doing the opposite: sharing how she is the opposite of lonely.
I was delighted to have Anya and Anand join me for a live conversation about adult friendship: why it’s gotten harder, what it takes to get going, and how to start practicing making friends again.
Here are ten takeaways from our conversation:
1. This is not about having plans on a Friday night. Friendship matters because so much of what we are living through right now is simply better held in community: climate anxiety, politics, parenting, grief, aging. The real question isn’t whether you have people to hang out with, it’s who you have to call when life becomes heavy.
2. Social media is not actually friendship. The world is loud and overwhelming, and retreat can feel tempting. Social media and podcasts step in as substitutes. They give us a sense of company without requiring much of us. But when things get tough, the move isn’t to scroll longer. It’s to text someone.
3. One sign of friendship is how you answer the question “How are you?” With strangers and acquaintances, “How are you?” gets a polite response. With a friend, you get the truth.
4. We changed women’s roles without changing the social workload. Over the past half century, women moved into public and professional life, but we didn’t have an answer to what and who does all that invisible work in the social realm. It certainly doesn’t disappear. Someone still has to coordinate plans, host, follow up, and keep relationships alive, and women tend to carry more of that mental load. We need to expand to allowing and encouraging men to practice these skills too. And we don’t have to wait until adulthood to learn this. Talk to Your Boys is one of my favorite guides for teaching boys how to have a rich, connected life to and with others. You can watch my conversation with the authors here.
5. Friendship takes time and effort. Making friends isn’t just about having space in your calendar; it’s about learning how to host, how to listen, how to repair, how to coordinate. These are learnable, practicable skills.
6. When anything can be anything, we have to make the rules ourselves. We’ve lost many of the shared rhythms that once synchronized our lives: Sunday mass, Friday night Shabbat dinner, civic groups. Friendship and community, in part, have become a coordination problem. When you create a clear container and a clear purpose, you take the guesswork out. People relax when they know what they’re walking into. (A similar theme, mind you, to my Live with Amanda Litman this week.)
7. Introverts can learn a lot from extroverts and vice versa. Anya is a raging introvert, and she writes that she learns from the extroverts. But the opposite is also true. When I interviewed people for The Art of Gathering, I was surprised by how many hosts shared with me that they self-identified as introverted. One woman told me, “I don’t know about everyone else, but I’m uncomfortable at most gatherings that I go to. So I create the gatherings that I wish existed in the world.”
8. What the heck do we do about lack of reciprocity? There’s an epidemic of folks perma-guesting, last-minute bailing and ghosting. There are simply too many last-minute opt-outs. Friendship works like a tennis match. The ball has to go back and forth. When care and effort only flow one way, the relationship or the group slowly loses its footing. I teach a simple way to diagnose this in our GROUP HELP Session on thriving group life, which you can watch here. (And, Litman advises to host anyway without any expectation of return.)
9. Friendships will have moments of friction. We can get hurt in our friendships and decide to just give up or exit. But, as I know from conflict resolution, groups that can’t move through conflict don’t last. Anya shared a gathering with women she deeply disagrees with and still knows one thing for sure: they’re there for each other.
10. Friendship across life stages takes flexibility and is totally possible. Allison P Davis wrote a piece in The Cut in September 2023 that asked a fundamental question: Our friendship survived bad dates, illness, marriage, fights. Why can’t it survive your baby? When life stages change, friendships don’t disappear because people stop caring, they disappear when the old ways of spending time stop working. Redesign the hang, and begin stretching to your friend’s new identity and – perhaps – your own. I share more practical ways to do this in my piece on intergenerational gatherings and in my recent GROUP HELP Session.
All of this comes back to practice. A huge part of what Anya does is lots of small things over time. Not grand gestures or perfection.
So here’s a simple place to start: look through your contacts and text two people you haven’t checked in on in a while. Ask someone you enjoy at work to get coffee. Invite someone for a walk. Host before you feel ready.
As always,
Priya
