The Most Lawless Relationship
Making friends is like living in the wild American west. Anyone who dares to venture out on this lawless terrain encounters new frontiers of the self.
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Conclusion First: Making friends in childhood is easier than in adulthood. Kids are less governed by rules and expectations and will enter more willingly into new relationship territory. As adults, we become accustomed to relationships bound by literal laws and centuries of implied obligations. We forget how to flow with the uncertainty of a relationship that can be literally anything we want it to be.
A Miracle in My 40s
If you ask Google how to make new friends in adulthood, you get millions of suggestions ranging from somewhat helpful to incredibly lame. The suggestions matter less than the sheer volume of the results. They prove that this is a hard thing to do in adulthood for almost everyone. Yet, somehow, I achieved it.
In my 40s, I made a new friend, and even though it’s been a couple years, it still feels like a miracle. We’re talking a real deal, adult friend who I can text just to say my day was crappy; whose kids I would take in during an emergency; and who sends me an unending number of memes of dubious appropriateness that leave me cackling while I should be writing. I feel a loyalty to this person that I did not expect could be born in this phase of my life.
Launching this relationship was scary because it was still in the Covid era, and everyone was pretty prickly about their personal politics and individual experience of the pandemic. I had recently quit Facebook and was consciously leaving behind my soundbite politics phase that the platform had encouraged. Without the yoke of needing to declare an opinion about everything on social media, I was free to meet people one on one. And once I gave up my 400 or so “friends” on Facebook, I was unbound. And I found something much more valuable. A friend in real life.
I had recently quit Facebook and was consciously leaving behind my soundbite politics phase that the platform had encouraged. Without the yoke of needing to declare an opinion about everything on social media, I was free to meet people one on one. And once I gave up my 400 or so “friends” on Facebook, I was unbound. And I found something much more valuable. A friend in real life.
The Lawless Relationship
Starting this friendship was also scary because friendship is lawless. By the time we get into adulthood, our lives are, often, well-defined and routine. Mine certainly is. Our primary relationships are often with our spouse, our children, and our co-workers. Life just doesn’t really have time for much more.
Good marriages transcend their legal trappings. But no matter how much love you share or how many children you co-parent, you’re still involved in a legal arrangement that’s registered with the state. Marriage is also full of traditions and obligations governed by history, both on a personal level (how your parents did it) and on a societal level (how we expect spouses to behave). The same is true of the parent-child relationship. While the kids are under 18, there are a boatload of legal obligations that parents have to meet. Then, even when they’re considered adults, there are traditional social obligations between parents and children.
But what of friendship? We don’t go down to the county municipal building and pull a permit to become friends. When we fall out with our best mate from high school, there is no mechanism of filing for friend-divorce. (Too bad if they still have your favorite hoodie.) There is no ritual for crossing the threshold from acquaintance to friend or friend to best friend. It just, like, happens.
The Supreme Court has included the world “marriage” over 1,000 times in its written opinions. But “friendship” only appears 200 times—and most of these mentions are about boats with the word in their names or treaties with foreign entities.
There is, truly, no law about what friendship should be. That leaves you in a state of constantly feeling out what’s up between you and some woman you met at your kid’s soccer practice. You’re always wondering things like, “Are we after 10pm texting friends? Should I send this meme with the raunchy joke? Can I ask for a night of childcare…again? Can I share my worst moods? My weird childhood memories? Are we coffee date friends? Or playdate friends?”
Friendship is lawless and scary but when it works, it’s a thrill. To learn how to be better at making friends, we should all take cues from my 14-year-old son.
A Shifting Frontier, a Land of Opportunity
Middle school is the era of the constantly changing friend group. Kids are in different classes every 45 minutes. Their personalities change almost as often. Whole glow ups and growth spurts happen over the 10 weeks of summer. Like the wild American west, the frontier is always shifting. Why can’t aspects of that continue in adulthood?
Kids enter 6th grade with a passel of children they knew in elementary school, many of whom they feel friendly toward just because they’ve been stuck together for a while. But middle school is big (in our case, three times as big as elementary school), and you can lose people because you’re in different sports, academic tracks, or related arts classes. There’s a kid my son knew in elementary who is 100% for certain attending his middle school, but he says he’s never seen him on campus in almost three years. This is a lot like grownup life—you’re in close proximity to a lot of people but maybe not the ones you’d choose for a perfect matchup of interests.
So do what the kids do: bond over whatever is happening around you. My son has a group text that is just kids in his social studies class who all think the teacher is lame for the same reasons. They basically just text each other impressions of the teacher saying the days of the week in her odd southern accent. [“Sundee, Mondee, Tuesdee, etc…”] This is the definition of lawless. These kids are not in the same social groups outside of this class, yet they’ve bonded over the shared trauma of U.S. history taught by a 70-year-old. They’ll probably go their separate ways once the school year ends, but if their paths cross again, they’ll have a starting place for a new type of friendship. Adults have similar people littered across the history of their lives. We, too, can reconnect over old bonds.
Earlier this year, my son was placed in an Advanced Video class with a trio of theater kids. He knew two of them a little bit from elementary school, but the third was new in town. They worked on multiple projects together and had a big time both in and out of class. My son is very much not a theater kid, and yet he fell right in with these boys. Now that the class has ended along with the fall semester, he occasionally finds his way to their table for lunch and plans to join them all in taking men’s chorus in 9th grade. Accidental proximity has yielded intentional proximity. Again, we can do this in adulthood. If you worked on a project or volunteered with someone whose company you really enjoyed, don’t be sad that you don’t see them anymore. Be intentional about hanging out. Maybe it’s lame and the spark is gone. But maybe not.
Then there are the friendships that have ended in their immediacy, yet hang on based on history. My kid has this one guy he was in class with for both Kindergarten and 1st grade. They were the best little buds. It became a tradition for them to always go to each other’s birthday parties. Even as they’ve grown into completely different types of teenagers, they stick with their birthday tradition. It might be one of the only times all year they intentionally hang out. And that’s OK. They don’t need to mourn that there isn’t more to it. The lawlessness of friendship allows for birthday friends. Maybe in adulthood we’d call these people our touchstones—someone we check in with once a year or every two years. They help us remember who we were when we were closer and allow us to see the change in ourselves that we might not see otherwise.
All My Friends
I’ll close with the saddest song I know about what happens to our youthful friendships. There are no parties like the old parties. But even with a “face like a dad and a laughable stand,” there’s still time to make new friends and connect. Embrace the uncertainty. Embrace the thrill. Be lawless.
“As for friendship, that of the animals is without comparison more alive and more constant than that of men. The King Lysimachus’ dog when his master was dead remained obstinately on his bed, refusing to eat or drink; and the day they burned the body he took a run and threw himself into the fire, where he was burned. As did also the dog of a man named Pyrrhus, for he did not budge off his master’s bed after he was dead; and when they took his master away he let himself be carried away with him, and finally sprang into the pyre on which they were burning his master’s body.”— Montaigne
“Aren’t we amazing?” — Margaret the Pug