On "Big Friendship"

My friendships have been transforming and shifting, sometimes out of pace with my own personal growth and identity. Self-awareness can be painful that way.

Friendship has been in the slowcooker of my lil cerebrona self lately. I read Big Friendship: How We Keep Each Other Close by Aminatou Sow and Ann Friedman. They cited Aristotle, who said that friends hold up mirrors to one another, meaning that we see each through the reflections refracted by one another. For example, you get complimented on your pizza hair clip, and remember, yes I am fashion INCARNATE.

However, friendships can also hold mirrors to refract versions of ourselves we’ve outgrown or no longer feel connected to, and that’s where the cognitive dissonance starts to set in.

In the Atlantic article, It’s Your Friends Who Break Your Heart, it discusses the correlation in how the older we become, the least likely we are to maintain close friendships. Friendships both in degrees of intimacy and the volume of friendships sharply decline once we reach our late 20’s. There’s no one answer as to why.

The main reasons are the number of responsibilities we have grows out of proportion with the time constraints that late-stage capitalism makes us endure. Responsibilities such as managing childcare, caretaking for elders, living with chronic illnesses, and workplaces with poor boundaries.

Tbh, sometimes I forget the innate struggle in trying to do the following :

floss daily, take my vitamins, see the sun by doing a hot girl walk, eat healthy, grocery shop, avoid ordering in, meal prep, do my quechua homework, put money into savings, try to both be productive at work and not get fired, but also not push myself to the point of my right eye doing a sexy lil twitch, check in on my amigas, get my nails done, call my parents, do laundry, develop a style aesthetic, fold laundry, plan for the future, be informed about world politics, take money out of savings into my checking to avoid overdrafting & ruining my credit score again, read for fun!, resist White supremacy, “be on my journey” by journaling, schedule my annual physical (oops I forgot 2022-23), pay my credit card bills, buy replacement bras (I was surviving on one bralette this last week), get my eyebrows threaded, practice festejo, (deep breath, I’m having an asthma attack just typing this out… no really, I started hacking, Dios Mio I left my inhaler in my other purse.)

Still, I relish the ordinary rhythms. However I’m starting to understand why women face a friendship crisis as we get older. Women apparently have a dramatic dropoff on friendship in their 30’s and 40’s. Ironically, it’s when we need each other the most, when we see each other the least. I’m feeling this loss and I’m not even married or caretaking yet.

I expected to lose friends after high school and post-college, but I was not emotionally ready for steady waves of friendship loss now at 30. Big Friendship cited a study that every 7 years you only keep about 30% of friends. Which made me think about the friends I had from when I was 23 and how many of them I’m genuinely still friends with.

Most women face motherhood and becoming caretakers with the least amount of friends. Cue La Soledad by Laura Pausini… Blaming the very still gendered division of household labor but that’s for another time.

By the time the hot flashes of menopause surge, most women realize they don’t have many friends. Friends were the first to be sacrificed along the way. Empty nesters who had friends through whose commonality were their kids, no longer have that to relate to one another.

Also, there’s divorce, so if you are a divorce, your friends from your marriage might have been split up unofficially with the assets.

Growing up, I cannot recall my mama taking a single day to just hangout with her friends solo. Wherever she went, I was either hiding behind her purse or tugging at it, vying for her attention. To this day, I have to catch myself to not walk a step behind her. There was no chismosas mimosas at brunch for her. It came down to money, time, and lack of an external support network. Incidentally- there’s a broader discussion here about the intertwined factors of race and social-economic class to be had.

My mama’s friends were always dictated by the relationships of her husband and her children’s friends.

La esposa de ______, La mama de ______ became her name and it shaped her friendships.

During my mid twenties I started feeling the loss of friendships, with some of my friendships fading out. It was that indescribably hollow feeling of loneliness when next to my friends. It’s that feeling of distance when sitting next to your friend at dinner, it’s the pauses that feel awkward instead of comforting, it’s the tendency to stay on superficial fluff topics because the safety of emotional intimacy has disappeared.

In my late 20’s that feeling only deepened. It was the Christmas cards that I received with smiling faces of my friends, but whom I no longer knew nothing about, aside from who they were years ago. It was the wedding invites I received as proof that our friendship was commemorative.

I was relevant to the bride’s bildungsroman, a living breathing souvenir of an era of her life gone by. I was so out tune with some of the brides’ present lives, that I was making a habit of meeting the groom on their wedding day. It was me sending multiple reminder texts to my friends from high school to please remember our monthly zoom calls and being left on read.

I would rant to my therapist Lana describing these feelings of confusion and loneliness. “Don’t my friends care? Don’t they see what’s happening? We’re pretending we’re still close.”

Y’all I was misguided…

At one point I confronted my high school friendship group about the ways we were drifting apart. It was a shitshow. We were tipsy, off our drink of choice in that era; Barefoot Moscato. Yes, we were sommeliers. I suggested a sharing circle, where I essentially told my friends that I felt that we knew past versions of ourselves but had lost touch of our current friendship. The response was mostly awkward silence as my friends were largely content as we were. I can feel my ears burning right now just from the embarrassment of the memory.

My former therapist Lana helped me work through my feelings of anxious attachment and grief. As Big Friendship highlighted, there’s plenty of research on attachment theory as how it relates to marriage and family dynamics, but not friendships. Lana helped me learn the friendship bullseye analogy.

In the center of the bullseye, there is you. In the next ring, there is your closest friend, your confidante, your bff. In the following ring, there is your close friends, friends whom are there for you in times of crisis. Then friends who enjoy hanging out with, but don’t have as strong an emotional bond with. The next ring is casual friends, followed by friends of friends and work friends.

With my therapist’s help, she helped me realize what the core of my grief was. I had the expectation that friends that were previously on a close, inner ring in the bullseye, would always stay there. Time and life transitions meant that these friendship were now on an outer more removed ring in my friendship bullseye.

My grief was coming from a place of lack of acceptance, a place of tension when I wasn’t willing to accept present reality vs. my memory of what our friendship used to feel like.

Once I accepted that my friendships had shifted onto an outer ring, so did my expectations of what kind of reciprocity and emotional energy to give the friendship. This acceptance has allowed me to redirect emotional labor and care into myself and other friendships.

It should be noted that over of course of a friendship, friends can change their position in the friendship rings, from further to closer multiple times. No- this isn’t a throwback of your Myspace Top 8, but a tool to understand just how these relationships fluctuate over time.

Also- I never had a Myspace, but I am old enough to have been bullied on it by a middle school classmate. She then naturally evolved from being a middle school bully to Instagram influencer to anti-bullying advocate influencer as one does.

At times, I’ve had friendships fall off this bullseye, whether by a gentle fizzling out, arguments, or outgrowing one another mutually.

I’ve grieved some friendship losses in ways comparable to when I experience romantic heartbreak and breakups. There’s not really a lot of support for experiencing friendship loss, mass media hasn’t kept up with offerings. Self-help sections will definitely have many books on dealing with divorces and breakups, but not so much on coping with the ending of a friendship. It’s more so a reflection on the fixation we have on romantic partnership being the end-all-be-all of life, rather than the very real need for platform of expressing grief over friendship loss.

Where are the support groups for those of us who have had to delete photos, text threads and unfollow their friends off at least three social media platforms? I can’t be the only one who’s gone as far to unfriend former friends on Venmo (yes Venmo)… It’s painful to see your former friends send cocktail and pancake emojis to others!

I don’t have any solutions, but I do know that is part of my emotional fabric to love my friends deeply and to also mourn friendship loss with the same intensity. I’m not sure what my friendship circle will look like at 40, 50, and if I’m lucky, as a viejita at 80. I do know that I fear not having close friendships where I feel seen, heard, and empathized with more than I fear ending up without experiencing marriage.

P.S. Go watch All of Us Strangers starring Paul Mescal and Andrew Scott. Bring chocolates and tissues. Go to Appa’s Pizza, and order kimchi bacon pizza with an ube latte. It’s Feral February- do whatever brings you joy to your Vitamin D deprived self.