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Many analogies have been made of friendship—it’s like shifting seasons, or a plant, or a really good bra—but I picture friendship most clearly as a house, jointly occupied. Each party agrees to perform their end of the upkeep, and the result is something shared that can last. But how friendships are maintained is a matter of personal preference. I recently asked The Atlantic’s writers and editors to share the ways they stay in touch with people, and their responses included spontaneous phone calls, dog-park meetups, and being brave about watching horror films. So I turned the question to The Daily’s readers too, who replied with their own accounts of how they care for their friends.
In many relationships, the first step is the hardest one to take. Fred Gregory, a retired Army medic who served in Afghanistan, wrote that after his “Army buddies spread to the four winds,” he realized that something—or somebody—had to give. “Men, in general, are terrible at maintaining friendships,” he noted. “Swallow your pride and make the first move, hooha.”
And sometimes, a reminder to reach out can come in the form of a cold shock. “A year ago, a dear college friend died suddenly while walking his dog. It was distressing we hadn’t remained closer,” Scott King, 71, wrote from Bermuda. He committed to calling his friends more, “frequently while walking my small Schnauzer on the golf course. Hopefully, I won’t meet the same fate.”
Consistency is key: Robert Rose, from West Virginia, goes out with his “group of old guy friends” to eat at a different locally owned restaurant each week. “We are MENSA,” he wrote: “Men Eating Nowhere Special Again.” Lori Walker, 58, praised the “pre-book” strategy, so that the next meetup date is set when everybody is already together. And once a month, Ella T., from Los Angeles, meets her British childhood friends on Zoom: “We begin with the ‘organ recital,’ namely which anatomical parts need repair or have fallen off.” Then comes the “doom exchange” of politics and news updates, followed by a head count of their “mushrooming army of grandkids. Mostly, we giggle.”
Generational differences can be stark when it comes to communication; Denise P., 71, from Ohio, loves to make her own cards and receive handwritten letters from her friends and family, which is “a rarity nowadays.” Samyukta Reddy, 17, from India, observes that her friends usually rely on texting and sharing memes as a way to keep in touch, but she remains wistful for “the analog past” of a simple phone call. To bridge the gap, maybe all it takes is finding an activity that people can share: For one reader, it’s playing “Jewdle,” a Jewish-word version of Wordle; for another reader, it’s making custom buttons to hand out at protests. “We are ten strong,” ranging in age from 30s to 80s, Meg C., 81, wrote of her friend group. “Youth gives us rage and age gives us humor.”
A well-maintained friendship is a long-lasting one. And a long-lasting friendship can document life’s many bends. Priscilla Newberger, 81, from Oregon, is part of a female class that made up a tiny percentage of MIT’s graduates 60 years ago. They bonded over social isolation and the great difficulty of finding a bathroom on campus. Since the pandemic, a bunch of them have been gathering on video calls each month. “Some of these women I haven’t seen in many years,” she wrote, “but we are friends forever.”
That same refrain runs through Rebecca Vara’s story: At 46 years old, she has been friends with a group of women since the seventh grade. In high school, some boys started calling them the “Acorns,” and the name stuck. Their friendship “took deep roots, grew proud and strong, weathered seasons of joy, grief, drought and renewal; we’ve witnessed marriages, births, deaths of loved ones, divorce, all the things that make up a life,” Vara wrote. “34 years is a long time when you’re only 46. There is great joy in knowing these incredible women will be in my life for the next 34 and beyond.”
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The Week Ahead
- Mission: Impossible—The Final Reckoning, an action movie starring Tom Cruise as an International Monetary Fund agent on a mission to stop a rogue artificial intelligence (in theaters Friday)
- Sirens, a dark-comedy series about two sisters and a strange billionaire at a lavish estate (premieres Thursday on Netflix)
- The Book of Records, a novel by Madeleine Thien about a family who arrives at a mysterious enclave that bends time and space (out Tuesday)
