What I'm learning about friendship lately
Maybe it doesn't have to be so different from making connections on the school playground
At this point, you might be sick and tired of hearing me talk about the bizarre territory that is adult friendship: making friends, keeping friends, evolving those relationships, etc. I get it. In the year and a half since I launched this newsletter, I’ve explored it quite a bit, focusing a little extra on the idea of “mom friends” as someone who’d long been under the impression that building that kind of community was the next great frontier in my social life.
My thoughts today are less about any single category of adult friendship and more about the broader observations I’ve made recently in the process of leaning further into a couple of newish relationships. Conveniently, these observations are pretty aligned with other realizations I’ve come to as as I continue navigating the very important connections I have with people I’ve known for years.
(Isn’t it nice when a bunch of signs are pointing in the same direction? It rarely happens that way.)
Lately, I’ve had a few new friendships take shape.
I won’t get into all the details of how I met these folks, how long we’ve known each other, etc. This isn’t a story about any one relationship, nor are the details especially relevant. What’s important for you to know is that the last few months have felt like a breath of fresh air for me, socially. Since we moved to Philly in 2025, I’ve struggled with finding new friends and working out my place in older friendships. For whatever reason, (the stars aligning! a change in season! a change in my attitude!), a bunch of pieces seem to have come together lately. At last!
Some of the friends in question live near me. Others are what you might call “internet friends,” though more and more, I think many of us are coming to understand that in 2025, this isn’t all that important of a designation. From my perspective, what all of these relationships share in common is a sense of peace. A sense of acceptance of exactly where we are with each other right now.
Currently Reading: Notes on Your Sudden Disappearance by Alison Espach
I fell so deeply in love with Alison Espach’s writing when I read The Wedding People earlier this year, and when I learned that it wasn’t her debut novel, I was equal parts excited to have more books to check out and annoyed that I hadn’t seen them yet. So far, Notes on Your Sudden Disappearance—which was published in 2021—is giving me many of the elements that I adored about The Wedding People. Espach manages to juggle such a careful balance of humor and deep sadness. It’s really so masterful, and in this book, it’s applied to childhood experiences.
Let me explain a little more…
First, let me come clean about something I’ve found challenging in friendship during this period of my life. I can sum it up in one word: change.
It’s one thing to weather changes of your own, especially if those changes are a product of your own decision-making. Changes can actually be fun and exciting! Partnerships, moves, career shifts, pets, children… in most cases, these are cause for celebration! I’m a creature of habit, but mostly do okay when it comes to embracing new chapters.
What’s tricky is when the new chapters I’m embracing end up in conflict—or at least not in exact parallel—with the new chapters that others are embracing.
I want to trust and believe that we can grow with each other as we evolve with and through the shifts. And I really think we can.
But that doesn’t mean that the friendships stay the same—or that they won’t go through weird, funky phases that don’t always feel the comfiest. Longer-term friendships aren’t static, especially as we get older and become new versions of ourselves. I’m doing my best to let go of the fear that these relationships feeling different has to mean that they are fundamentally different, to keep showing up as myself in hopes that doing so will keep the core of our found family strong through all the ups and downs that we’re facing separately instead of together.
In the meantime, I’m working on embracing new and growing relationships from exactly where they are.
I don’t think I started doing this consciously. But when I step back and consider where some of these friendships stand and why they’re feeling good, this is the common thread.
It’s kind of like making friends as a kid. Which is interesting, because often, when I hear my friends lament the challenges of adult friendship, they refer to the ease with which it happened back on the playground.
Maybe that experience isn’t quite as off-limits as we think it is.
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