Some Good Stuff About Friendship to Read (and Watch)

Transactional, affirming, long-distance, and lifelong friendships

Author

Julie Beck
October 18, 2024

There was a huge solar storm last week and we saw the aurora in MARYLAND of all places. That has nothing to do with this newsletter, but it’s a nice picture.

As I’m working on my book, I’ve been reading and taking in so much stuff about friendship, that I thought I might send the occasional roundup of the stuff that was good, for others to enjoy! So without further ado, some Good Stuff About Friendship:

“I Got Next: Banishing Venmo Brain in Friendships” by Elise Granata of the very good newsletter Group Hug.

Venmo has made it very, very easy to pay our friends back, to split the restaurant bill exactly equally. I remember the year or two after its inception that I didn’t have the app, and the mild annoyance I got from my friends every time I mucked up the seamless transaction of squaring up with each other with cash, or God forbid, PayPal. But Granata writes that getting used to immediate, precise reciprocity in friendships isn’t necessarily a good thing. It can make relationships feel transactional and encourage account-keeping, rather than nurturing the trust that allows for give and take on longer time scales. She writes:

Something magical happens when we trust in the long loop, in that middle space where we give without expectation and receive without frenetic reciprocity. We’re saying that we love each other enough to simply give. There’s a timescale implied too, one that quietly reassures: we’ll be in each other’s lives for long enough that it will all come back around. Or that we’re okay with it never coming back to us at all, and give just to inspire the delight of more giving. 

See also:

“Is ‘True Friendship’ Dead?”, a video essay by Mina Le

I really like Mina’s YouTube channel. She talks primarily about fashion and culture, but has made a couple forays into talking about the State of Friendship Today, from a younger perspective than my own. Her videos are smart, funny, and really well-researched. This one makes a nice companion to the Venmo brain piece—she talks a lot about how celebrities and influencers monetize their friendships and how that posture trickles down to us regular folks. This video is also where I saw the above tweet, full disclosure. (Who aggregates the aggregators?)

This piece had some good and interesting advice about keeping friendships alive in an age where everyone is more mobile than ever (define what you want to be to each other, find things outside yourselves to talk about, avoid the “catching-up” death spiral). But what stood out to me the most was her theory about distance possibly keeping some friendships alive when they would’ve otherwise expired—rather than the inverse, which I hear more often. In this quote she’s talking about her childhood friend-turned-long-distance-pen-pal:

But that’s the least surprising part, if you ask me. The original friendship we’d formed at the apartment-complex bus stop was built on dolls and proximity. If Ricarda had never moved away, we likely would have faded out of each other’s lives much sooner. But as long-distance friends, we got to watch each other grow up and even celebrate that feat with fireworks over the Rhine River during that one final weekend we spent together. Now that I’m in my 30s, where almost every friendship inevitably turns into a juggling act across constraints with space and time, my (fuzzy) memories of Ricarda have sweetened into a real appreciation for our kiddish, determined act of pen-palling against the odds. It’s made me think about how long-distance friendship—a bond you build together entirely out of mutual effort, in spite of daily routines, time-zone differences, and an unreliable postal service—might be the purest form of friendship of all.

A fascinating article that I maybe only 60 percent agree with, but which was nonetheless super interesting to read. She diagnoses a modern norm of unquestioning support within friendships; the unspoken expectation that a friend’s role is to validate, not question, your perspective. She writes: “I…wonder what we lose when we stick to validation instead of risking the consequences of directness when it comes to our close friends.”

I don’t think friends enabling each other is a particularly new phenomenon but I think she’s definitely right that challenging or questioning someone’s decisions is more fraught in friendships than other relationships. That’s something the always-brilliant Stephanie H. Murray wrote about it in a piece I edited a couple years ago, if you’re curious to read more on this.

Crossing to Safety by Wallace Stegner

If you have ever wondered “Where is the serious, epic literature about friends?” well, this is the book for you. And for me. Boy, did I love this book. Published in 1987, it tells the story of the decades-long friendship between two couples, the Langs and the Morgans. It’s quiet and beautiful and full of little observations about the nature of friendship:

It is a relationship that has no formal shape, there are no rules or obligations or bonds as in marriage or the family, it is held together by neither law nor property nor blood, there is no glue in it but mutual liking. It is therefore rare.

I wrote basically the same thing nearly 30 years later when I published the first article I ever wrote about friendship, so apologies to Wallace, who got there before me, and who, I think, was pretty ahead of his time. (Although I disagree that friendship is rare.) It’s kind of fashionable now, for lack of a better way of putting it, to talk about the importance of friendship, but people have of course felt it since time immemorial.

That’s all for now! Send me your recs for quietly beautiful novels about love and friendship. And maybe,

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