Ryu's Blog

Noah Smith has written a good article on making and having friends after age 30. For an introvert like myself, big groups and frequent socializing events are too draining. However, I do enjoy occasional small group gatherings with friends or interesting people. The challenge is consciously planning and seeking out opportunities to make these connections happen, even if only occasionally. Smith also touches on what constitutes close friendships.

There’s no hard-and-fast boundary between close friends and more casual friends; it’s a spectrum. Closeness tends to develop gradually over time, and it feels a little different in each case…

There are basically two things that define a really close friendship: understanding, and interdependence. Your close friend has to understand who you really are, and you also have to know that you can count on them if you need help. If a friendship has only one of those things and not the other, it’s not really a close one. 

Understanding gets built up over time, but it can’t reach a truly deep level without confessions. We all have certain things that we’re reluctant to tell other people about ourselves — not necessarily secrets, but core truths of our lives that we don’t like yelling at everyone we meet at a party. Occasionally these might be facts about your life, but usually they’re just vulnerabilities and desires and fears. 

In order to make a really close friend, you have to tell them at least some of those things, and they have to tell you theirs. You have to have moments when you open yourself to another person and make yourself vulnerable to them. And you also have to have moments where they do this for you. You don’t both have to do it at the same time, but it has to happen on both sides….

The other thing you need for a close friendship is interdependence — you need to know you can rely on your friend, and they need to know they can rely on you. There’s no way to prove this in an absolute sense, of course — you’ll almost certainly never know if your friend would really lay down their life for you, because that sort of situation almost never actually comes up…

And I agree with his conclusion:

So I think you have to work at it. Having friends is one of the most important components of a complete, fulfilled human life. It’s just too important to leave entirely to chance.