Can I call you and cry?
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There is nothing on Earth like this kind of friendship.
I say that with no offense to my wonderful family of origin, my husband, or my therapist.
Friendships don’t have the publicly recognized anniversaries and legally binding contracts of a marriage. They don’t have the same obligations as familial relationships. Friendship is a mutual choice, and these relationships are —as the aphorism goes — for a reason, for a season, or for a lifetime.
I sent this text to a friend I’ve known for eight years, and have been close to for about 6. We went from strangers to acquaintances to friends to friends and colleagues to friends. We have seen each other through several kinds of conundrums, a variety of pickles, and a few certified disasters. I can call her and cry, and I love it when she returns the favor and cries to me. It is a gift to be needed, and a gift to allow someone to need you this way.
A perk of my job as a writer is that I am often send books to read. A downside of my job as a writer is that I do not get paid to sit around all day and read, and there are more books to read than days in my life, and some of these books sit in hopeful stacks around my office, waiting for the day I crack them open. This one, though, never made it to the stack. I ripped open the mailer, went back to my office (bed) and read until I was all the way through it.
It’s the story of an intergenerational friendship and an autopsy of the author’s own lost friendships, and I loved it for the same reason I loved Ann Patchett’s Truth & Beauty. Because I love friendship! And I’ve struggled with it the same way I have any other relationship.
Friendship in general is having a moment. A well-deserved moment. An overdue moment. I see more people talking about this and writing about this than I have seen since we were hunched over our yearbooks on the last day of school, writing impassioned entries about how we will love each other until the end of time. LYLAS. BFF. And hopefully this isn’t a moment, but a redistribution of our eggs from one basket to many, a righting of a ship that lists precariously towards romance or family.
Nothing has stabilized me more in the last few months than my friends. Even when I invite one to the first night of the Taylor Swift Eras Tour only to find at the gate that I didn’t “get a screaming deal on two floor seats” but actually “got hosed on one floor seat.” My lifelong friend simply laughed, shrugged, and walked a mile to the closest Olive Garden for a glass of white wine before taking an Uber back to her family. Yes, this is a real thing that happened.
So here’s to the friends who let us cry, and the friends who send a warning text before they pick up the phone. We need each other. Let’s hold on tight.
But wait, there’s more!