Friends: A How-To Guide
You need them, as an adult.
The Frontier Psychiatrists is a newsletter. Owen Scott Muir is your author. I have a medical doctorate and work as a child and adult psychiatrist. I write this daily newsletter. I welcome subscriptions and sharing. I am up to just under 2500 subscribers and enjoy a collaborative article. Hit me up. Now, onward!
Regarding Public Health disasters, the lack of friendship is rarely mentioned. Every once in a while, it pops its head up:
Friends are important. I have them. A non-exhaustive list, just here on Substack…1
I feel blessed to have them. I am blessed to have them. There is no obvious way to make more friends as an adult. Getting more of them seems like a mystery for people who don't have a lot of social connections. If you'd like to go on a date, we have dating apps for that. I think those are scams2 Friendster, in the early days of the pre-MySpace Internet, was theoretically about this concept, but not really. It was a coy not-dating app. Dating is not the only social interaction adults can have with each other.
Making friends is built-in to interactions throughout childhood and early adulthood. There's a lot of hanging around time in college. Some of us are lucky with colleagues at work who become friends.
Friendship is different from just work and family in important respects: there is no gun to your head to make a friend. There needs to be mutual agreement to keep at it. You have to show up for family, or so we are told. Similarly, with work, you're stuck with your coworkers.
Friends? You choose to spend time with them. If you didn't choose to spend time, you wouldn’t see them. Romantic relationships are generally dyadic— in a pair-bonding species, with much social pressure to handle it that way. Even for our Polyamorous Peeps, it's still a lot of dyadic time!
Togetherness in a group, or dyad, that is voluntary but not explicitly romantically charged? The “additional” relationship doesn’t have the pretense and coercion of till death do we part, or a risk of being separated when fired. Similarly, your friends can ditch you at any time. You can cut them out of your life. There are no contracts, no divorce settlements, no friend laws. Nothing binds you other than goodwill. This means you have to be on your best-enough behavior.
Friends will do insane, outrageous, remarkable things for each other. Loyalty to one’s friends might as well be the strong nuclear force. Making more friends is not trivial. Keeping them is not trivial. I believe it to be a sickness of a kind to have none—or a symptom of sickness. It’s f-ed to be lonely.
I’ve got one trick, as it were. Do you want to have good friends? You can…be a great friend. This means doing good things for others. Being kind, and helpful, above what anyone would expect. This will, likely, not come back to you in the now. Maybe not ever—from any specific person. An attitude of appropriately bounded graciousness is still to be relentlessly cultivated. I will warn you— no good deed goes unpunished. This perilous course? It is a practice, like meditation.
My mom had a sign hung in her office for over a decade.
“No Good Deed Goes Unpunished.”
Not because she wanted to stop. She needed to radically accept that she would not be thanked for kindness. When she accepted it, the sign came down.
Life is an iterative game. If you want to win, it won’t be alone. This will earn enemies, especially for disagreeable people like myself, who like to push back on things we’d “rather not.” Friends are the insurance policy against that. So, what does that practice look like in one’s life?
If you need more friends—and eventually more good friends— stock the top of the funnel. You act to get a flow of new possible friends into your orbit. It means being around people. This means social events in the real world. These go better if they feature a conceit selects for your type of people. Examples:
Board Games Clubs
Hiking Clubs
Political Rallies
Charity Events
Community Organizations
Professional Societies
Sports Leagues
Conventions
If we are looking for healthy friendships, I will make two specific recommendations—avoid alcohol and drug-centric events and activities centered around unhealthy eating, even if you love those things. ESPECIALLY if you love those things. Active, Thoughtful, Health Promoting activities as some of your “time spent diet” is clutch. If you made zero friends at the frisbee club, you still ran around instead of getting drunk. If you find an event or community with people you like and who seem to like you…Do more of it.
Find your people—and this means doing stuff that will involve not your people if only to have comparison data. Next, spend time with your people more often than you might by one unit. If you feel up to one event a month, do two. One a week, go to a second. One a year? Go to a second in Q3. Push yourself just a bit.
When you meet someone who you vibe with, exchange info. If they reach out, respond. If you don't like them, be gracious. There are annoying people you won’t immediately like. They need friends too. So do you. Being friends with the otherwise annoying is a fine way to have some friends. Tolerate imperfect social graces. Some awkward person might take a bullet for you when you need it.
Do not tolerate cruelty, unkindness, predation, or antisocial behavior, toward you or anyone else. A “friend” wants to use you? They will—only give them once. Being a giver, of your time, talent, and energy, but not to those who only want to take. Identify givers, and help them give. Help. Find a thing with which you can be helpful, and do it.
“We are throwing a party, charity event, etc.” What is the least glamorous job? Take that one. Then hang out, do it, and boom, friend-making is happening. These things, I will note, happen in the real world.
Meet friends in real life.
Yes, you can build or continue friendships online. But meet. In real life. And here is the cheat code, as far as I can tell: Offer. Great friends aren’t going to ask for help much. They may let you know when help would be helpful. But the best way to not fall prey to vampires? Do give when asked, offer when not asked but clearly needed. If you offer, and give, your time, support, and attention freely. A friend in need will be a friend indeed, perhaps. But for many, asking for help is hard. Offering it is easier for your new friends. They will remember it.
Oftentimes we worry about being needy and demanding, and thus we suffer rather than ask. So being a proactive helper is a great way to square the circle. If people aren’t grateful or fun to help, don't do it with them again. If it is a blast? Help someone else together next time. What to do? It does not need to be big! “What have you been putting off? Going through a drawer? Cleaning out your closet!?”
It’s not magic. It takes no special know-how. Being with someone as they face a thing they were putting off? Hard to say no to, easy to do, and a great excuse to find yourself with more support and friends in your life as a result.
Be a friend, get a friend.
Share this newsletter, and say let's be friends. Or, subscribe — I also won’t be sad.
And I hope I get to hang with Mills Baker and Heather Havrilesky some day… but for now, I'm just a fan.
10% of men get close to 100% of swipes, so when women compare notes, all the men are total F-boys, but they all chose the same 10% of men, so what do we expect?
I certainly count myself as one
Bet