2022.06.10 友谊档案 推动友谊的六种力量

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THE FRIENDSHIP FILES
THE SIX FORCES THAT FUEL FRIENDSHIP
I’ve spent more than three years interviewing friends for “The Friendship Files.” Here’s what I’ve learned.

By Julie Beck
JUNE 10, 2022
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“The Friendship Files,” my series of interviews with friends about their friendships, began with an idle thought. Having written a lot about both friendship and dating apps, I was curious about Bumble BFF. Did it work? Did it feel like dating? What do you do on a friend date anyway? So I interviewed two young women who became best friends after using the app. It was intended as a onetime article, but the conversation was so fun, genuine, and sometimes vulnerable that I wanted to do it again.

Read: How friendships change in adulthood

That was more than three years ago. Since then, I have done 100 interviews. The 100th—which features a French woman and an American woman whose families were connected by an act of courage during World War II—published today. It will be the final installment.


Saying goodbye to this series is bittersweet. These conversations have felt different from any other interviews I’ve done. In them, I’ve not only heard about friendships, but witnessed them in real time—how the friends talk and joke together, how they remind each other of their shared history. I never did a single interview that I didn’t publish; every friendship has a story. I’m so grateful to the hundreds of people who have welcomed me into their relationships. Being trusted with your stories has been one of the greatest honors of my life.

When this project launched, I wrote, “People are at their most generous, their funniest, and their most fascinating when talking with and about their friends.” The interviews that followed only reinforced that belief. I could continue this for the rest of my life and only scratch the surface of the infinite ways friendship shapes our lives, but I’ve done my best to pull out the recurring themes I’ve observed from these 100 conversations. Though every bond evolves in its own way, I have come to believe that there are six forces that help form friendships and maintain them through the years: accumulation, attention, intention, ritual, imagination, and grace.

Accumulation
The simplest and most obvious force that forms and sustains friendships is time spent together. One study estimates that it takes spending 40 to 60 hours together within the first six weeks of meeting to turn an acquaintance into a casual friend, and about 80 to 100 hours to become more than that. So friendships unsurprisingly tend to form in places where people spend a lot of their time anyway: work, school, church, extracurricular activities.

Sometimes that time builds up slowly, as it did for two neighbors who have lived across the hall from each other for 20 years. They’ve checked in on each other when they were sick, and split a subscription to People magazine. That gradual accumulation of shared moments added up to an important friendship during the early days of the pandemic, when they were trapped inside. They opened their doors to talk across the hallway and each felt less alone.

Read: The pandemic forced these teens to sail home across the Atlantic

In other circumstances, those hours get put in really quickly. For instance, in March 2020, a group of teens from the Netherlands were trapped on a ship. They were doing a study-at-sea program, and were supposed to fly home from Cuba. But when COVID-19 started shutting things down, they couldn’t get a flight, and had to sail home across the Atlantic instead. I spoke with four kids who forged a bond on that sailing trip that felt different from their relationships with any of their other friends. “Being around someone 24 hours a day, you tell them everything,” one of the friends said. “You don’t do [that] when you are home.”

Attention
Making friends can be hard—but there may be more opportunities than we think. Doing these interviews has taught me that connection can come from anywhere, at any time, if both parties are open to it. As one woman, who stayed close with her ex-boyfriend’s mom for more than 30 years, told me: “You have to look for friendship in places you would never expect it.” A new friend could be waiting in the comments section of an article you’re reading, on the other side of a Google Doc, or in an elevator. The person you’re arguing with on Facebook could become a friend, and so could your ex’s new spouse, or even your ex themselves.

Read: What it’s like to truly be friends with your ex

Paying attention goes a long way when forging these unexpected friendships—noticing when you click with someone, being open to chance encounters. It helps to step out of our habits and into the moment. Because as much as we may feel like our social networks are set and settled, it’s never too late to meet someone who will be important to you for the rest of your life. I spoke with more than one group who was surprised and grateful to have found one another in middle age, a period when work and family responsibilities tend to peak and keeping up with friends is not always easy. “I never thought that in my late 40s I’d make friends for the rest of my life,” one man, who found a tight-knit community at fantasy baseball camp, told me. “This was such a special thing to come into my life at this age.”

Intention
Attention only gets you so far without action. When opportunity arises, you have to put yourself out there, and that requires courage, vulnerability, and a willingness to let things be awkward.

One of my favorite origin stories from “The Friendship Files” came from Abhinav and Fernando. Abhinav was learning to play tennis, and wanted a partner who was also a beginner. Across the court he spotted Fernando, “and I instantly found my equally sucking tennis partner.” A couple of weeks later, he approached Fernando at a party and invited him to play tennis. “What impressed me about that moment,” Fernando said, “was that it was kind of a date, in the sense that you sought me out. You had that intentionality. In between when you saw me sucking and the mixer, passed weeks. But you still had the plan, and you pursued me.”

Read: Overcoming American masculinity to build a deep male friendship

Most friendships require a bit of courtship to get going. And even when they do seemingly fall in our lap—say, you get stuck on a sailboat in the Atlantic with nothing to do but socialize with your fellow sailors—they won’t grow without intention. This is the hardest part of friendship. It takes energy and thought, and our mental and physical resources are often spread thin. In other words, friendships take work. But I have never liked framing our friendships as labor. Showing up for our friends takes effort, yes, but it shouldn’t be drudgery. It should be a joy.

Ritual
One thing that seems to make keeping up with friends easier is ritual. I personally find that the effort of coordinating hangs (or even phone calls) is the biggest barrier to seeing my friends. It’s much easier when something is baked into my schedule, and all I have to do is show up. For instance, while working from home during the pandemic, I’ve gotten lunch every Friday with my friend who lives around the corner (when it’s been safe to do so).

Many of those I’ve interviewed also have rituals like these. Some have organized a book club, a monthly hike, or a regular dinner party. Others have committed to a group chat that runs all day every day, or a Dungeons & Dragons campaign that’s lasted for 30 years. In addition to keeping groups close, these traditions can fuel a friendship and give it a shared culture. The Dungeons & Dragons group has a shorthand with references stretching back decades.

Read: What it’s like to carry on a tradition with a friend who can’t remember it

The power of a ritual was particularly evident in the story of two friends, Gabe and Andy, who, for more than six years, have walked 30 minutes to give each other a high five. But then Gabe got sick, and lost his memory. He didn’t remember the high five, although he remembered Andy. In the hospital, Andy asked Gabe to give him a high five on the walk from the bathroom. They had a particular way of doing it—a clap, a snap, and then a high five.

“I started walking toward him,” Andy told me, “and then right before the high five, he did the clap, and the snap, and I just started crying.”

“That’s one of the things I love about the routine,” Gabe said. “Not just the mechanics of it, but the friendship part of it is so burned into my body memory that that’s what came out.”

Imagination
Society has a place for friendships, and it’s on the sidelines. They’re supposed to play a supporting role to work, family, and romance. It takes imagination not to default to this norm, and to design your life so that friendship plays the role you really want it to.

Read: What if friendship, not marriage, was at the center of life?

I’m inspired by the people I’ve spoken with who imagined something different for themselves: the friends who bought a house together, who went to therapy together, who have raised their children together, who committed to an “arranged friendship,” whose friendship has fueled their fight for justice. The man who gave his friend a kidney and the woman who gave birth to her best friend’s quadruplets remind me that there are friends who choose to love each other radically every day. Their love does not stand on the sidelines.

Quieter ways of showing your friends love can still be radical. The beauty and the challenge of friendship is its diversity. A friendship can be whatever you want it to. Each one is a canvas whose only limit is our imagination.

Grace
All of the forces I’ve mentioned so far—accumulation, attention, intention, ritual, and imagination—are ideals. They’re impossible to fully live up to. Life often gets in the way.

As a reporter who’s covered friendship for many years, I sometimes suffer from imposter syndrome in my own friendships. Who am I to be dispensing advice when I can’t even text my friends back promptly? Sometimes, people have assumed that I must be a really great friend, given how much time I’ve spent thinking about this. And I’m not. I try to be, but I tend to retreat too much into myself and my romantic relationship and don’t prioritize my friends as much as I’d like to.

I’ve written before about how friendship is flexible, and bends to fit the shape our lives need it to. But during the pandemic, I saw just how elastic it can be, how it can stretch to allow long silences, how it can snap back into place when you least expect. Inspired by a “Friendship Files” interview, I spent many Saturdays during the pandemic having “PowerPoint parties” on Zoom with friends who live across the country. I saw them more during those months than I had in years. It was unexpected, and special. And it couldn’t have happened if we were angry or resented one another for all those years of limited contact.

Read: If you and your friends are bored, PowerPoint parties may be the answer

Many of the people I spoke with—who, in many cases, love each other so much that they nominated themselves to be interviewed about their friendship—told me that they don’t see each other that often, or that they don’t talk as much as they would like. I’ve come to believe that friendship doesn’t always have to be about presence; it can also be about love that can weather absence.

But absence doesn’t have to last forever. “The Friendship Files” includes many stories of second chances and rekindlings. There are the elementary-school friends who started hanging out with former classmates again after their 50-year reunion, the Vietnam veterans who fell out of touch after the war until one of them wrote a letter and brought them back together, and even the high-school best friends who reconnected after one decided to return a sweatshirt he’d borrowed 20 years earlier. After that last interview was published, they told me that a lot of their other high-school friends had reached out to them, and they’d all gotten together for a reunion.


I’m not religious, but I do love the concept of grace, of a gift so profound that it could never be earned or deserved. And so when I cite grace here as the final and most important force in friendships, I mean it in two ways. One is the forgiveness that we offer each other when we fall short. The other is the space that creates for connections—and reconnections—that feel nothing short of miraculous.

Julie Beck is a senior editor at The Atlantic, where she oversees the Family section, and is the creator of “The Friendship Files.”




友谊档案
推动友谊的六种力量
我花了三年多的时间为 "友谊档案 "采访朋友。以下是我学到的东西。

作者：朱莉-贝克
2022年6月10日

"友谊档案 "是我对朋友们进行的关于他们的友谊的系列采访，始于一个闲暇的想法。我写了很多关于友谊和约会应用程序的文章，我对Bumble BFF感到好奇。它有用吗？它感觉像约会吗？你在朋友约会中到底做了什么？所以我采访了两位在使用该软件后成为最好朋友的年轻女性。这本来是一篇一次性的文章，但谈话是如此有趣、真实，有时还很脆弱，以至于我想再做一次。

阅读：友谊在成年后如何变化

那是三年多以前的事了。从那时起，我已经做了100次采访。第100篇--以一位法国妇女和一位美国妇女为主角，她们的家庭因二战期间的一项勇敢行为而联系在一起--今天出版。这将是最后一期。


告别这个系列是苦乐参半的。这些对话感觉与我所做的任何其他采访都不同。在这些对话中，我不仅听到了友谊，而且实时见证了友谊，见证了朋友们在一起谈话和开玩笑，见证了他们如何提醒对方他们共同的历史。我从来没有做过一个不发表的采访；每一段友谊都有一个故事。我非常感谢那些欢迎我进入他们的关系的数百人。被信任地讲述你们的故事，是我一生中最大的荣誉之一。

当这个项目启动时，我写道："人们在与他们的朋友交谈时是最慷慨的，最有趣的，也是最迷人的。随后的采访只是加强了这一信念。我可以在我的余生中继续这样做，但这只是友谊塑造我们生活的无限方式的表面，但我已经尽力从这100次对话中拿出我观察到的反复出现的主题。虽然每条纽带都以自己的方式发展，但我相信有六种力量帮助形成友谊并在多年后维持它们：积累、关注、意图、仪式、想象力和优雅。

积累
形成和维持友谊的最简单和最明显的力量是在一起的时间。一项研究估计，在认识的头六个星期内，需要花40到60个小时在一起，才能把一个熟人变成一个普通朋友，而要超过这个时间，则需要80到100小时。因此，友谊毫不奇怪地倾向于在人们花费大量时间的地方形成：工作、学校、教堂、课外活动。

有时，这种时间是慢慢积累起来的，就像住在对面的两个邻居一样，他们已经住了20年了。他们在生病的时候会互相问候，并分享一份《人物》杂志的订阅。在大流行病的早期，当他们被困在室内时，这种逐渐积累的共同时刻加起来就成了重要的友谊。他们打开门，隔着走廊交谈，每个人都感到不那么孤独。

阅读。大流行病迫使这些十几岁的孩子横跨大西洋航行回家

在其他情况下，这些时间真的很快就被投入了。例如，在2020年3月，一群来自荷兰的青少年被困在一艘船上。他们正在做一个海上学习项目，本来应该从古巴飞回家。但是，当COVID-19开始关闭时，他们无法得到航班，而不得不横跨大西洋航行回家。我与四个孩子进行了交谈，他们在那次航海旅行中建立了一种纽带，感觉与他们与其他任何朋友的关系不同。"其中一个朋友说："一天24小时都在别人身边，你会告诉他们一切。"当你在家里时，你不会这样做。

注意
交朋友可能很困难--但机会可能比我们想象的要多。做这些采访让我了解到，只要双方都愿意，联系可以来自任何地方，任何时候。正如一位与她前男友的母亲保持了30多年亲密关系的妇女告诉我的那样。"你必须在你想不到的地方寻找友谊"。一个新朋友可能在你阅读的文章的评论区，在谷歌文档的另一边，或者在电梯里等待着。在Facebook上与你争论的人可能成为朋友，你前任的新配偶也可能成为朋友，甚至是你前任自己。

阅读。与你的前任真正成为朋友是什么感觉？

在建立这些出乎意料的友谊时，关注会有很大的帮助--注意到你何时与某人相识，对偶遇持开放态度。这有助于跳出我们的习惯，进入当下。因为尽管我们可能觉得我们的社交网络是固定的，但要遇到对你的余生都很重要的人，永远不会太晚。我与不止一个群体交谈过，他们对在中年找到彼此感到惊讶和感激，这一时期的工作和家庭责任往往达到高峰，与朋友保持联系并不容易。"我从来没有想过，在我40多岁的时候，我会在我的余生中交到朋友，"一位在幻想棒球训练营中发现了一个紧密的社区的男子告诉我。"在这个年龄段进入我的生活，这是一件多么特别的事情。"

意图
如果没有行动，关注只能让你走到这里。当机会出现时，你必须把自己放在那里，而这需要勇气、脆弱性和让事情变得尴尬的意愿。

友谊档案》中我最喜欢的一个起源故事来自Abhinav和Fernando。阿比纳夫正在学习打网球，他想找一个也是初学者的伙伴。在球场对面，他发现了费尔南多，"我立刻就找到了我同样糟糕的网球伙伴"。几周后，他在一个聚会上找到了费尔南多，邀请他打网球。"费尔南多说："那一刻让我印象深刻的是，那是一种约会，在你寻找我的意义上。你有那种意向性。在你看到我吸吮和混合器之间，经过了几个星期。但你仍然有计划，而且你追求我。"

阅读。克服美国式的大男子主义，建立深厚的男性友谊

大多数友谊都需要一点求爱的过程来进行。而且，即使它们看起来确实落在我们的腿上--比如说，你被困在大西洋的一艘帆船上，除了与你的水手同伴交际外无事可做--它们也不会在无意中成长。这是友谊中最难的部分。它需要精力和思想，而我们的精神和身体资源往往是分散的。换句话说，友谊需要工作。但我从来不喜欢把我们的友谊归结为劳动。为我们的朋友出现需要努力，是的，但它不应该是苦差事。它应该是一种快乐。

仪式感
有一件事似乎能使与朋友保持联系更容易，那就是仪式感。我个人发现，协调聚会（甚至电话）的努力是见到朋友的最大障碍。当一些事情被纳入我的日程安排，我所要做的就是出现，这就容易多了。例如，在大流行期间在家工作时，我每周五都会和住在附近的朋友一起吃午饭（在安全的情况下）。

我采访过的许多人也有类似的仪式。有些人组织了一个读书会，每月一次远足，或定期举行晚宴。还有一些人致力于每天都进行的小组聊天，或者持续了30年的龙与地下城活动。除了保持团体的紧密性之外，这些传统还可以为友谊提供动力，并赋予它共同的文化。龙与地下城 "小组有一个速记，其参考资料可以追溯到几十年前。

阅读。与一个不记得了的朋友一起继承传统是什么感觉？

一个仪式的力量在两个朋友的故事中表现得尤为明显，他们是加布和安迪，六年多来，他们走了30分钟的路来互相击掌。但后来加布生病了，并失去了记忆。他不记得击掌了，尽管他记得安迪。在医院里，安迪要求加布在从浴室出来的路上与他击掌。他们有一种特殊的方式--拍手、啪啪，然后击掌。

"我开始向他走去，"安迪告诉我，"然后就在击掌之前，他拍了拍手，又打了个响指，我就开始哭了。"

"这是我喜欢这套动作的原因之一，"加贝说。"不仅仅是它的机械性，还有它的友谊部分，它是如此地烙在我的身体记忆中，这就是我的感受。

想象力
社会对友谊有一个位置，它是在场边。他们应该在工作、家庭和浪漫中扮演配角。这需要想象力，不要默认这种规范，并设计你的生活，让友谊扮演你真正想要的角色。

阅读。如果生活的中心是友谊，而不是婚姻，会怎么样？

我被那些与我交谈过的人所启发，他们为自己设想了一些不同的东西：那些一起买房子、一起接受治疗、一起抚养孩子的朋友，他们致力于 "安排的友谊"，他们的友谊推动了他们为正义而战。给朋友捐肾的男人和为她最好的朋友生下四胞胎的女人提醒我，有一些朋友每天都选择彻底地爱对方。他们的爱并不是站在一边的。

以更安静的方式向你的朋友表达爱，仍然可以是激进的。友谊的美丽和挑战在于其多样性。友谊可以是你想要的任何样子。每个人都是一张画布，唯一的限制是我们的想象力。

恩典
到目前为止，我所提到的所有力量--积累、关注、意图、仪式和想象力--都是理想的。它们是不可能完全实现的。生活常常会妨碍我们。

作为一个报道友谊多年的记者，我有时会在自己的友谊中患上冒牌货综合症。当我甚至不能及时给我的朋友发短信时，我有什么资格提供建议？有时，人们认为我一定是一个非常好的朋友，因为我花了很多时间考虑这个问题。而我不是。我试着去做，但我倾向于太多地退缩到我自己和我的浪漫关系中，而不像我想的那样优先考虑我的朋友。

我以前写过关于友谊是如何灵活的，并根据我们的生活需要而弯曲。但是在大流行病期间，我看到它可以有多大的弹性，它可以伸展到允许长时间的沉默，它可以在你最不期望的时候弹回原位。受 "友谊档案 "采访的启发，在大流行期间，我花了很多个星期六在Zoom上与住在全国各地的朋友举行 "PowerPoint聚会"。在那几个月里，我见到他们的次数比我多年来见到的还要多。这是出乎意料的，而且很特别。如果我们因为这些年的有限联系而生气或怨恨对方，这就不可能发生。

阅读：如果你和你的朋友都很无聊，PPT聚会可能是答案。

与我交谈的许多人--在许多情况下，他们非常爱对方，以至于他们自己提名接受关于他们的友谊的采访--告诉我，他们不经常见面，或者他们没有像他们希望的那样多交谈。我开始相信，友谊并不总是关于存在；它也可以是关于能够经受住缺席的爱。

但是，缺席不一定会永远持续下去。"友谊档案 "包括许多第二次机会和重逢的故事。有小学同学在50年的同学聚会后又开始和以前的同学一起玩耍，有越战老兵在战后失去联系，直到其中一人写信把他们重新联系在一起，甚至有高中的好朋友在其中一人决定归还他20年前借的运动衫后重新联系在一起。在最后一次采访发表后，他们告诉我，他们的很多其他高中朋友都向他们伸出了援手，他们都聚在一起重聚了。


我不信教，但我确实喜欢恩典的概念，一个如此深刻的礼物，它永远不可能被赢得或应得。因此，当我在这里把恩典作为友谊中最后和最重要的力量时，我的意思是在两个方面。一种是当我们做得不够好时，我们给予对方的宽恕。另一种是为联系和重新联系创造的空间，这种联系感觉非常神奇。

朱莉-贝克是《大西洋》杂志的高级编辑，负责家庭专栏，也是 "友谊档案 "的创建者。