An article about "good enough friends."

I was recently touched by an article posted to Slate, titled "Good-Enough Friends," written by Dan Kois. This article came to me at a time when I've been thinking about friendship and relationships a lot. Here's some context:

• Two weekends ago, I got married. The next night we had a celebration with my wife's friends at a small restaurant in Toronto. One of the conversations I had with someone was about how hard it is to make friends in your 30s. I argued that most of the friendships you make as adults tend to be activity partners, and not the deep sorts of friends that one acquires in university or high school. Friendships in high school and university have the benefit of time: at those times, we have the time to be selective and the time to build a strong foundation of openness and acceptance. However, as adults our time is taken up with family, home life, and bills, and we can't expect to develop the sorts of friendships that we curated in our early 20s. 
• I've been thinking a lot about my kids. I haven't seen them for a long time. They live far away. They are teenagers. Lately, I've been sending them things through the mail, since messaging seems to be so ineffective. I don't know what their friendships are like, nor do I know much about their lives right now. Therapists and counsellors assure me that this is normal teenage behaviour, but I'm still always thinking about their lives, wishing I knew them better. I really wonder about what their healthiest relationships look like. Anyhow, I hope to send the kids a couple things I picked up over the last week, but I'm nervous about doing so because our communication is so spotty. 
• I have numerous friends whom I haven't called for a long time. I've grown really reluctant to use the phone or even to email people. The last really pleasant interactions I've had with good friends have been in person, one last summer and the other a month ago. If it's not in-person, it's kinda' dissatisfying. 
• A year ago my partner and I had a housewarming party, about eight months into living in our little duplex. I invited lots of people and they all came. It felt great to have so many people in our back yard, to see so many people in person. However, since then I've seen very few of them. I've had a couple interactions through Facebook or Instagram here and there, and one tried to set up a meeting last summer, when I was in a particularly low place, but apart from that all the interactions have been through a screen. The only people we've interacted with in-person since that party have been some of our friends in New West, where we lived previously, who knew my wife in high school.

In this "Good-Enough Friends" article, Dan Kois makes a couple observations that I think might be worth knocking around in my brain. I liked Kois's concluding paragraphs:

The internet is where I think a lot of my teenagers’ friends live too, whether they’re school friends who don’t get together in person or Discord friends who live in Italy or Minnesota or God knows where. And some of them really seem to be the friends of their hearts—people they’ve professed deep secrets to, people who share a worldview.

I don’t want to discount those friendships, which, in an atomized age, are fun, nurturing, meaningful—everything you’d want a close relationship to be. Yet it’s striking to me how frequently teenagers are able to avoid navigating the awkwardness of real-world connection. As one respondent to a recent New York Times survey of kids pointed out, “When I’m online, I can mute myself, and they can’t really see me. I can’t just mute myself in real life.”

I never had that, and maybe such online friendships of the heart would have changed my high school experience. But I wonder if they would have changed it for the better. I couldn’t mute myself with those good-enough friends. They really saw me. I had to learn to deal with them and their Extreme fandom; they had to learn to deal with my fussiness and nerdiness. That was the bargain we made, to have people to hang out with. I wonder what version of childhood, of life, offers more happiness: the one spent with perfect friends whom you never see, or the one spent with good-enough friends who, as I was, are up for whatever.

As it stands, as a 42-year-old man, it's hard to be "up for whatever." But I like to remember those times, when a phone call could set off a serious of social adventures, when meeting someone downtown could lead to numerous connections with numerous other people.

These serendipitous experiences depended on having a good cache of "good enough friends," of being willing to hang out with people and take time for people I didn't know exceptionally well. I have numerous fond memories of hanging out with people I barely knew, or felt were a little awkward. It was important to give these people a chance, and I had time to do it.  As Steve Dangle says in relation to hockey, you need to "make your own luck;" it was easier to be lucky socially in my early 20s.

But pretty-good friends now? They all have families. We're all constrained by time and bills and jobs and whatnot. It's harder to get together. It's harder to keep up with one another. It's harder to make those deep conversations that build years of experience.

I was thinking about Chickens, the musical I was in a few years ago. It was hard and it was grueling, and those friendships were overall really positive. I think we had a lot of great conversations with both cast and crew.  But once the play was over, once I moved down the Mainland, the relationships, for me, didn't quite continue. I saw how many of the cast and crew had forged their friendships through years of performances and projects. I was glad to get to know those people for that time, but knew I would never really break in to the friend group, because they had already forged those relationships. And that's OK, because I'd already forged good relationships in other places. 

And that's the value of those folks you've known forever. Those friendships were forged when there was time to forge them. And some of those friends are people I haven't seen for decades, but the conversation could pick up smoothly, as soon as I see them again.

In 2005, when I moved from the Island to the Mainland, I left most of those forged relationships behind me. I kind of feel like I still never recovered from that move, particularly after I got married. But I'd like to believe that I can catch up with some of those folks, one of these days. 

Scattered thoughts from a scattered mind, but hopefully coherent enough.