When I pitched this story, I opened with the following sentiment: “I am a 33-year-old working mum of a toddler so while I think about friendship a lot, it feels like I don't have a tonne of it in my life. Or at least not the time to cultivate it.”
A few weeks passed, during which the New York Times introduced us to the ‘medium friend’, Dazed defined ‘aesthetic friendships’ and Charli and Lorde worked it out on the remix. In my corner of the internet, the noise around friendship was reaching a fever pitch – a maelstrom of jargon, pseudo-psychology and a pop song to boot. But I wasn’t sure I still believed in my angle: death to catching up? The topic appeared to have swelled beyond that container.
Meanwhile I’ve been trying to catch up with one of my friends for months now, aligning our calendars feels like trying to crack the Da Vinci Code. I oscillate between feeling bruised and giving her grace. Trying to get beyond myself and see her as a complete person, with her own unique set of worries, pressure and plates spinning precariously above her head – instead of focusing solely on how her actions (or inaction) affects me. But it’s not always easy taking the high road and sometimes I feel like a scorned lover, waiting in vain for a text or reciprocation.
Fast forward a few more weeks, Charli was now working it out on the remix with Billie and I was still grappling with the chimaera that had become this story. Unable to wrestle my thoughts and feelings into a neat 800 word parcel, I submitted my first draft (V4 nonetheless) and stewed in the absence of clarity I’d been able to summon. Meanwhile, my friend and I had managed the inconceivable and aligned our calendars for the long awaited ‘catch up’.
READ MORE: Ensemble on friendship
• The last time Shit You Should Care About cried, danced and got drunk
• Good news, yappers: Group chats can improve your mental health
• Ensemble Love Line: Can I be mad at a friend dating my ex, if I did the same?
• An ode to the close girl summer
It wasn’t that we hadn’t tried to see each other in the intervening months. We were consumed by the relentless roster of work, parenting and attempting a modicum of self-care that there simply were not enough hours in the day. This compression would lead to unrealistic attempts at connection. Trying to work each other into our existing agendas at the last minute and realising that spontaneity is a luxury of youth.
Therein lies the friction of the ‘catch up’. With old friends – those you grew up with, travelled with, or spent significant time with in your 20s, squishing your companionship into the time it takes to drink a coffee feels especially jarring. Earlier this year, TikTok user Bianca Stellin (@infinitebs) made the news with a viral video asking, “Have most of your friendships devolved into catch up friendships?”
Describing how “every time you talk you have to start the conversation with a big load of life updates, before you know it you’ve essentially spent 45 minutes interviewing each other like you’re on a reality show”.
So how do we travel back to the silly, joke laden realm of friendship past, and can we? Meandering days spent with conversation (freed from the constraints of life updates), allowed to roam and riff becoming a shared world of its own.
Rhaina Cohen explores the concept of world-building in her article for The Atlantic, titled What Adults Forget About Friendship. She writes, “Although friendships naturally evolve as we grow up, they don’t have to lose their vitality. Maintaining a childlike approach to friendship into adulthood can result in connections that remain essentially ageless.”
Armed with all my big ideas, I was ready for one bonanza of a catch up. But, disaster struck – I couldn’t help feeling the universe was conspiring against me when my partner mentioned he had a work commitment on Thursday. It was the Thursday, the titular Thursday, the cracking of the code: our catch up. His CEO was visiting from Australia to celebrate the company’s 30th anniversary. I had to convince him that the ‘catch up’ was, in fact, of equal importance. I rushed to explain the background; the WhatsApp ping pong, trading of calendars, and the juggling of work and family required to produce this reunion of besties. My heart hoped quietly that’s what we still were.
The truth was, I wasn’t sure what we owed each other anymore. Somewhere between our late 20s and early 30s, the rules changed. We had kids, careers, partners – our lives expanded and shifted to accommodate these new responsibilities, pushing our friendship to the periphery. So, though I sometimes felt like a lover scorned, I wasn’t sure I had any right to. We have well-defined expectations for romantic and familial bonds, with societal norms dictating the level of care required. In contrast, the rules of friendship are shaped entirely by those participating in it.
New York Times best-selling author and psychologist Marissa G. Franco writes extensively on the subject of relationship hierarchies describing how, for heterosexual people, friends exist on the bottom rung. You could fill a thousand libraries with the literature on how to find love, be in love, fall out of love and the same could be said for parenting. This blind spot trickles down into the way we communicate; we don't have the vocabulary to express platonic love or discontent so often we say nothing at all. Likely why Charli xcx and Lorde working it out on the remix felt so subversive. Tapping into a vein running just beneath the surface for so many of us, how do we actually talk to our friends?
It was hard to get beyond the superficial when so much of our comms were taking place over messaging apps. A haphazard exchange of memes and WhatsApp messages, the tools used to shade in lives that were layered and complex, was rife for misinterpretation. I was worried I might have offended her at one point, unsure if my contrition was conveyed, despite my exaggerated use of heart emojis. Likewise, I harboured my own hurt at her absence in my time of need. A little sting that refused to be soothed by rationalising about how busy we both were.
By now I’d used so much of our dynamic to explore this subject that it felt only right to share it with her. My plan had been to get into the weeds of it all over a pinot in the crisp winter air, but in an ironic twist of fate our catch up didn’t materialise. So here I am, nervously hitting send on an email and wondering if this is how Charli felt sending that voice note to Lorde. The vulnerability of exposing myself as the raw naked baby I am.
Family activist and author Mia Birdsong, in conversation with journalist Julie Beck, describes how there is no way to have a close relationship without allowing yourself to be seen in some way. “I think many of us are terrified of being known. We want people to see the best version of ourself, because we think that’s the version that people will love.” Beck responds, “if there’s a basic action to community-building, it is ‘not hiding’.”
So here I am. And while I might be wishing ‘death’ upon the catch up what I’m really trying to say is: I love you, I miss you, I miss us x
