'It can absolutely be just as hard to find a really great friend as it is to find a soulmate.'

There seems to be this idea that friendships are easy, as though healthy friendships are just the accessories everyone comes with when they’re born, and romantic relationships are harder and take work and communication and effort.

We never hear close friends say things like, “Yeah we’ve been best friends for six years. It’s hard, sometimes! It definitely takes work, but it’s worth it. You have to choose each other every day.” That would sound so horrible, wouldn’t it? You’d hear that and think, Wow, you two guys should maybe stop being friends because that sounds COLD. 

But when we hear someone who’s been married a long time say it, we nod and smile and think, Wow, they’re really choosing each other. So sweet. But I think we should start viewing friendships as relationships because that statement is equally true for our friends.

It IS hard sometimes. It DOES take work, and hopefully, it is work worth doing.

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If we started viewing friendships as relationships, we wouldn’t feel like failures when we have to work on them, when we hit bumps in the road, when we both change individually and our relationship with each other changes as well. We would see it as a progression, as something we’re both working on together, as two people who get to keep choosing each other, or not.

In romantic relationships, people tend to think that something is only a success if it lasts forever, and we have the same expectation with our friendships. If a friendship ends, we never say, “We just wanted different things.” It can feel like once you’re friends, you have to strap in and stay on the ride forever, or else you’ve failed. But I have friends who were my favourites and we’re not friends anymore, and I will always hold them in my heart with neon lights around them. Do I wish they’d lasted longer? Yes! But if they didn’t end in an emotional shoot-out in a saloon, I still hold them in my heart as a great success, because I think the most successful relationships aren’t necessarily the ones that last the longest but the ones that made you the happiest.

So much of our conditioning, particularly for women, set up for us to think that our job is to have a great family (super easy, everyone just gets that, sure!), find some great friends (again, easy! Just learn to socialise, have a little fun, don’t think about it too much!), and then look for a partner. Your friends and family will be there while you look for romantic love, but don’t worry, they’re just the movie previews. The feature film is surely the person you will marry who will be everything to you and you will see your friends sometimes to complain about how he’s “on your dick” about something. (That sounded more like a cliche of a husband, but I prefer to think of it this way here because it is more fun.) Then you go back home to him, your One True Love, your cup having been refilled with understanding and assurance from your friends. This is madness.

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What if we put more weight behind all of our connections and allowed them to be richer, more conscious, healthy, and full? Think of how much freer we would be to make decisions about the types of people we have in our lives. 

If you have a great friend group, you won’t be in a rush to “settle” with the wrong romantic partner, because you’ve been able to develop that intimacy, that bond, that kind of love and companionship with your friends, so now you’re not seeking one romantic partner to be the only community you have. And you have people in your life who are there to support you in this choice not to settle, even when society is screaming at you that you should.

I always wished we had more romantic comedies about friendships because these two types of love are so very similar. You meet someone in a cute way, you want it to be a little more, and then it becomes more, and more and more and more. And now you have a how we met story (I love a good friendship how we met story). You have history, you have a will they/won’t they (become friends), you have all the makings of a great romantic comedy in which neither of you have frenched. Or you did once but have not since, etc., no judgment.

It can absolutely be just as hard to find a really great friend as it is to find a soulmate. And that beginning of a relationship when you’re both playing a weird game of chicken to figure out if this has legs or if you’re just trying each other on? Good god that exists in friendships. So let’s explore things you might experience during the “What Are We” stage of friendship:

1. Reading way too much into everything they say. “Is this turning into a thing?” is something I say virtually every twenty minutes while reading texts from someone I have a crush on and also a new friend I am really excited about. Are they just bored and I’m a fun new text friend, or are we also mutually mentally planning a friendship road trip for three to four months from now, or maybe next week because I’m around?

2. Trying to figure out how to say goodbye in a casual way usually turns into you half-hugging them and running away. Running away at the end of the first few friendship hangs with someone is one of my favourite pastimes/coping mechanisms. Mostly the latter.

3. Being so nervous about making plans for the next time you see them that you just leave before it can happen. Because what if I ask them what they’re doing next weekend, and they say, “Um, I have my own life, next week is too soon and I saw this as more of an every three months friendship,” but they’re too polite to say it outright, and then I have to figure that out from their tone and body language cues. No, thank you, bye.

4. Not wanting to assume that everyone who is passively nice to you wants to be real friends with you, so you assume no one ever wants to be real friends with you. This has been my plan since I was thirteen and I’ve been happily unsure of my personal connections ever since (JK, this plan is terrible).

5. The more you like someone, the more terrified and nervous you become. My friends are always trying to tell me to “calm down” and “stop breathing into that paper bag every night when you think that this new friendship might actually be something cool because that means it could end and then where will you be,” but I don’t listen.

6. You worry about making the first move. Have I tried asking a stranger who I felt I had a cool connection with if they wanted to be friends and then it turned into three fun texts and a mutual ghosting? Yes, I have. And because of this, the last time I made the first move was about four years ago and I don’t plan to do it again!

7. Someone you hit it off with says they want to hang out sometime and you debate in your head for two hours whether it’s worth it. I mean, they could be great or they could be mean or weird or I don’t like them as much, or they don’t like me as much, and then we’re trying to make it work when it just doesn’t . . . oh. They already walked away, like twenty minutes ago. Hm.

8. Wanting to be Best Friends so badly that you start romanticising that future possibility to an inappropriate degree. Basically falling in love with the idea of how close you could be, cute things they could do, cute things you could do, to the point where you’ve now written this friendship rom-com in your head without them and you don’t even know their middle name yet.

9. Wanting to scream, “DO YOU WANT TO BE BEST FRIENDS?” during conversation but having to hold it in. Once I full-blown like someone, it’s all I can do to not shout this every twelve minutes.

10. Being so terrified of first-friend-date silence that you end up telling a really personal and upsetting story. Probably about your gut microbiome or how your parents died in a fire. Neither one goes super well with noodles. But to be fair, some of my favourite friendships started off with unintentional mutual trauma blurting that turned into laughter and a solid bond, so it could go either way.

This is an edited extract from You Will Find Your People by Lane Moore, published by Thames & Hudson, RRP $39.99.

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