the best boat...is your friend's boat
part II of a series on friendship
Are you a good friend? What type of measure would one need to answer this question?
Claude Monet, Impression Sunrise, 1872
Society has enlisted various metrics that tell us how wealthy we are (net worth), how healthy we are (BMI), or how smart we are (IQ). But when it comes to friendships, it’s an ambiguous and subjective evaluation. Friendship is something I’ve invested a lot into in the last few years, and I’ve been actively studying how to maintain it.
On many of our worst days, we feel less alone because we find that unique synchrony that comes from talking to the people who know us best. The magic of friendship is that it is the ultimate biohack. There’s research on when we’re unhappy in our intimate relationships, we can still be happy with our lives if the quality of our friendships is high. When I have bad days at work or feel a dissatisfaction with life, I call my friends. It’s not that I have to share every detail of my lives with them to feel a deep connection. Simply 8 minutes of just hearing their voice, voicing my emotional turbulence, and knowing that they’re listening brings me tremendous gratification.
These days, the toughest part is that my closest friends live farther away from me. Today, we move to the places where we find employment, or we want to live in cities that are “cool” and provide a culture we’re looking for. Millennials are moving to Texas or Florida to save money on taxes and housing. But personally, I don’t want to save money to live in a place I don’t want to be. I want to live with the people I love, and if it costs more, I can make that sacrifice.
When we make friends, we sign an implicit contract with each other. To me, it would be something like this:
I wish we lived fairly close to each other, but since we can’t, I expect us to call or text a few times a month. We’ll both actively try to make that happen. If you text me and I don’t reply right away, it’s not because I’ve forgotten about you. I’ll ring you back soon. I love talking, and I prefer to communicate on a call. I’ll call you on your birthday, write sappy messages and send you letters wishing you were with me, and remind you of who you are even when you forget. I come to you because I appreciate your advice or because I know you’ll listen. I may ask for a favor from time to time because I’d inconvenience myself to do the same for you. It’s an absolute honor to be there at times when you need someone to pick you up. I hope that you’ll be part of my life for a long time.
We don’t need a lot of friends. As with everything else, quality is better than quantity. On average, very close friendships take around 200 hours to develop. But we can’t leave our friendships to coincidence. Friendships don’t stick because we went to school with a person, or bump into them randomly while being back home. They require active work.
If you need reminding of who you are, a really good question to ask a friend is, “Why are we friends?” They might answer with, “Oh, well you’re really caring” or “you’re so much fun to be around” or “you’re so funny”. But your job is to play devil’s advocate and argue, “Well that could be true of anybody. Why are you and I friends?” You’ll start to see your friend dig deep and look for stories about a time one of you showed up for the other person, or something that is only specific to you.
I recently tried this with a friend. We reflected on how our friendship started and realized that our relationship deepened when I was there at a really low point in her life, when she needed help but didn’t know she had to ask for it. Over time, she said, “You just continued to show up. You were consistent with making sure we called.” Another thing she mentioned that really touched me, “You make me want to be a better person.”
We stay friends with people because they make us want to be better versions of ourselves. They make us feel good. We want to continue improving by proxy of them.
The question, “Why are we friends?” pulls back the curtain of vulnerability and makes it easier to understand what holds your friendship together.
We store pieces of our identity in friends. Our memories are innately interwoven. When retelling stories to each other, we don’t say, “I did this cool thing x years ago.” We say, “Remember when we did that together?” There’s no way to replicate the experience of someone knowing you through a particular period of your life. Even for the friends we lost along the way, you still think of them when you look back at those eras. As we get older we don’t lose friends, we just find out who our real ones are.
There is this common adage which goes:
“There are good ships and wood ships, ships that sail the sea, but the best ships are friendships, and may they always be.”
I think I found an updated version of this when I watched an interview between Simon Sinek and Trevor Noah. Noah was traveling, asking around for what kind of boat to buy, when a man interjected, jokingly, by answering, “The best boat is your friend’s boat.” The reasoning is quite simple. Everybody who buys a boat needs friends to be on their boat with them. If everybody is working to buy a boat, no one has time to have friends to enjoy their boat with. And no one wants to be alone on their boat.
Appreciate you reading.