I would love to have more friends.
I just have absolutely no interest in doing any of the things required to make them. Meeting new people. Making plans. Leaving my house. Responding to messages within a socially acceptable time frame.
Gross.
What I want is an established friendship without participating in the deeply inconvenient introductory period. Can we skip meeting each other and go directly to having known each other for eight years?
I want you to already know that I’m going to disappear occasionally. I want to be able to send you a completely unrelated meme after three months of silence without either of us acknowledging the gap. I want a deep emotional bond with extremely low administrative requirements.
Unfortunately, this is apparently not how new friendships work.
There is one woman I have been meaning to become friends with. Our daughters are friends. They attend each other’s birthday parties every year. This woman and I see each other, talk, get along perfectly well, and inevitably say, “We should get together sometime.”
We have been saying this for three years.
At this point, I think saying it annually might actually be our friendship.
The girls have somehow managed to build and maintain an entire relationship while their mothers remain trapped in the preliminary discussion phase.
“We really should make plans.”
“Yes, definitely.”
Then we both return to our respective homes and make absolutely no attempt to do that.
To be clear, I mean it when I say we should get together. I would genuinely like to.
I would also like no one to suggest a date.
This is the difficult part about wanting more friends. Eventually somebody is going to invite you somewhere, and suddenly the hypothetical friendship has become a logistical problem.
Dinner? I would have to leave my house.
Drinks? Also outside my house.
A party? There will be several people outside my house.
Come over? Now people are inside my house.
I will attend school-parent things because I have children and apparently their education requires occasional public appearances. Everything else feels unnecessarily ambitious.
Sometimes I do make plans. I will also cancel made plans. These are both important parts of my process.
People say scheduling things in advance makes plans easier. It does not. It simply gives me more time to dread them.
I need at least three weeks’ notice so I have enough time to look forward to seeing you, regret agreeing to see you, consider canceling, feel guilty for considering canceling, nearly cancel, attend anyway, have a genuinely good time, and return home wondering why I behaved like I was being deployed.
Most of the time, I enjoy myself.
You would think this would teach me something.
It has not.
Then there is the communication portion of friendship, which I am somehow even worse at.
I can go months without talking to someone and still love them exactly the same amount. In my mind, nothing has changed. We are still friends. I have simply not provided any recent evidence.
I’ll randomly reappear with something like, “Hey you. Long time. Still alive?”
Then they respond.
This is where the system falls apart.
I see the message and think, “I’ll answer that in a minute.” Apparently, a minute in my brain is approximately 42 business days.
Eventually, enough time passes that responding feels embarrassing. Now I cannot simply say, “Sorry, I forgot.” I need an explanation for why I vanished midway through a conversation and resurfaced six weeks later.
I don’t have one.
So I continue not responding until enough additional time passes that I can send a birthday message, holiday greeting, or completely unrelated meme and inexplicably begin again. It is not a good system, but it is the system currently in place.
At one point, I had 151 unread text messages.
One hundred and fifty-one.
My best friend had texted me and was somewhere inside that pile.
She had no idea.
She probably assumed I read it and forgot to respond, which is honestly very generous of her because it suggests I made it far enough to read it.
Thankfully, she also has a whole herd of children. Our friendship has survived because neither of us has the time or organizational capacity to interpret silence as a personal attack. Months can pass, one of us can randomly reappear, and the friendship is still exactly where we left it.
That is the kind of friendship I understand. There is no attendance policy. No required weekly communication. No wellness check because somebody has not answered in months.
If you truly need me, you may have to call twice, text my husband, or send someone directly to my house to notify me. But once the information successfully reaches me, I’ll show up.
I just might not attend brunch afterward.
So yes, I would sincerely love to have more friends. I like people. There are people I have specifically thought, “I would really like to be friends with her.”
Have I done anything with that information?
Absolutely not.
My current friend-acquisition strategy is apparently to notice interesting people from a safe distance and hope we somehow develop a deep emotional connection without speaking, exchanging contact information, or making plans.
Friendship desired: yes.
Weekly communication: no.
Spontaneous plans: absolutely fucking not.
Long periods of unexplained silence: must not be taken personally.
Will genuinely show up when it matters despite routinely failing to answer ordinary texts: yes.
I realize I cannot complain too loudly about not having more friends when this is what I’m offering.
“I would like additional lifelong friendships. Applications are closed. Please do not approach me.”
