Ask Anahit: Friend Group

I (like many of us I’m sure) dream of having a close knit community of friends who spend time together that’s more than just grabbing coffee. But I have an in-person job with set hours, everyone’s tired and busy, and I don’t feel like I’ve got the energy to organise stuff. Any advice? 

I was convinced my best friend had sent in this question, because we talk about this all the time, and it turns out she didn’t and is weirded out, because we talk about this all the time. I don’t know if I find the fact that other people also feel this way comforting or depressing. It does make me wonder if we’re all yearning for a utopia that doesn’t exist and that’s why none of us can attain it, which I find definitively depressing. No one told you life was gonna be this way (clap clap clap), except they kind of did DAVID CRANE AND MARTHA KAUFFMAN, and it isn’t what they said and I think that is more egregious than the enormous Greenwich Village apartment, actually.

Which is to say, really, that I don’t have an answer; a state that fills me with latent shame and anxiety because I literally wrote a book about friendship, so why is it still so precarious in my life? I think the usual stuff – patriarchy, heteronormativity, capitalism – is to blame, and there’s only so much we can do against such deep-rooted systemic power. Part of my advice, then, is to not internalise this absence, because you’re fighting against pretty big obstacles.

My other advice, if you really want to stage the resistance, is to think about this in terms of time and space. The kind of community you’re seeking is rooted in a particular idea of time (things not being scheduled, a shared life) and space (collective domesticity, third spaces). Set up a groupchat filled with random friends and tell people when you’ll be hanging at the pub with a book, or the evenings you’re doing an open house and people can just drop in. Keep doing the weekend coffee, but invite another person, and then suggest running an errand together that bleeds into the afternoon. Try and fold people into your everyday. It’s really fucking hard, because modern life isn’t built that way, and it may fall apart and you have to start from scratch. But those moments when it comes together are so, so worth it.