F.R.I.E.N.D.S.

I know why friendship doesn’t look right in the movies. Friendship is such a varied thing. (But maybe I just feel that way because I’m an Enthusiast.) Each friendship I have is different. It feels impossible that one friend should have to do it all. Rolling my celebrity gossip friend, my sitcom-loving friend, my heart-to-heart friend and my “can you believe what I just did?” friend into one person seems like an unfair task. I could force my friend Robert to start buying People magazines so he, too, could keep up with Rita Ora, but that’s a recipe for disaster. It makes sense that friendship seems cleaner in movies and on TV. On screen, you need to have a reliable (but not too large) cast of characters that you can rotate in and out. It is a practical production decision. It isn’t supposed to be a reflection of reality. I know that as an adult. But, as a child, I felt like I wasn’t doing friendship “right.” I never had just one person with whom I wanted to share a BFF necklace. And they don’t make BFF necklaces that are divided into 18ths. Sometimes, it is worth reminding yourself that fiction is fiction. Friendship can be messy. Friends annoy one another. Friends fall in and out of touch. Friendship isn’t always a made-for-Instagram proposition. It can be easy, even at my old age, to doom scroll through Instagram at night and think, like I did at eight, that I’m not doing friendship “right.”

Friendship can be messy. Friends annoy one another. Friends fall in and out of touch.

So, I’m just reminding you—as I often have to remind myself—that friendship can look however you want it to look. You and your best friend love to sit in silence while you glue pom-poms to a giant poster of Jonathan Taylor Thomas each month? Great. That can be friendship. Or you and six friends stay in constant contact through a group chat that never dies? That’s not for me, but I love that that’s your style. There’s no real template for friendship; each one looks different. That’s what makes it, simultaneously, one of the most freeing and terrifying relationships you can have. You pick how it looks and functions and feels. Robert will live another day without me calling him on the phone demanding he learn that Rita Ora is releasing an album and, even though she called herself a musical artist for years, it is her first album. Robert, you’re off the hook. For now. Maybe in my next life, I’ll have that one BFF, the kind you want to share half of a necklace with. But, in this life, I have a bunch of beautiful and different friendships and, as long as I don’t randomly compare myself to fictional models of friendship, that feels pretty good.