Once just an app for dating, in 2016 Bumble launched a new feature for finding a different kind of soulmate — a friend. Bumble BFF was created to function like the initial dating app; you join, create a profile, swipe through algorithm-suggested people, find a match, and go on a “friend date.”
When it comes to the daunting and perhaps mysterious process of making close friends, a dating app probably isn’t the first thing that comes to your mind. I don’t think about perfectly curating a profile that lists my likes, dislikes, Spotify wrapped, Enneagram type, zodiac sign (Leo, duh) for potential candidates to judge and decide whether they want to be friends with me or not. Sure, when I meet someone for the first time, I’ll half-jokingly ask what their Spotify wrapped was and silently judge them if Harry Styles didn’t make it in their top five — but I don’t plan on swiping left or right on their face if they happen to only listen to 80s hair metal bands from Europe.
Jokes aside, I do see why some people may join Bumble BFF. I mean, making friends as an adult is hard, especially if you moved away from your family and friends at home. And sometimes you need help getting out of your shell or finding friends that are out there. As human beings longing for community, something that has become harder to find after the pandemic, why wouldn’t we want to use the resources available to us?
According to Forbes Health, 59% of adults in the United States found it harder to form relationships since COVID-19. The pandemic made us more isolated and lonelier than ever before. We’ve become accustomed to keeping to ourselves. Cancelling plans to stay comfortably at home is now a habit. The friends we once saw twice a week have become the people we occasionally see once a month. And because many jobs can be done remotely now, even our work buddies are people we only “ping” when a job needs to be done — long gone are the coffee breaks and the drinks after work.
Difficulty in forming friendships wasn’t just a result of the pandemic, of course, it seems that friendships are harder to make as you grow older, too. Marisa G. Franco, a psychologist who teaches at the University of Maryland, pinpointed why it may be harder to make friends as an adult:
Sociologists have kind of identified the ingredients that need to be in place for us to make friends organically, and they are continuous unplanned interaction and shared vulnerability. But as we become adults, we have less and less environments where those ingredients are at play.
Time and time again, I’ve heard from my peers how difficult it is to find community when you are no longer in school or living in the dorms. And unless you are already connected to a church, finding a small group of besties feels impossible and intimidating.
The post-college friendship desert also reveals just how much friendships are more the result of proximity than what we might think of as compatibility. I may not have become friends with someone if I had to swipe right on an app, but a friendship nonetheless formed because we were around each other for large amounts of time. For friends, we don’t usually have a checklist of desired traits or a radar for red flags that we may require for a romantic partner (although there is a lot of chatter about getting rid of toxic friends on TikTok). Friends are mostly free from the tests of compatibility and chemistry because they bloom out of mutual need for community.
When it comes to friendship, compatibility largely follows from proximity, rather than the reverse. For instance, attending a church or church-like gathering surrounds you with people of faith. Going to, say, a Taylor Swift concert surrounds you with other Swifties that like to bop to Reputation and cry to evermore. Or even showing up to a sports bar puts you around people who also enjoy watching football, eating hot wings, and drinking beer.
Of course, proximity can also have a downside. It doesn’t always provide room for diversity, wholeness, or meaningful dialogue. It can trap us in the echo chambers that only reflect back our same beliefs, thoughts, and ideas (algorithms are great at doing this, too).
But what I want to convey with proximity is less about ensuring you are around people that are similar to you and more about simply being around people. Sometimes we can’t even remember the beginning of our most cherished friendships because they happened without us even trying. It wasn’t so much the work we put in, but the random experiences and the collective need for connection that made it flourish. Sarah Condon, on the latest Mockingcast episode, said, “We live these lives where we are just missing the miracles.” If miracles are all around us, I believe that friendships can come from something as mundane as sitting next to someone on a train ride or waiting in line to buy your Chicken Tikka Samosas from Trader Joes — no matter how much it sounds like a bad Hallmark movie.
Many of our insecurities or social anxieties stem from the pressure to fit in and put forth a personality that meshes perfectly with those of others. Our tired attempts of control have made any connection into a battle to be won rather than a gift to be received. But true friendship is less about the status quo or worthiness and more about the unmerited grace of happenstance. It’s less about compatibility and more simply about being around other people. It doesn’t have to be as scary or complicated as we’ve made it out to be.
By letting go of the pressure, maybe we can be freed from the isolated worlds in which we’ve found ourselves stuck and be open to the seemingly randomness of friendship. As Laura Fabrycky for Comment put it so beautifully:
[Friends] can also be a well from which to draw when life robs us of our human dignity, even when we are the thief. In the lonely crown, among the pluralities of our networks, contacts, and associates, a friend is the one who is still willing to know us, singularly and freely.
Friendship — like grace — is a happenstance. As with many of the best things in life, it is a happy little unmerited accident amid a sea of loneliness. It is circumstance repeated over time until a relationship of mutual interdependence mysteriously springs up out of nowhere.
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4 responses to “The Seemingly Random Accident of Friendship”
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Love this, Cali. Friendship was the theme of our youth retreat last weekend. We shared these words from C.S. Lewis:
“In friendship…we think we have chosen our peers. In reality a few years’ difference in the dates of our births, a few more miles between certain houses, the choice of one university instead of another…the accident of a topic being raised or not raised at a first meeting–any of these chances might have kept us apart. But, for a Christian, there are, strictly speaking no chances. A secret master of ceremonies has been at work. Christ, who said to the disciples, “Ye have not chosen me, but I have chosen you,” can truly say to every group of Christian friends, “Ye have not chosen one another but I have chosen you for one another.” The friendship is not a reward for our discriminating and good taste in finding one another out. It is the instrument by which God reveals to each of us the beauties of others.”
Missing you, my friend!
Thanks for this reflection, Cali. My friendships are the most treasured relationships I have besides my family, and when I think about how most of them started, it really is a product of continuous unplanned interaction & shared vulnerability. The challenge I’ve discovered in maintaining those existing friendships, though, is that I’m at an age where virtually everyone is married and many are having kids, so the pandemic-induced retreat into home life has been a huge setback for a single person like myself. My married friends can cancel plans & hang out with each other at home; when my plans are cancelled, I am home alone. It’s a really hard phase of life and I’m not sure what to do about it; my married friends don’t have much understanding of what it’s like, but I also can’t excessively force my way into their home lives.
As for making new friends… I will admit to being skeptical of the premise. Nowadays, you can put yourself in proximity to all kinds of strangers out in public, but *everyone’s* attention is completely captured by their phone. The idea of meeting someone on the train is well & good, but 95% of the people on any of my recent train or bus trips are looking down at their phone. Makes it very hard to strike up a conversation. I absolutely thrived on the serendipitous interactions in school to make friends, and I feel tremendously blessed that I finished college before phones colonized everybody’s attention everywhere. It sucks to try to connect with a stranger in public now, and I’m not surprised that people think apps are the solution, since everyone’s just looking at their phone all the time anyway.
[…] It is the instrument by which God reveals to each of us the beauties of others.” I’ve written about this before, but friendship is more so the result of proximity than what we may think of compatibility. Or in […]
[…] a designated place to meet friends, especially post college, is nice. If you haven’t already read her article, Cali Yee discusses this post-college friend desert and argues that friendship is more a result of […]