2001 

In 2001, I was six years old, and a full fledged tomboy. I had a little bowl cut and often wore my brothers' baggy clothes. The average passerby couldn't tell if I was a girl or boy, but my friends and I didn't care because we weren't really aware of gender at that age.

My days of limitless imagination were spent with one kid in particular: Rithvik, a little Indian boy who lived a couple houses down from me. It's been almost twenty years since I've seen him, and I can't remember what we talked about or how we spent our time. But I know for sure he was my best friend. And when I peed my pants accidentally this one time randomly, Rithvik was there to help and loan me a fresh pair of his Spiderman-themed underpants. Gosh, what a friend. 

"...Remember when we cut our hair/ Both looked like boys/ But we didn't care..."

So where did all our underwear-lending friends go? Well, if you've been wondering the same thing, don't worry. There are tons of writers who have opined on the topic of friendship and discussed how it evolves over time. As an example: In the last scene of the 1986 classic, Stand By Me, the protagonist of the story, Gordy, writes:

"I never had any friends later on like the ones I had when I was twelve. Jesus, does anyone?"

In an essay for The Guardian, columnist Josephine Tovey explores the impact of this final scene. She says:

"We see Gordy hunched in his home study over his computer, with thinning hair and a swelling paunch, ruminating on a time when his days were filled by his three best friends and their endless, circular conversations, excoriating humour and life-and-death adventures. Grown-up Gordy isn't shown talking to anyone outside his family any more....That last line always stuck with me, as a coda to the story but also as a warning. What it said was that deep, fortifying, true friendship is for the young." 

Two things. I do think most people will go on to become a Gordy, unfortunately. Secondly, I'm going to take a moment to disagree that "deep, fortifying, and true friendships" are only for the young. I push back against this romantic notion of young adulthood because my own childhood wasn't anything like Stand by Me. I had a large group of friends when I was younger, but I was introverted and sort of kept to the edge of the group. There were no camping trips in the backwoods of Oregon, no hunts for treasure, no searches for missing kids' dead bodies (please watch the movie to get the reference), and certainly no near-death, train chase scenes. 

When it comes to friendship, I was a late bloomer. It wasn't until my last years in high school and college that I started to understand what kinds of people I fit in with. One thing I miss about college was all the time we had to spend with each other. I would see my friends in the cafeteria for every meal, in the student center between classes, in the library when we did work, and at night in the dorm before going to bed. It was a period of my life when I didn't have to work at making friends -- friendships just happened.

Which brings me to my next crucial point: time. In a recent study, researchers found that it takes about "50 hours of time with someone before you consider them a casual friend, 90 hours before you become real friends, and about 200 hours to become close friends". Additionally, they define "time" as quality time. Simply existing in the same space as someone doesn't count. If it did, lord knows we would all be BFFs with our coworkers.

So, in short, I think Tovey's remark above must be reworded. “Deep, fortifying, true friendship” is not just for the young; it's for those with the most free time to nurture their friendship. 

Stand by Me is a 1986 American coming-of-age film directed by Rob Reiner and based on Stephen King's 1982 novella The Body, with a title derived from Ben E. King's song. In Stand by Me, four boys in 1959 Castle Rock, Oregon, go on a hike to find the dead body of a missing boy.

The film was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay and two Golden Globe Awards: one for Best Drama Motion Picture and one for Best Director.

Although, if you're a typical human being, chances are you'll move around for work, get caught up in said work, and start to lose contact with your friends....Time just isn't on our side. 

William Rawlins, the Stocker Professor of Interpersonal Communication at Ohio University, summarizes it well: 

"As people enter middle age, they tend to have more demands on their time, many of them more pressing than friendship. After all, it's easier to put off catching up with a friend than it is to skip your kid's play or an important business trip. The ideal of people's expectations for friendship is always in tension with the reality of their lives. The largest drop-off in friends in the life course occurs when people get married, and that's kind of ironic, because at the [wedding], people invite both of their sets of friends, so it's kind of this last wonderful and dramatic gathering of both people's friends, but then it drops off."

After the baby, everything changed / I only have a couple a night these days / I've been gigging around, it's really bumming me out / That suddenly no one wants to play it fucking loud / Let's get the old band back together again / Let's get back in the room and let the magic happen

Words of Wisdom from my friends, Mary and Sean:

I think this sense of longing and nostalgia about past friendships is captured really well in "Get the Old Band Back Together", one of my favorite singles off of Christian Lee Hutson's 2020 album, Beginners (Talk, Northsiders, and Lose This Number are great songs as well). 

The first time I heard this song was in Brooklyn at a Better Oblivion Community Center concert. When Christian performed it, the band members of the other acts came out to sing it with him. As they performed it, I immediately felt the weight and happiness of the song. It made me think of the awesome feeling you get when all your old friends get together, and how amazing it is to be reunited. But the song can also make you feel like shit too, because you realize that friendship inevitably involves decay, fizzling out, and just a general, awkward weirdness. People get busy, time passes, and then you're not sure if you ever can be friends again like before. Christian’s song, like the end of Stand by Me, is another warning/encouragement for us to make time for friendship and let the "magic happen".

"To Sharon, Phoebe, Marshall, Ethan, Griff, Dash, Darin, Kelly, my family and all my sweet friends: I love you all so much. Thank you for helping me make this thing." - Christian, May 29, 2020. (I included his album dedication because I feel like album dedications as a whole are so tender and so worthwhile, but horribly underrated and rarely read. 

Not only are friendships hard to maintain,  but they can be disappointing and hard too. A part of me is struggling to figure out what I want to say during this part of the essay. [So as always, when I have writer's bloc, I go back to a writing technique I learned in my 12th grade English class, which is continuous writing. No matter what happens, keep typing, keep writing (stream of consciousness style, like Jack Kerouac).] I have this song by Ethan Gruska playing in the background (you should click those two little videos right there and listen to them for yourself). I love Ethan's music so much. Of all the songs I've featured in this article, the song, "On the Outside" speaks to me the most. Let me explain: I have a friend who lives super close to me. We know each other very well, and we've been hanging out since we were super young. But she doesn't really make an effort to spend time with me, even though I keep inviting her to do stuff again and again. It’s a bit frustrating. So when Ethan sings, "You shake my hand, and then you go on with your life, my friend. I always feel like I'm on the outside with you", I understand him. His lyrics really resonate with me, and I feel I can put myself in his shoes. To me, this song has to do with our need to be valued as human beings. And when we feel like we're being dismissed or taken for granted, well, that can be hard. But taking this song in conjunction with "Get the Old Band Back Together", we should realize that the hustle and bustle of our daily lives is bound to wound or slow down our friendships. It’s no one’s fault, and rarely do people mean to hurt you. As I said, it's just the natural arc of how friendships evolve over time (I also think it’s low-key a symptom of how we prioritize relationships in this little civilization we call America, but that topic we’ll save for another time...). As I've gotten older, I've come to terms with this aspect of friendship more. My advice to readers experiencing the same thing: forgive your friends, but also don't sell yourselves short. Value yourselves. People change, and people's lives are constantly in flux. If new friendship and companionship are what you're seeking, find people who both value friendships the same way you do and who currently have the space in their lives for new friends. 

Friendship advice from Lala Lala. 

Lala Lala is the indie rock project of Chicago-based songwriter Lillie West. She was raised in London and moved to Los Angeles with her family when she was a teenager (which explains why my friends and I were very confused and could not tell if she was an American doing a British accent, or a British person doing an American accent during her concert hehe).

Even though friendships can be messy, they’re so important to our wellbeing.  The recording I've attached (see below) is from the same Better Oblivion Concert where I saw Christian Lee Hutson perform for the first time. Lillie West, the lead singer and songwriter of Lala Lala, tells this crazy story right before she begins playing "Fuck With Your Friends". The whole thing is wonderful and hilarious (and I'm so thankful I have this odd habit of recording the concerts I go to).

Lillie’s story gets at one of the main benefits of friendship, which is access to the banter, the inside jokes, and all the hilarious, I-wanna-piss-my-pants moments between you and your friends. We don’t need to fully get into the research on the myriad health benefits, but just know that spending time with friends is plain good for the human soul.

To put it a different way, socializing with a good friend is like achieving the highest level of fluency. It's almost like we begin to speak a different dialect of English. Each word in our stories has meaning or conjures an old memory. For example, that tennis court over there isn't just a tennis court. No, it's the place where you in the tenth grade catapulted a tennis ball 100 feet in the air, only for it to accidentally land on the windshield of a Honda Odyssey minivan and prompt the woman sitting inside to come out and yell at you. Ah, memories.