How You May Be Harming Your Friendships

Most of us have an implicit hierarchy in our relationships. It goes something like: spouse –>family–>friends, or family–>spouse–>friends. Either way, at least for heterosexual people, friends are at the bottom. This hierarchy limits what we see as normal for ourselves and others to do for friends. Fly across the country to visit a romantic partner? Cool! Do it for a friend? Hmm. That’s kind of intense. Is mom recovering from surgery? Take care of her! Friend recovering? Shoot them a text to see if they’re all right. Does brother need a loan? Sure. I’ll help out. Does a friend need a loan? I’m not sure I feel comfortable.

We’ve been taught to compartmentalize friendship to happy hour, movies, or dinners. With our romantic partners, however, our repertoire of acceptable behaviors is broader. We express love, work through conflict, or formally commit through hard times. We assume that friendship is inherently shallow compared to other types of relationships. But, it’s not. It only tends to be because we compartmentalize friendship in ways that dampen its depth.

How to Decompartmentalize Friendship

The backbone of intimacy is found in de-compartmentalizing, in shaking up tired norms to let friendship breathe. In the research this is called multiplexity and it is linked to greater closeness. We must reclaim, among friends, behaviors typically confined to family or romantic partners. Smiley Poswolsky’s new book, Friendship in the Age of Loneliness, reveals several practices we can engage in to de-compartmentalize friendship, such as developing rituals with friends, having friend sleepovers, making a playlist for friends, and hugging friends longer. He describes his friend Gabe who “squeezes you like he loves you. He squeezes you like he isn’t afraid of what people will say when they see two men hugging for a minute on the street.”

Whatever decompartmentalizing looks like to you, if you’re willing to embrace it, you’ll feel closer to friends than ever. For me, it looks like friend vacations, visiting long-distance friends, and directly telling my friends how much I cherish them.