#16 - I refuse to believe in friENDship

Building off of Gus' Hump Meeting, we investigate bonamie. The sacrament, the pain of loss, the effervescence and our human need for friendship.

Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin is a fast paced, entertaining novel with complex characters, artistic cultural references, frequent nods to Shakespeare and a narrative structure that resembles the game, Super Mario Brothers. The book takes place in Los Angeles (and in Cambridge, MA) and is overtly about video games, which serves as backdrop for romance and the story’s heartbreaks. But most of all it’s a love letter to friendship. The book begs many of the age old questions: What is friendship? What does it mean to be a good friend? Are friends necessary? How do friends repair from cruelty? How do and should friendships end?

As a parent of rising eighth graders, someone who interviews high schoolers wishing for Stanford, a former PTO co-president (with the amazing Azadeh Rasmussen) and normal human being, it seems that societally we’ve lost the plot line when it comes to friendship. Friendship feels frayed for our children, but somehow achingly more so for we adults. Go no further than anyone posting on X to know that our society lionizes individual success, ambition and status over shared companionship, intimacy and play. Are friendships built or emergent? Is this the END times of friENDship?

Los Angeles Circumlocution

I grew up in Los Angeles. And by LA, I do not mean the Inland Empire, Tarzana (the Valley), Westlake Village, Hawthorne, Torrance or any of the other places that claim to be LA proximal. I’m talking about dyed in the wool, westside LA: Santa Monica, WeHo, Beverly Hills (adjacent), West LA, Mid Wilshire - the La Brea Tar Pits. We’ll accede to Culver City, these days, K-town, 7th and Adams and Dogtown. Malibu and Manhattan Bach can eat it and none of that north OC stuff. I note my own privilege in my descriptions of LA geography.

In spite of this, we Angelenos feel this ghostlier demarcation¹ of belonging that leads us to cheer for the Lakers (I did), while being conflicted about Kobe (I was and am), and root for the Dodgers at Chavez Ravine (I never went as a kid), fail to cross the 405 (but to play Street Fighter 2 at UCLA), ride closeouts in Santa Monica (I was 32 when I finally did) and pick up LA-ese, which goes a little something like:

Oh my god! It’s so good to see you! We definitely need to hang. How long you in town? Beers, coffee soon? I’ll call you! Lates!…. [turning to the next person] Oh hey, you!!!!

This was the typical Southern Californian patois; saccharine, evanescent, Hegelian, connection as authentic as a Louis Vuitton knock-off from the Venice boardwalk. Growing up, we were all magister when it came to this ludic, lingual dance. My sister, Evelyn, a considered thinker, former concert mistress, professor and director of ARPA-E can easily fall back into this waltz, like me. It’s not small talk, it’s no talk.

Everything we’ve learned about relationships from psychology, indicates that this shallow speak is the opposite of connection. Brene Brown says we should be courageously vulnerable. Simon Sinek tells us to speak love to one another. John and Julie Gottman, the heads of the Love Lab, offer a culture of appreciation.

But somehow in this wasteland of Hollywood superficie, there were a bunch of us, maybe all of us, who fostered deep and resilient relationships with each another that have lasted through the exultant and disintegrating ululations of life. My best friends from high school remain so; my mates who have excavated intimacy from our decades long friendships; not just through time spent with one another but in the intermingled sharing of insecurities, failures and even these days, colonoscopy prep-procedures. We don’t speak of old glory days, but instead forge connection out of the raw, unsmelted ore of our continued, ongoing lives.

Santa Monica High School

In the early 1990s, many of us found ourselves at Santa Monica High School, otherwise known as SAMO, with its famous Hollywood alums like RDJ, Estevez, Lowe, Penn and Sheen. Carson Daly, before being written into our cultural canon at MTV was merely a senior on the golf team, my frosh year. SAMO was a public school and representative of the People’s Republic; it felt inclusive. To paraphrase Ferris Bueller’s Day Off’s excellent Edie McClurg, we were all “sportos and motorheads, geeks, sluts, bloods, wastoids, dweebies, dickheads.” We belonged. Hi to Amanda Feld who somehow reads this substack and I’ve known since I was eight!

It was in this foundation of safety at SAMO, that I found my first formative friendships. There was an eclectic elixir of interests that brought us together, but the gravity, for me, was the orchestra room. In addition to spending each day, fourth period, in symphony orchestra rehearsals, we spent many afternoons in sectionals (where each instrument splits off to work on their own parts in isolation) and Fridays in chamber orchestra (a slimmed down string group). Extra practices were scheduled for pre-concert preparations, a visit from the then LA Phil’s conductor, Esa Pekka Salonen, album recordings², or if our conductor Jeff felt like and demanded them.

It paid off; we traveled to Europe my sophomore year, winning “best symphony orchestra” in Vienna’s International Youth and Music Festival, playing Bernstein’s Candide, Barber’s Adagio for Strings and Beethoven’s Fifth. My first kiss happened here.

We returned to Europe my senior year to perform in Spain, where my sister led us in a stunning performance of Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade, with its nasty violin solo. Shedding the wind, brass and percussive remnants of the group, we made our way to Finland where our chamber orchestra performed Serenade for Strings³ at one AM in the morning under the crepuscular, borealic, summer sun.

The orchestra room⁴ was inclusive to those who didn’t play. There were the adjacents - choir singers, friends from classes, wrestlers⁵ like Ban or Troy Linkugel. Reflecting back upon this time, there was, of course, the cacophonous warm ups mingled with the typical hormonal aroma of adolescence. There were also deeper conversations, delvings into what Whitman referred to as the multitude of ourselves; laughter, of teenage love, imagined futures and the innocent and debated assuredness of our art.

This is how I learned to be a friend, imperfectly so. I made mistakes along the way, experimenting, trying out different versions of myself and figuring out the LJP in these relationships. But this foundation of friendship served me well through college, graduate school, work, sport, play and life.

A good friend knows your stories… a best friend helped you write them.

The decay of friendships feels globally pathological. The 2021 American Perspectives Survey showed one in eight Americans have zero close friends, isolation ballooning four fold since 1990. Vivek Murthy, the surgeon general of the US, has repeatedly called for action against the epidemic of loneliness. Despite our seemingly expansively “connected” world, with tools for instant communication and the plethora of details of our curated lives, increasingly, people feel lonely and detached.

The New York Times launched a friendship challenge because in our milieu of polarization, toxicity, boundaries, transactions and disconnection, we adults need guides, nudges and practice⁶ to enhance connection. How ironic that we require help when six year old children naturally intuit all this. To quote Dave Chappelle: “What the [hell] is going on around here?”⁷

The Gottmans, mentioned above, are psychologists who study romantic relationships. They’re famed for predicting, with roughly 90% accuracy, whether or not a couple would be separated within five years. They also posited the 5:1 ratio, that couples require five positive interactions to mollify one negative interaction for romantic relationships to thrive. To keep a relationship from completely imploding, you need at least 3:1. What do you need from a platonic friendship?

According to my friend and psychiatrist Peter, the ratio for friends is 8:1! We need more positive interactions with friends than with romantic partners?

Yes. That’s because, as Gus, the son of two psychologists, points out in his incisive hump meeting on friendship:

A necessary feature of friendship is that they are totally voluntary, they are opt-in only. Friends are essentially “arms-length” relationships. This makes friendships fragile by design. You’re in them because you actively want to be and derive something of value from them (not in the coin-op sense, unless maybe you are part of an entourage). Disagreements rarely lead to the friendship-equivalent of Couples Therapy. Friendships just cease to be.

There is no equivalent of marriage in friendship, a concrete contract of coupled finances, memories, sex, children, friends, societal pressure, couples therapy and shared losses that can act as backstop. One must consistently invest in friendships; it means that we must be a good friend.

So perhaps it’s important to revisit what it means to be a good friend. The Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, asserts there are six rules to stable friendships:

• Friends tend to stand up for each other in each other’s absence

• They trust and confide in each other

• They support each other emotionally

• They offer help if it’s required

• They try to make each other happy

• They keep each other up-to-date on positive life developments

I would add (at least) one more, by looking to my friend Charlotte, of Epistolary, who would conjecture:

• They play with you (she did a hump meeting about this as well)

Play is especially important because this is where your best stories are written. Together. You should want to be there for your friends when they need you, when they’re struggling. It’s good but it’s not enough. You need to play, sit, cry, immerse in one another; time spent and attending matters.

Incidentally, play is not the antipode to work. I played a lot with Kevin at Svaya while pulling all nighters building equipment. I play a lot with Gus, and our friends, at Chimera, while working through science. I play with Josh, Ban, Ryan, Lisa, T, Chris(es), Dave(s), (there is only one) Foley and so many more. I played with Kim, one of the best friends of my life at, guess what, life. It’s travel, walks, music, sports, books, TV shows, shared hobbies. This is the opt-in nature of friendship. There is broad talk of boundaries and safety now, I get it, but given the trends of disconnection, we need to opt-in more to one another.

How do we be better friends to one another?

There are great odes to friendship. Zevin’s fiction is one. There is also a real-life story of friendship in love. Mandy Len Catron, featured in the NY Times’ Modern Love series, writes the story of the 36 questions that she rallies with a friend, over drinks in NYC, before nervously staring into each others’ eyes for minutes.

Elaine and Arthur Aron authored the paper containing the questions with the bland title of On the Generation of Interpersonal Closeness⁸. Their research showed that closeness requires and can be achieved through increasing mutual disclosure. The questions start with routine questions of “who would you invite to dinner” but over time deepens into questions of:

• embarrassment (“Share with your partner an embarrassing moment in your life.”)

• mortality (“If you were to die this evening with no opportunity to communicate with anyone, what would you most regret not having told someone? Why haven't you told them yet?”)

• and tears (“When did you last cry in front of another person? By yourself?”)

In the end Mandy falls in love, marries the guy she knows 36 questions about; they have kids and presumably go on to live a friendship and marriage with love and conflict, shared experiences and at least a 5:1 ratio of lovingness. Bravo Mandy.

To be better friends, we must attend to them. Listen intently. Be together. Do stuff. Share, vulnerably. Build something, jointly.

Partners can be great friends too. In fact, that’s often the case and often should be the case. But they may not be the only ones. Imagine a friend and ask yourself:

• When’s the last time you were there for them in a time of great need?

• When’s the last time you texted them, called them, seen them?

• When’s the last time you shared something meaningful in your life with them?

• When’s the last time you shared something mundane with them, like an idea, thought, a quote, or a good dad joke? (sometimes known as pebbling)

Now repeat and think about when they did these things for you.

And sometimes friendships end

At our best, we invest heavily in our relationships. And at times, it is not enough. Friendships, like romance, can end.

As friendships dissipate, the residue is the palimpsest; the barely legible, but still present markings of an erased white board, the burned-in images on an old CRT monitor without a screen saver, or the indented grooves of pencil on paper, scrubbed of graphite. A friendship ended leaves diaphanous, ephemeral marks upon us, scars of amity upon our memories and beings.

Gus’s hump meeting, inspired by Jennifer Senior’s, excellent and crushing article about the fading of friendships, told us the same. She wrote “At this age, if your romantic life is settled, it’s your friends who break your heart. Because they’re who’s left.” We grow out of relation with one another. Other times, friendships are lost to envy, politics, death, divorce and shame or grow heavy with disinterest. But even the most “freighted” friendships, don’t need to end. Sometimes, friendships just need a little rekindling. This is perhaps the central point of Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow.

Reach out. Don’t wait. Check in. I had no idea that Nduka (also a SAMO wrestler) would have thought of me, thirty years later when I searched for IDH. It was delightful to reconnect with my old wrestling and orchestra friend Jerel Davis, not having seen him in 20 years at the (sadly disappeared) Menlo Park establishment Oasis, dining with my graduate school friend, Neil Kumar. Friendship can be ubiquitous; they’re needed at work, as we’ve discussed before. We merely need to search and yearn for the we, the us and say “hi” or come together.

Because in the end, it is also our friends who best reveal us to ourselves. Friends stretch us, know us, call out our BS and help us grow. We are the best versions of ourselves, when they gaze upon us. It’s 8:1. And sometimes, it’s their palimpsest, even when they are no longer part of our lives, that continues to nudge the persons we are towards whom we aspire to become.

To all my friends: I love you, and:

“For M” - Mikko Harvey

You stopped making sense

The wonderful Swedish pop group, the radio dept, captured the essence of friendship heartbreak in their song, you stopped making sense. I’ve been away for awhile so especially out of tune here:

And this poem as an addendum, to all our friends (from Joseph Fasano):

1. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43431/the-idea-of-order-at-key-west

2. Gratefully I’ve lost the CDs of our infamous Shostakovich 5 performance, which was pretty good, except for the trumpet section’s third B-flat at the end of the fourth movement.

3. I can’t remember but it must’ve been either Dvorak, Tchaikovsky or possibly Janacek.

4. It was also the band room, but we all know how ego-centric string players can be.

5. There were a surprising number of wrestling/orchestra folks: Jerel Davis, Ryan Payne, Norman Lee, Justin Wolff, Thomas Hartman, Hans and Mike Schoellhammer, Sung Hee Lee, Hogan Lee and others. Sung Hee, Ryan and Jerel were actually good. An it pissed off our coach, Mark Black, that we prioritized orchestra. Right Brian Garrison?

6. Indeed it is a practice. And practicing being a friend requires effort.

7. From the Netflix Special the Bird Revelation,

8. Have been thinking about how to morph these into a work context, either to build teams or to enhance interviewing.