Big Friendship

As humans, we are all thoroughly shaped by the people we know and love. Day to day, our friends influence our tastes and our moods. Long term, they can also affect how we feel about our bodies, how we spend our money, and the political views we hold. We grow in response to each other, in ways both intentional and subconscious.

In 2015, the researchers Moira Burke and Robert Kraut set out to answer the following question: Does social technology draw us closer to our friends or isolate us? In their review of two studies conducted 15 years apart, they found that the internet’s effect depends on how people use it. The studies measured social support, depression, and other aspects of psychological well-being while also taking into account participants’ internet use. “The more people talked one-on-one, such as writing wall posts or comments, especially with close friends, the more their well-being improved,” Burke and Kraut reported. But the more people looked at strangers’ feeds, without that interaction with friends, the worse they felt.

Race is not a challenge to overcome. It’s something to be constantly aware of.

In a 1975 lecture on race and politics, the writer Toni Morrison summed up the true function of racism: “It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining, over and over again, your reason for being. Somebody says you have no language and so you spend 20 years proving that you do. Somebody says your head isn’t shaped properly so you have scientists working on the fact that it is. Somebody says that you have no art so you dredge that up. Somebody says that you have no kingdoms and so you dredge that up. None of that is necessary.”

Pat Parker’s poem “For the White Person Who Wants to Know How to Be My Friend” begins with two pieces of advice: “The first thing you do is to forget that i’m Black. / Second, you must never forget that i’m Black.”

A healthy friendship, Pickell continues, is one “where people are bringing their true feelings and needs into the relationship.”

You are not the person you were 10 years ago, and you won’t be the exact same person in the next decade. For a Big Friendship to survive, it has to adapt.

she was earning more than twice as much money as she had been making at the think tank—again, she negotiated for it—and she continued to ask for a raise any time she got a chance. Aminatou learned that if they give you what you ask for without flinching, you probably didn’t ask for enough. She also started asking the men in her life how much they made, and she was appalled when she realized most of her women friends were grossly underpaid. These men weren’t smarter or more talented. They just asked for more. And they usually got it. Aminatou knew this was a muscle she would have to exercise.

If Los Angeles is a town where people’s first question is “How are you?” and in New York it’s “Who are you?” the first question in DC is definitely “What do you do?”

It’s funny that high school, college, and the first years of adulthood are all identified as being formational years. Because for us, our late 20s and early 30s also represented a pretty radical amount of growth into our adult selves. We had achieved escape velocity from our upbringings and established a toehold in our careers, and we were starting to figure out adulthood. How do you want to live? Who do you want to be? These were questions we were answering together.
On our respective couches, we told each other the story of where we had come from, who we had met and loved along the way, and the fears and regrets we carried with us. And in the telling, we started to figure out where we wanted to go.