10 ways to make your friends become friends
(And other cohesion tactics)
Last year, I threw a couple of pancake block parties in San Francisco to turn the random people living on my street into neighbors. It was an effort to build local community, which is on a lot of people’s minds lately.
This problem of local community is primarily approached as an urban design and neighbor-building problem. But the other side of “local community” that deserves equal attention is the cultivation of friend groups. In Dunbar’s hierarchy, these people are the “good friends” group: the 50 people who are both emotionally and physically close enough to you such that you’d invite them to a barbecue. The 150 people you’d invite to a wedding is the circle right outside that one. They might be emotionally close, but aren’t physically close to you. And the circle outside that one is the acquaintances, or the set of neighbors that are at a block party.
I love the idea of having 50 people to invite to a barbecue. I’d love it even more if they knew each other. I spent my 20s in a tight group of friends who saw each other every week after work, lived together in big group houses, and went on joint vacations. We were always wandering around the city, filled to the brim with fizzy giggles. When I’d come home from work, we’d turn the speakers on and have a dance party in the living room. We’d host countless parties in our building and make jokes about our imaginary friend Kenneth. We’d have long discussions about the rotation of women that our friend was sleeping with, and make disastrous meals for all of our visiting parents (crunchy quinoa was the norm.)
As our 20s started to wane, life changed. People started to have children, busy jobs, aging parents, and new cities to explore. People got divorces, fell out of touch, grew apart, and developed new interests. In its wake, we all adapted. I kept some of the old friends and made lots of new friends. But the new set of friends did not know each other. How could we make them into a group?
I love friend groups because they knit the many layers of yourself together. They help share in the burden of friendship — they create a latticework of support for every single person. Of course, you can’t force people to be friends and make a group out of nothing. But if you like people, it’s not far fetched to think they’d like each other too.
Here’s a few things I’ve read on this topic:
We’re in little solipsistic bubbles
Are we really suffering from a lack of friends in addition to a lack of community?
Dunbar’s number: Before you even get started, here’s the man himself talking about his number. Yes, this study may be pseudoscience, but it’s a useful framework for classification of friend types even if the results aren’t perfect.
Why Americans suddenly stopped hanging out: “But for Americans in the 2020s, solitude, anxiety, and dissatisfaction seem to be rising in lockstep. Surveys show that Americans, and especially young Americans, have never been more anxious about their own lives or more depressed about the future of the country. Teenage depression and hopelessness are setting new annual records every year. The share of young people who say they have a close friend has plummeted. Americans have been so depressed about the state of the nation for so many consecutive years that by 2023, NBC pollsters said, “We have never before seen this level of sustained pessimism in the 30-year-plus history of the poll.”"
The Dark Heart of Individualism by Anne Helen Peterson: Some of the difficulty has to do with infrastructure: car culture makes it really hard to just hang out. Some of it has to do with mobility: more specifically, the way educated Americans are more likely to move away from the places where they have networks of support in pursuit of job and life opportunities. Some of it has to do with the way work has cannibalized our time and made “hanging out” seem like a failure of optimization.
But a whole lot of this ethos stems from a deep-seated belief in individualism. We think that just because we can “do it ourselves” (and by “it,” I mean raising kids, performing domestic labor, caring for others, finding economic security, living life) that we should do it ourselves….and our ability to do so evinces innate moral fortitude. We’re better people, in other words, because we did it alone.
Ways to create group cohesion
How do you get your friends to be friends?
The Summer Camp Effect: I made some of my best friends at summer camp. It was an Indian classical dance camp based in remote Yogaville, Virginia. There was no cell phones and no television, we slept in bunk beds, we swept the dance studio every morning, and we danced our little hearts out from dawn till dusk. I think there’s something special about summer camp that helps you make the best friends. I believe that reproducing that feeling as an adult involves:
Adult summer camp for friends with kids: Remember the Catskills summer camp in “Marvelous Mrs. Maisel”? Imagine that you and your friends had a retreat to go to together that was within driving distance of your normal place of residence.
International travel: My friend Parth got a bunch of his friends to go on a trip to Mexico together. The group was a mix of “closeness” levels — some people were childhood friends, some people had only met once before. The idea was that we’d all live in a big house, explore new restaurants together, and go on walks through the city. I think the container of a trip was beneficial to the deepening of friendships because it forced people to hang out with each other, gave the group a little bit of shared problem solving (lost baggage! none of us had very good Spanish!), and made space for both togetherness and alone time with each person. I’ve made a little template for curating a trip like this that I’d be happy to share on request!
Create space for intimacy to grow: You need extended time to get to the good stuff. It helps if there’s a challenge involved. As my friend Jialu says, “I think what we are really looking for in our friends is intimacy, which I think is best formed when you spend a long, consolidated time with someone. You need to get the boilerplate catching up out of the way (how's work going?) before you can get down to the real stuff, "My wife and I are having the worst argument we've ever had and it's about sleep training our kid" or "I'm reading a book about hookup culture in American colleges and it's really got me thinking about how a lot of my behavior is related to status and insecurity."“
Once you have a group who is prepared to spend extended time together, how do you help intimacy grow? My friend Kathy used to send her engineering teams ice-climbing because she believes that “people bond through trauma.” This is not a false belief, but it is certainly the most intense way to make this bonding happen. If you’re not in the mood for a harrowing adventure, there’s a weaker way to make that happen: gently nudge past the boilerplate chat to the real stuff.
Examples:
There’s a Stanford GSB tradition that involves students telling their life story. The class always feels closer due to the disclosure.
Watershed did a company ritual called “personal priorities” that I’d recommend for any sub-25 person startup.
Question games. I haven’t played this game, but it comes recommended by many other people.
“Relationship Primitives”: In this essay,
and write about breaking the implicit couplings of relationship types and specific activities to deepen all of your relationships. For example — what if friends prepared for time together, the way you might prep a meeting with coworkers? “The formality that we bring to work meetings isn’t necessarily the thing to replicate here, but rather the thoughtfulness and intentionality about how use the time in order to increase the the likelihood we spend the time discussing things that matter versus shallower updates.”What stops you?
There’s a lot that can get in the way.
Being a new mom/dad: Most of my time hanging out with new parents involves me snuggling their baby as they eat a Souvla salad in the bath. Most people are barely staying alive with their jobs and their families. But it’s also possible to relieve the load of babysitting by hanging out with other grownups. A friend of mine has a big group of friends with many, many babies. The whole gang has a “summer camp” house that they visit with all of the babies, every long weekend. All of the baby stuff is in the new place already, and the wifi definitely works. It’s a nice way to hang out with your friend group, split costs, and share in the cooking/cleaning/babysitting labor.
The Art of Gathering by Priya Parker: When you are the architect of bringing friends together, you have to host. Hosting is tough! Curating the right group of people is tough! I found this book, recommended by my friend Kurt, to be very useful. I’ve linked the summary with just a few tips, but what strikes me as the best advice is giving each gathering a strong purpose that feels opinionated.
Meaningful hangouts: Dinner can get boring. What’s better? One thing my friends do is called TOTM, which stands for “Topic of the Month.” You pick a topic, assign reading and a facilitator, and come together once a month to discuss it. Last month’s topic was on mixed socioeconomic marriages lead by a friend who is a born facilitator, and this month’s topic is about happiness, lead by a friend who works in a happiness psych lab at UC Berkeley. It’s nerdy but so much fun.
Cringe: It can be really hard to try to pull your friends together in a group like this! You feel very cringe while curating guests lists, asking people thoughtful questions, and pointing out their flattering traits. You feel like a rancher selling his horse — “examine the fine gait and flowing mane, do not miss the elegance of his hindquarters.” But you need someone to be cringe. You need someone to be intentional and structured. You want someone to be opinionated on how things go. Whenever I feel cringe, I remember my favorite meme:
A beautiful topic and some good thoughts.