The Care and Keeping of Best Friends
“There is no autopilot mode for a Big Friendship. You just have to keep showing up. Active friendships require active maintenance.”
As someone who didn’t meet my husband until my late 20s, my friendships, particularly my female friendships were the big, important relationships in my life over the past nearly two decades. I’m grateful to have 5 best friends. You might be thinking that best friend is singular, but let Dr. Mindy Lahiri educate you:
The 5 women I consider my best friends live in 5 different cities throughout the United States and the one time all of 5 of them have been in the same place was at my wedding two years ago. At a time when I’m not sure when I’ll be able to see them all again in-person, I cherish that weekend all the more, but it can be hard to prioritize investing in these relationships and showing up outside of the big, monumental moments in our lives. I was excited to learn from these two Big Friend Pioneers. Like Gayle and Oprah, Anne and Leslie, Aminatou and Anne are vocal about their platonic love of each other and I love to see it. I’m not a frequent listener of their podcast, “Call Your Girlfriend”, but as someone who is online more than I should be, I was familiar with their work and legend.
This short, but potent, book is not really for those hoping to learn how to make friends as an adult (although you can pick up tips if you’re looking!) and instead focuses on sustaining a deep, valuable friendship. I appreciated how open the two were in sharing about the good, bad, and trying of their commitment to each other and how their narrative weaves qualitative and quantitative data to provide a guide to embracing and investing in Big Friendships. The chapters isolate and highlight certain aspects of their friendship as a way to clearly help them process their evolving shared narrative. The resulting book is a dedication to their practice of committing to a Big Friendship. I found myself highlighting, underlining and dog-earing sections I know I’'ll need to reference when friendship tune-ups are required. In 2020, their chapter on the unique challenges that can happen in interracial friendships is especially timely and value, you can read an excerpt here.
Before shelter-in-place began, I found myself feeling emotionally distant from one of my besties. Despite these feelings, I didn’t do anything about it. It was easy to downplay the feelings as temporary or just a phase, but they existed. As I was reading this book, I found myself tearing up, remembering why I connected with this best friend in the first place. When I was finished reading it, I ordered her a copy from my former favorite independent bookstore in her area. I’m grateful that this book provides a map on how to stay in the land of deeply loving your friends and I’m excited to force my best friends, I mean gift my best friends this book as a declaration that I want to keep doing life with them.
P.S. This is definitely a book I’d recommend to (fictional) Issa and Molly.