Finding Friendship at 20

I was walking back to my dorm from Shabbat dinner with my mother and aunt on a Friday evening during a short family visit. Since beginning college, my life has seemed increasingly compartmentalized; it's the first time most of my friends haven't known my family or been to my hometown. I was anxious to have my family meet my friends, less because of who they were and more because the mixture of these compartments—home and school, friends and family—threatened that predictability.

Dinner went almost suspiciously well, and our return trek's conversation wavered between the friends that had been present. Still, when my aunt commented, "It's so good to see Kinsey has friends that feel like family," I stopped. It wasn't jarring because it was untrue. Rather, it was jarring because it was true.

I struggle a lot in interpersonal relationships. A combination of persistent anxiety, natural awkwardness, and blatant eccentricity has made it difficult for me to relate to others for as long as I can remember. I have countless memories of this: walking into the Junior High cafeteria on the first day of eighth grade and panicking because I had no one to sit with; deliberately avoiding taking classes with teachers who assigned copious amounts of partner projects; and finding friends in teachers, co-workers, and fellow Taylor Swift bloggers rather than my classmates.

However, it would be inaccurate to say that I didn't fit in at all. I was never bullied. I was well-known and generally liked, though never quote-unquote popular. Rather, I struggled to find friends because I was searching desperately for the all-encompassing best friendship I thought everyone was supposed to have and everyone else did have. I thought friendship, by design, was having someone who just got me, shared all my interests, and regularly had long, intimate conversations with me at ungodly hours of the night.

The reason why I have good friends now is because I don't look at friendship like that anymore. I realized that it was both unrealistic and unhealthy to expect myself to have relationships that are all deeply intimate, meaningful, and identical.

Today, I have friendships based on vastly different types of connection. There are deep, intellectual friendships founded over coffee shop tables. I have friends I call when I'm upset or anxious, friends I have "sad boi hours" with late in the night. There are friends I talk to daily and friends I rarely ever see, friends from home and school and run-ins in faraway places. I have friendships that are deeply serious and some that are funny, some that are intense and others that are relaxed. I have one friendship that survives solely on the exchange of Pride and Prejudice memes.

I think it would be easy to attribute this change to moving away from home or going to college. I have made a lot of friends at Yale. But today—despite spending too little time at home—I also have more friends from high school now than I ever did while in high school, something I attribute much more to a shift in how I look at others. Even a year ago, I measured friendship based on how much my friends shared my interests. But now, I measure my friendships based on how much my friends share my values.

This means that some of my friends have interests I don't share. I have friends who study biology, perhaps my least favorite subject. One of my closest friends is a software developer. We watch different TV shows, prefer different foods, or have different hobbies.

This seems self-evident. Of course, we all have different interests from some of our friends. But growing comfortable in those differences is difficult. It is difficult to develop relationships that are meaningful and accept that they won't necessarily deliver perfection, that someone could be one of your closest friends and are still not someone you would call for political conversation or a movie night or personal advice, or more personally still, a late-night cry.

This is what I've been getting at. We are constantly pressured to have deep, intimate romantic and platonic relationships. As children, we are inundated with the belief that, "My boyfriend is my best friend," is the ideal romantic relationship and that exchanging matching friendship bracelets is the ideal mode of friendship. But as we grow up, we realize that relationships are more complex than that. We get hurt enough times to realize that unhealthy relationships and unhappy lives often begin with a hyper-focus on forcing this type of once-in-a-lifetime intimacy.

My relationships are better now than they were a year ago because I learned to love the connections I made for what they were instead of what I wished they could be. I recognized the danger of expecting too much from people and grew to appreciate that really, sometimes people are telling the truth when they say they are busy. I found ways to love people who hug me every time they see me and those that have never hugged me at all, the ones who know my intimate thoughts and those who don't. I learned that loving someone doesn't depend on how frequently I see or talk to them, that people can be in my corner even if we are halfway across the world.

And finally, I learned to appreciate the simple relationships, the ones based on Pride and Prejudice memes or Taylor Swift blogs. Even in sharing this, I share some small part of myself.