Friendship in the Age of Loneliness

FRIENDSHIP RITUAL LIBRARY

We are lonelier than ever.

The average American hasn't made a new friend in the last five years.

Why do we spend 50 minutes a day on Facebook, yet only four percent of our time with friends?

Research has shown that people with close friends are happier, healthier, and live longer than people who lack strong social bonds.

This refreshing, positive guide offers practical habits and playful reminders on how to create meaningful connections, make new friends, and deepen relationships.

Friendship in the Age of Loneliness

FRIENDSHIP RITUAL LIBRARY

Here are Friendship Rituals from the book to inspire you. To add a Friendship Ritual to this library, please fill out this form.

Ashley Rose Hogrebe, founder of Do the Damn Thing, a business service that helps feminist creatives get organized and accountable so they can achieve their goals, hosts You Did It!—a party to celebrate nontraditional milestones. Participants gather to celebrate things like starting a business, landing your first partnership, booking your first client, raising your rates, rebranding, finding a therapist, or whatever you want. 

Melissa Wong hosts Messy Circles, a place where you can embrace being unfinished and unpolished and less alone during the messy parts of life. Messy Circles are supportive gatherings where a small group of humans gets together to share any messy thoughts or feelings present and enters into a brave space where mess is welcomed with open arms. 

Jillian Richardson sends out notes of being awesome. Whenever she’s in a conversation and talks about how awesome someone is, she pauses and sends them a message right then to let them know how awesome they are. As Jillian says, “I never know what mental state someone is in when I send them that random love, and I often receive messages back like ‘I was really struggling. I needed that.’” 

Friends Natalie and Hunter used to send each other a good night text before going to bed. Kind of like when your parents used to read Goodnight Moon to you when you were a little kid, it’s nice to get a good night wish from a friend. 

Natalie’s mom and her three close friends, who are all European immigrants in their sixties, have an annual women’s weekend. Once a year for thirty years, they’ve planned a weekend getaway, and they’ve managed to keep up their weekends from back when they met in California, through having full-time jobs and raising multiple children. 

Anna Akullian and her friend Gina have a November 17 phone call. They made a pact when they were best friends in seventh grade to always talk on November 17, and they’ve kept it for seventeen years and counting.

Anthony Scopatz and Jana Hirsch host odd Fridays. On odd Fridays, they have a potluck at a friend’s house, and all you have to do is show up as you are.

My parents took a summer camping trip they deemed adventure before dementia. When they turned sixty-two years old, they got a Lifetime Senior Pass to America’s National Parks, which only cost ten dollars at the time. My mom and dad drove across the country and stopped to hike and camp in the Rocky Mountains, Bryce Canyon, Arches, Sequoia, and Kings Canyon National Parks. They ended their trip—looking as youthful as ever—meeting my sister and me in Yosemite National Park.

Erin Kim created Lettres Mag, a print magazine of love letters from around the world, conceived from a desire to revitalize modern connection.

Kat Vellos wrote Connected from Afar, a collection of prompts and conversation starters for bringing depth to your friendships, even if you are far away. One of my favorites is “Yelp Review,” where they write a Yelp review about each other as if it would be read by a stranger who was considering becoming a friend with them.

Patrick Ip and Christine Lai host baller dinners in cities all across the country. Baller dinners are curated, multigenerational, and interdisciplinary dinner parties of eight to fifteen interesting people, where everyone contributes to the cost of dinner. Ballers believe in action over talk, humility over arrogance, and inclusion over exclusion. Dinner attendees are encouraged to share their story, check their ego at the door, and always ask, “How can I help?”

Every single night, Mel Brooks drove from Santa Monica to Beverly Hills to chat, eat dinner, and watch Jeopardy! with his friend of seventy years, fellow actor and comedian Carl Reiner. Carl passed away in 2020, but as Mel said, “This is a great place because I got friendship, love, and free food. Free eats are very important.”

My friend Sara Weinberg is a treasure chest when it comes to friend rituals. Here are a few of her favorites. Trips for tacos: you give someone a ride to the airport (or help them move or do them a favor), and in return, they take you out for tacos. Instead of a financial reward or a physical gift, the exchange means even more friend time.

Signature greeting: Sara and a friend invent a hug/greeting neither has ever done before and it becomes their signature greeting, a playful and fun way to see her friends, especially since her love language is physical touch.

Romantic friend dates: Sara takes friends out on a not-so-cheesy date. “Why do you have to be ‘romantic’ with just a partner?” she wonders. She gives her friend flowers, dresses up, buys them dinner, and even surprises them. During coronavirus, she even did this a few times on Zoom.

For a remote ritual, Sara practices Facebook memory lane: she and a friend share their screens and take turns picking random old Facebook pictures of one another and have each person explain the context of the picture.

Lastly, Sara and a friend come up with joint yearly intentions. Last year’s theme was “Big Joy,” and that theme informed everything they did. Every time they interacted, they tried to bring some element of Big Joy, which means making the person beam with a huge smile or having them laugh uncontrollably or whatever fills their happy cup in that moment.

Ankit Shah started the Silent Hike Society to bring a small group of people together for long, silent hikes in nature followed by a conversation over lunch.

Liz Travis Allen and her friends have a virtual cooking club to cook recipes together when they are far apart. During quarantine, they read Samin Nosrat’s cookbook, Salt Fat Acid Heat, and used the app MarcoPolo to share short videos of the food they were cooking.

To catch up with each other, frequent travelers and friends Liz and James have a recurring where are you now? calendar invitation. Each year, on September 12, they have a phone call to see where their friend is and how the past year has been.

Every summer for the past thirteen years, Liz’s parents, Dean and Susan, who are in their sixties, host a monthly full moon kayak and invite their friends to kayak in the San Francisco Bay at night.

Fred, seventy-two, and Linda, sixty, host Friendsgiving in June at their home in Lake George, New York. When they moved to the lake nine years ago, they didn’t know anyone, but they began befriending people through their real estate agent. The first Friendsgiving brought twelve people together, and now more than thirty people come every year. Many attendees say it’s their favorite event of the year. Friendsgiving in June even has its own logo: a turkey sitting in an Adirondack chair, wearing hiking boots.

Kasley and her friend host a narrative night. Instead of bringing wine, guests are told to bring a personal story related to a theme; for example, one theme was “Recent Revelation.” After using conversation prompts to break the ice, strangers share their story in a supportive environment. 

Mark Brenner, seventy-one, and his best friend Buzz, sixty-seven, are in a breakfast club together. Every year for fifteen years, they have met up at 8:56 a.m. (to beat the 9:00 a.m. crowd) at a local breakfast joint. They generally spend two and a half hours talking about relationships, family, work, politics, and in Mark’s words, “our Seinfeldian, meshuganah, curmudgeonly notions about other humans.”

Lauren Cohen Fisher’s annual canoe trip in Maine with the same group of friends has taught her that friendships generate rituals but also that rituals generate friendships. Something magical happens hours from phone service, paddling through hurricanes, mosquito infestations, and beautiful sunsets. The group has returned to Maine every summer since 2015.

Lauren also has a standing Tuesday lunch date with three best friends. They bike from their respective offices and eat together for an hour. The time has become holy, blocked out like any other important meeting. When Lauren and a friend are upset, they sometimes write anonymous letters to people they find in the phone book.

Matt and his buddies have pancake Saturdays after going surfing together in the morning.

Every morning, Maggie and her friends have a gratitude practice, where they text the group thread one thing they are grateful for.

The early employees at Good Eggs, an organic grocery delivery company based in the Bay Area, used to have a Tuesday night team dinner. They all went to the Farmers’ Market to buy groceries and then cooked together.

Michael Liskin, Rebecca, Beth, and a group of twenty friends have an annual New Year’s Day gathering. They meet up with their friends and friends’ kids. At sunset, they all walk down to Venice Beach to see the sunset and talk about their visions for the year ahead.

Every day for an entire year, Dev and his friend Lisa texted each other a photo. At the end of the year, they printed a photo book with all of their photos from the year.

During university, Dev and his friend Mimi gave each other a set of addressed and stamped postcards to make it easier to write each other. Twelve years after getting the set, Dev found one of the last remaining postcards in his desk and sent it to Mimi for a pleasant surprise.

Every holiday season for the past eight years, Lani and forty of her friends and family have had a white elephant costume exchange on the winter solstice as a way to bring light and play into the darkest time of year. Everyone is told to bring a costume and wrap it. Each person gets a number, and whatever costume you get, you have to put it on and embody the character. “It’s an activity not just a party,” Lani says. “You get to see your friends and be weird together.” Lani’s friend Sebastian, a DJ, finds a song to match each costume, and every person does a cat walk in the middle of the room so they can have their moment.

Jenny Yrasuegui and a group of seven girlfriends participate in a communal birthday gift ritual. Instead of giving individual gifts, everyone in the group throws in thirty dollars, and the birthday celebrant gets to feel special and pick something nice she wants for her birthday.

Josh Kelley and their roommate indulge in a weekly decompression exercise together. First, they sit on the porch, share a joint, and philosophize in the way that only two stoned friends could possibly do. Then, they order food from one of their favorite neighborhood restaurants and enjoy dinner together while binge-watching a TV series. The ritual doesn’t conclude until they’ve motivated each other to get off the couch, brush their teeth together, chat about the show they just watched, and finally say good night.

A group of Josh’s friends started a monthly documentary club (“a book club for lazy people”). For over a year and a half, they have met once a month to share wine, snacks, and a documentary they want to see. In the era of social distancing, they started with a Zoom catch-up call before hopping over to a Netflix party to watch the documentary together.

Every summer, Josh gets together with a bunch of their fellow LGBTQ friends to go on vacation together. Josh loves their gay-cation ritual. Usually, they hit up destinations with a rich history for the LGBTQ community, like Provincetown and Fire Island. For a weekend or a whole week, they just hang out on the beach, drink, dance, party, and “participate in the magic that is a hetero-free, pride-full weekend of being ourselves and celebrating what makes us unique and special.” As Josh says, “It’s a queer-takeover of paradise, and for a moment the world is ours and ONLY ours.”

Joanna has a letter writing ritual called Everything I Never Said. She picks a friend who’s on her mind and shares with them all the things she thinks of them, admires about them, the memories she has of them that she wants the friend to know.

Joanna also saves voicemails to Google Drive because she wants to have artifacts of people she loves and, in her words, “There might be a time when I don’t get to hear their voice again.”

Adapted from FRIENDSHIP IN THE AGE OF LONELINESS by Adam S. Poswolsky.

Copyright © 2021 by Adam S. Poswolsky. All rights reserved.