Newsletter August 22, 2024

Modern Friendship: A Conversation with Author Anna Goldfarb

Daniel A. Cox, Kelsey Eyre Hammond

I’ve written a lot about friendship over the past few years. Despite the topic, which often lends itself to humor and levity, the story of American friendship has been sobering. Over the past several decades, close friendships that have been a central feature of American social and civic life have been disappearing. More Americans report feeling lonely or isolated and spend more time by themselves. Men have been especially hard hit by America’s “friendship recession”. None of this is new, but there was some hope that once the pandemic was over, these social connections might recover. After all, much of the recent research that revealed America’s growing social malaise was conducted in the shadow of the Covid-19 pandemic. But a few years on, there is not much good news. In a brand-new report, “Disconnected: The Growing Class Divide in Civic Life,” Sam Pressler and I find the number of close friends that Americans have is still much lower than it once was. Not only that, but we also document a widening friendship gap between college-educated Americans and those without degrees. Roughly one in four Americans with a high school degree or less report having no close friends, a dramatic increase over the last three and a half decades. College graduates are far less likely to report being without any close friends—only 10 percent.  

But this wasn’t always the case.  

In the pre-Internet world, limited geographic mobility, stable employment, and strong civic commitments limited the overall number of people who might become our friends, but they also made these relationships more stable, predictable, and secure. Americans were friends with the people who belonged to the same union hall or church, who lived up the street, or worked the same shift. These friendships served to provide Americans with a sense of place and purpose.  

The collapse of American civic life has made the process of finding and keeping friends more difficult. The Internet and social media opened up new possibilities for social connection, but close and meaningful friendships rarely emerge from online interactions. But there is hope! Writer Anna Goldfarb argues in her new book, Modern Friendship, that the new social landscape requires a more purposeful and attentive approach to developing and sustaining social relationships. Today, American friendship feels more complicated than ever. Modern Friendship provides a helpful roadmap, and model for navigating relationship dynamics when communication styles differ, expectations are not aligned, and our time has become one of our most precious resources.

Goldfarb’s approachable writing style and wit help to overcome feelings of frustration or awkwardness that stem from the errant belief that improving our social relationships should not require intentionality or effort. She explains in the introduction of her book: 

Modern friendship isn’t just about sipping Chardonnay with your bestie like an Instagram ad for a cashmere poncho. Instead, modern friendship is about the story you tell yourself about why a friend didn’t respond to your text message asking if they wanted to get together this week for dinner. It’s experiencing the specific pain of knowing you have best friends but they live across the country and you have no idea when you’ll see them again. It’s about knowing why some of your friendships feel life-affirming, while others feel like an unpleasant job you’d prefer to quietly quit. Friendships take on many shapes and sizes and are constantly evolving. This book is a tool to help you set realistic expectations and periodically check in and diagnose these changes.  

As Goldfarb demonstrates again and again throughout the book, friendship can be a transformative relationship. But if they seem more difficult to manage and maintain it’s because they are. Modern friendships are unique in that they often lack a shared institutional context, such as church, or regularly scheduled contact, maintaining these connections requires a great deal of patience and perseverance. Ultimately, Goldfarb argues, and I heartily agree, it’s worth the effort. 

The Survey Center’s Kelsey Eyre Hammond caught up with Anna a few weeks ago to talk about the challenges and rewards of investing in friendships.

Note: The interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

American Storylines (AS): Thanks for joining me today, Anna! In your book, Modern Friendship: How to Nurture Our Most Valued Connections, you write about a lot of the ways that friendship today is distinct from the past. What are the main ways that friendship today is distinct from friendships in the past, and what makes it more difficult to have and maintain these friendships? 

Anna Goldfarb (AG): You could write an entire book answering that! The biggest distinction is that we just have so many more connections. It’s so recent that women even have attended college and higher education, and our roles have changed, and our identities have changed. James F. Richardson just wrote a book about individualism, and he talks at length about this. We only had a few roles available to us as women: married or not married, children or not children. Today, there are new roles. Are you divorced? Are you a non-parent? Are you childless? There are just so many kinds of outcomes that we can choose that really impact who we want to keep close to us.   

If you’re recently divorced, that’s going to impact the circle of support that you seek out, because you want to surround yourself with people who understand the unique challenges that you’re facing. We have so many different interests and hobbies and passions– there wasn’t even really a [shared] pop culture that long ago!  There wasn’t this unlimited choice. Now we have the internet, which exponentially increases our choice of whom to seek out and why.   

The impact of this shift is that now we have to generate reasons to keep friendships going. They’re not glued in place as much as our ancestors’ relationships were. Before, there wasn’t as much choice. There wasn’t as much flexibility in whom you could be friends with. Now, I can be friends with people of different genders, different ages, different backgrounds, and different class identities. This also makes friendships easier to shed, because there’s nothing keeping us in place.  It’s a crisis of managing these connections, because it feels overwhelming. It’s like going to a supermarket when you don’t know what you want to eat. I mean, imagine being hungry at Whole Foods! But that’s what it feels like — it’s a strange feeling of overwhelming choice. And that’s what our friendships are like; it’s like being in a supermarket but starving. 

AS: How did you land on writing this book in this way?  Why did you decide to do it as a how-to instead of as, say, an exposé on modern friendship?  

AG: I wanted something more interactive that brought people into the material and made them think. When you talk about friendships, you think about your own life, and you wonder who to slot in to have the material related to your personal life. I wanted to really bring these concepts alive. I am a journalist, and I mainly wrote for the Smarter Living section of the New York Times, and that’s a service section. A lot of my reporting concerns what to know, how to do, how to manage. I just took the service element and supercharged it — it’s not enough to explain what to do; let’s have you try it out with people in your own life and see what you think. See if you notice changes in the way people relate to you now. See if you notice different decisions that you’re making based on the concepts that we explored.  

What did you think about doing the exercises? Were there any things that you found surprising or really engaging in particular? Just curious. 

AS: I liked the exercises a lot!  As I was reading the experiences, tips, and stories that you shared popped into my head. It inspired me to be more intentional. 

AG: I want it to be fun! Who reads books? Books are homework! One of my mantras was don’t be boring. I did not want a boring book filled with stuff that you already knew, that you’ve already heard a thousand times. At every stage, I thought, “What can I do that’d be different, and that would engage me?” Someone who’s a little lazy, who’s happy to find a reason to not read a book. What would make me stick around and spend time here? I really wanted it to be fun and different.  

I was inspired by the book How to Talk So Kids Will Listen & Listen So Kids Will Talk. I thought it did such an elegant job of talking to busy people who may be skimming to get the information quickly. I really tried to model my book after that. These are skills that you can take with you forever, but you can get them quickly.  You can imagine a conversation with a friend who’s struggling. And you can see it both ways: how the conversation can go, and the different results that will come from it, and then make better choices of how to meet a friend in distress. That was my goal: for us to realize we have choices here, and when we choose something that alienates a friend, it has impacts. I mean, the stakes are so high with our friendships now.  

One of the biggest reasons friendships end is because someone feels that their friend didn’t show up when they needed them. People don’t do a good job of saying, “I need you to show up for me,” but then they hold it against a friend for not showing up.  I really wanted to lean into that friendship killer. What’s going on here, and is there a way we can make different choices to try and make our friendships more enduring? 

AS: And that’s so important, because I think many people think it’s on the other person.  They feel that they should be reaching out when, in reality, the whole thing with happy friendships is just putting in effort. I’ve caught myself doing this all the time when I ask, “Why should I reach out to them when they haven’t reached out to me?” 

AG: There’s so much neuroticism around friendship now — tension, anxiety — and I wanted to strip it away. Listen, people have to make choices. It’s not always personal. Desire for friendships comes from what we do together, what we talk about, how we enhance each other’s lives. And it’s okay if it’s not always present, it doesn’t mean something’s wrong or someone’s bad! I wanted to write a book about friendship that was hopeful, optimistic, and empowering, because every friendship book I see seems to say, “I know people ghost on you and they flake. It’s really hard out there. Wish I had answers. I don’t.” 

But no, that’s not good enough! I want to put friendships into context. One thing that frustrated me was that friendship feels like this other silo of “My friendships are suffering. What’s up with my friendships? My friendships are a hot mess.”  

You clearly need time to see other people in your life. What’s going on here? There are people whom you show up for, whom you do return text messages to. If your boss calls you up, you show up! I try to just change the way that we look at friendships as this other weird relationship, like, “I can’t handle it. I can’t figure it out.” No, it’s just a relationship. Why does this person want to be my friend? What do I add to their life that they would want to keep me close? It’s a very different question than “why hasn’t my friend called me?” 

AS: When it comes to public opinion and cultural trends, there seems to be a bit of a gap right now with the experiences of men and women. I wanted to ask you about how men and women differ in same-gender friendships and in friendships between men and women. What role does gender play in what’s happening with friendship? 

AG: I love that you asked me about this.  And if I get to write another book, this is what I want it to be about. I started reporting on friendships, it was like a monolith. But as you drill down, you see that women and men are socialized differently, and our brains are different, generally speaking. When getting older, women want more interdependence with their friends. They want to nurture their friends. They want to be involved in their friends’ lives. That’s something that women tend to do, to feel love and belonging. On the other hand, men want more independence out of their friendships. They don’t want to be criticized or judged, and they resist being vulnerable with their male friends, because they don’t want that information used against them or to look weak. They shy away from the increased vulnerability. Men don’t want to go there. They don’t want to do that.   

But we’re also transitioning from friends using friends as favors to friends being more about entertainment. And again, James F. Richardson goes more into this in his book about individualism; he goes into it in great detail. We outsource our favors. Before, when we were younger, it was like, “Can you give me a ride to the airport? Can you come over help me build my deck?”  Now, we hire an Uber, we hire a contractor. It’d be seen as gauche to ask a friend to help you with these kinds of things. It’d be like, “Why don’t you hire someone? Why do I need to spend my Sunday helping you build a deck?” There’s this real shift, and as people become wealthier, they don’t want to do favors for their friends like that. 

AS: Another question I have relates to how men are relying more on their romantic partners for emotional support. How do you feel that romantic partnerships impact friendships? What is that relationship like? 

AG: That’s a great question! Dr. Robin Dunbar studied friendships in his book Friends, and he found that falling in love usually costs you two friendships as your availability plummets. He said that any friendships that threaten the romantic relationship are usually the first to go. Men are not socialized to fight for friendships like that. They’ll just ghost. My colleague, Rhaina Cohen, has a book called The Other Significant Others: Reimagining Life with Friendship at the Center. In it, she asks, why do we put romance at the center of our life? Why isn’t platonic love as venerated as romantic love?  

Romantic love is such a part of our identity in a way that friendships aren’t. For most people, it’s a smarter investment of time and energy to focus on the romantic partner, because they’re going to stick around longer. Friends don’t have that kind of commitment. They move around more; they pick whom they want to be close to based on their hobbies and interests. But romance has other factors involved. We live together, we share finances; there’s so much more in-depth negotiation of our lives that we just don’t have with our friends. I don’t think we’re monsters who want to neglect our friends. I think that we are doing the best job we can juggling all these roles, especially with no models. We don’t have a lot of models, and the models we do have on TV and film are unrealistic.  

AS: I think your point about media is so important too, because when I think about different forms of media, and especially TV shows about people with friends, the people are single, and they don’t have children.  

AG: Yeah! It’s been a deficit that we don’t have models for these conversations. It’s also so easy to shed friendships now. We collect friends, and then we can move on with so little friction. It’s not something that we’re doing wrong or something that’s off-kilter. This is what happens. We pick friends based on who we find compelling to us at any given moment. When you have a baby, the most compelling people will be people who have information about this new role that you’re taking on. Your best friend from high school may not be equipped to tell you the information that’s most important to you during these milestone events. But I think this is beautiful, because we evolve and change; we’re moving into different roles and want people who can give us more helpful information. That’s just how we operate now. It doesn’t mean that we don’t love each other.  

AS: The story about your dad was very meaningful. It was so compelling to start the book with that. How did you make that decision to begin that way? 

AG: I wasn’t going to, but then I was thinking about the conclusion, and I wrote the story about my dad as the conclusion of, “Here’s why friendships are so important.” I showed it to some of my writer friends, and they said, “This needs to be the introduction.” It didn’t occur to me to write it as the introduction. But I realized it was powerful when I was asked, “Why write the book? How’d you get started with this idea?”  I knew I wanted to write about friendship. I didn’t know I wanted to write this book until this happened. This book is a COVID book. It is written by someone whose family has just had a tragedy with COVID, and it’s very much impacted me — seeing what happened with my dad, and how we didn’t get to say goodbye to any of his friends. They didn’t even know he was sick.  

But I also wanted it to bear witness to what we went through as a family, and what we’re going to carry forward through future generations. This was so just earth-shattering, and I wanted to include it so that people knew where I was coming from. There are so many friendship books out now, and I know a lot of the other authors. We all have different backgrounds and different ways that we came to this topic. I wanted to highlight that my experience was different.  

AS: During your time researching and writing the book, how has your own thinking about friendship evolved over the last couple years of this project? 

AG: Before the book, friendships were like background music to me. I dug the music, but after writing the book, I learned how to write my own music, and that’s the difference. Now I’m in control. I can create the music I want to listen to, and I just feel so much more empowered. 

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