The first thing you need to know is that friendship is not natural. If you were natural you would be a moss. Moss doesn’t have friends. Moss just spreads, cold and damp and indifferent, and sometimes another moss spreads nearby, and together they make a bog, and then the bog swallows a horse. But you, unfortunately, are not a moss. You are a person, and people are creatures that rot if they are alone. To be human is to be an animal that needs witnesses. Someone has to see you eating cereal. Someone has to be there when you tell a bad joke. Otherwise you start twitching in public, you start growling in the supermarket. You start developing hobbies. This is the horror we call solitude.
But making friends – have you tried it? Horrible stuff. It’s like applying for a job, except the application process is permanent and the job doesn’t exist. “So what do you do?” you ask. “What music do you like?” you say. All this hideous bureaucracy of the self, filling in forms with little fragments of personality so you can be filed correctly in someone else’s head. And half the time they reject the application. They ghost you. They say “we should hang out sometime” which, in the language of friendship, means “I hope you die.”
The philosophers didn’t make it easier.
Aristotle: friends are either useful, pleasant, or virtuous. What he didn’t say is that every friend eventually becomes useless, boring, and morally compromised.
Montaigne: “Because it was he, because it was I.” Which is sweet, but also tautological. It means “my friend is my friend because they are my friend,” which is the sort of logic you expect from a dog.
Nietzsche: friends should be arrows you fire into the future, meant to wound you, to test you, to make you stronger. Lovely. Except most of us are just happy if someone answers our texts.
Meanwhile, every self-help book tells you to “just be yourself.” But if you were yourself you wouldn’t need friends. “Yourself” is the exact person who sits alone at 2am scrolling through group photos of people who did not invite you. Yourself is unbearable. Yourself is the reason you need to invent a second self, and then a third, and send those versions out into the world, each of them a trial balloon, a mask, a ghoul, to see which one gets accepted. Friendship is basically the black market trade of masks. You offer one of yours, they offer one of theirs, and if the exchange goes well, you keep bartering until you’ve forgotten what your original face looked like.
Anyway, here is your first existential tip: friendship is impossible, and therefore it must be done. If it were possible, it wouldn’t matter. Only impossibilities have meaning. Only impossibilities are worth doing.
Alright, if that doesn’t quite itch the scratch, then, here are some non-tips as well – blunt instruments disguised as flowers. Use what works; bury the rest in the garden and see if anything grows…
Go where hands do things.
Bars are museums of speech; workshops are factories of friendship. Put your body where objects resist you. Clay classes, community gardens, picket lines, choir practice, soup kitchens, a Dungeons & Dragons table where the dungeon master is obviously power-mad: anywhere the third thing (soil, song, soup, dice) can stand between you and the other person like a kindly chaperone. You cannot stare each other into closeness; you can only arrive there while both of you are staring at something else and accidentally become co-conspirators.
Make a specific, stupid plan.
“Let’s hang sometime” is the Esperanto of the damned. Try: “Tuesday, 7:15, the dumpling place that smells like a wet dog.” Offer a finite window. Promise one drink, one loop of the park, one hour of mutual complaint. The soul does not open by decree; it opens under the protection of an end-time.
Bring an offering.
A tangerine. A photocopied poem. A cursed USB stick containing Romanian disco. The gift says: I have been somewhere else and thought of you. Do not overthink the gift. The point is not value; it is proof of motion.
Ask a small favour.
Not money, not a kidnney. “Can you watch my bike while I wee?” The Ben-Franklin effect, yes, but gentler: allow someone to rehearse caring for you on a miniature scale. If they do it well, escalate: “Help me move a sofa,” “teach me this chord,” “come with me to the dentist so I don’t run away.”
Tolerate untelevised time.
A friendship is mostly b-roll. Errands, waiting for buses, being wrong about directions together. If every meeting requires a highlight, you’re dating the spectacle, not the person. Share a silence without leaping to fill it with facts about magnesium. If you can be boring together you can be alive together.
Practice asymmetry without accounting.
You will text first, often. Later they will. Then you again. If you keep a ledger, you are an auditor, not a friend. The universe does not balance; the kindness must.
Be a small mirror, not a full-length one.
Reflect a little. Don’t cosplay them. Keep your colours. Friends do not fuse; they braid. Allow difference to survive contact: their football; your medieval heresies; their tarot; your taxidermy. The aim is not to be two halves of one person but two complete people orbiting a third thing that neither of you owns.
Speak plainly when hurt; briefly when angry.
A clean wound heals; a theatrical wound becomes a career. Name the specific sin, propose the small repair, and do not forward the minutes to the group chat. Apologies should be nouns (“I was cruel”), not weather reports (“things were said”).
Do not interview; notice.
The questionnaire kills warm-blooded animals. Come on! Instead: observe how they treat the waiter, how they talk about people who are absent, whether they slide their chair back when a toddler wobbles past. You are selecting a co-witness for the apocalypse. Choose for gentleness.
Let the phone be a bridge, not a house.
DM to schedule the walk. Send the photo of the dog. Do not live inside the thread like a tapeworm. The group chat is a mulch heap: throw scraps in, grow pumpkins out here.
Offer a first vulnerability, not a flood.
One true sentence: “I hate parties because I turn into a statue.” See if they set a coat around that sentence. If they do, the next sentence may be larger. Never trauma-dump as a hello; never demand caretaking as proof.
Be the one who convenes.
Everyone is tired. Everyone secretly wants someone else to ring the bell. Host the cheap thing. Name the time and end. Say, “door is soft; leave when you must.” Put crisps in a bowl. Friendship is logistics performed tenderly.
Lose some on purpose.
You’ll misjudge. They’ll misjudge you. Sometimes the chemical experiment yields a little smoke and a brown crust in the beaker. Resist the autopsy. Wish them a gentle life and walk on. Compost the disappointment; it will grow something improbable.
Learn to be findable.
This is the hardest. Being findable means living somewhere in public: a regular table, a habitual lane, a community noticeboard with your handwriting on it. It means answering invitations with an answer, not a fog. It means having a door that opens.
Remember the metaphysics.
A friend is not a contact, not a cure, not an escape room partner. A friend is the person who proves you exist when your own gaze slips. A friend is the witness at the small trial of every day. Together you invent a jurisdiction that can overrule the world.
And if you need one final mechanism, something idiotic and immediate, take this: open your phone and text the most nearly-friend person you have. Not the perfect one; the adjacent one. Type: “Walk at 6:40? Bring the stupid hat.” Send before your cowardice wakes up.
The rest is repetition, gentle and stubborn. The rest is tending. You are not moss; you are an animal that rots alone. Make the bog with others. Save the horse.
Start with a simple admission: every friend you’ve ever had has wronged you. Not in the grand opera ways – no poisoned goblets, no monologues under the thunder. It’s smaller, meaner, bureaucratic. They drift. They acquire a dog with a complicated gut. They move to a suburb called Something-Heath where the last bus leaves at 9:12. They reply “haha amazing” to your most elegant despair. They go off gluten and then become gluten. Even the ones who stay close eventually betray you by dying. And if they don’t, you’ll betray them first. This is the contract hidden in the handshake. That’s the horror of it. That’s the miracle of it.
Friendship was never supposed to be a bilateral treaty anyway. It’s a cultic rite conducted in the ruins of the self where, briefly, the candles catch. If you insist on keeping score – “I texted last,” “I bought rounds,” “I provided crucial banter in Q4” -the bookkeepers of Hell will love you; they worship exactitude. But the rest of us are trying, in grubby, hopeless ways, to kneel before something larger that sometimes borrows a human shape.
So here is the sstupid heresy: each particular friend is an emissary. A courier for the Infinite Friend. You’ve met them. You keep meeting them. They arrive disguised as a barista who treats you like a Victorian convalescent. As the flatmate who wordlessly slides a plate of eggs under your door when your brain has become a wasp factory. As the stranger in the smoking area who tells you, in a voice like a kettle unplugging itself, the one sentence you needed to remain alive for another week. That’s not them. That’s the Infinite Friend poking a paw through the membrane of history.
People have tried to give you language for this. Aristotle muttered something about another self, and then the Romans turned it into Latin and the Church put it in a chalice and everyone pretended to understand. Augustine fell apart over a boyhood companion; to patch the hole he invented a God made entirely of longing. Nietzsche, the petulant sunbeam, begged for the friend who would force him to grow fangs. All of them circling the same unhousebroken animal: friendship is not the warm bath of recognition; it is the safe-cracking of reality. Two idiots put their ears to the vault door of the world and whisper, “On three.” Click.
—>They do not scale. If a relationship comes with a Patreon tier list, it’s not friendship, it’s artisanal loneliness in monthly installments.
—?They insult you at exactly the right time. Not cruelty: calibration. “You’ve become a spreadsheet,” they say, and you laugh because your breath smells like pivot tables.
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—)They are a bad influence in a strangely wholesome way. You stay out too late and wake up wanting to apply for a library card.
—(They vanish. Then the universe quietly rearranges itself to put them back in front of you at the bakery you never go to, holding the one croissant that looks like a fossilised ear.
If none of this happens, the Infinite Friend still visited – you just refused hospitality. They don’t mind. They are patient like sediment.
Friendship wants your face taken off and hung on the wall briefly, to air out. It wants you de-furnished. You cannot bring the entire IKEA of self: the self-care ottoman, the trauma console, the gallery wall of takes. The Infinite Friend hates storage. They prefer you with pockets turned out, lint offered as tribute: “Here are my ridiculous thoughts; they keep multiplying in the night.”
This is not vulnerability marketing; real tenderness is unbeautiful. It’s you crying the way a tap malfunctions. It’s them handing you a napkin that already has a stain because they used it for the same purpose ten minutes ago. It’s both of you knowing the other is unbearable and bearing, because bearing is the sacrament.
—>Pilgrimage: Walk. Farther than comfort requires. Into the ugly part of town where the brickwork is acne and the kebab shops hoard fluorescent light. Talk until your feet forget who owns them. All theology of friendship is podiatric.
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—?Shared Cowardice: Run away together – from a party, from a responsibility, from a grief for one hour. Cowardice in company transubstantiates into mercy.
—)The Errand: Go with them to buy a bin. Spend forty minutes deciding between pedal and swing-top. You are not choosing a waste receptacle; you are choosing a future in which your boredom is apprenticed to a witness.
Self-optimization. Professional networking. Status anxiety disguised as taste. The algorithm’s sweet narcotic drip that replaces “we” with “for you.” The contemporary delusion that intimacy must be hygienic, that it should smell faintly of eucalyptus and good lighting. Friendship is not spa water. It is the puddle you step in together and then name.
Most dangerous of all: Narrative. The minute you decide what this friendship is, you have given it a plot arc, which is simply a schedule for death. Let it resist articulation. Let it be the thing that only explains itself while it is happening, and even then only in a dialect the air forgets at once.
At some stage you will have to take your friend into the underworld. This is standard. Do not prepare speeches. Bring oranges, headphones, and an uncharged phone (a devotional object). Sit with them while the lift of their brain remains inconveniently stuck between floors. Say very little. Do not tidy. Make a fort out of blankets if the gods permit. Explain, falsely and correctly, that nothing is ruined. Most people cannot be rescued; they can be accompanied. That is rescue enough.
When it is your turn to go under, let them carry your name like a match cupped against wind. Yes, they will see the worms in your machinery. Yes, they will come back with a stray dog and a ridiculous plan. Accept both. This is medicine.
Every friendship is a rehearsal for the final conversation the universe wants to have with you. We mistake it for preference – “we like the same obscure synth album,” “we hate the same mayor” – but that’s just handholds on the cliff. The thing itself is a brief ceasefire in the war between subject and object. For a second the world stops being “out there,” you stop being “in here,” and the border checkpoint falls asleep. Two citizens of nowhere look at each other and each becomes borderless. This is illegal in most jurisdictions.
You can be sainthood-level at this and still lose them to time. The Infinite Friend will not apologise. They are a monarch with a pocketful of seasons; they keep swapping summer and winter like coins and do not see the problem. What you get instead is the residue: the way certain streets brighten like a dashboard when you walk them alone, the phantom laugh that arrives before the joke, the taste of a drink that only exists in the bar where you were both nineteen forever. Memory is not faithfulness; it’s the thing friendship leaves to keep you from dying of sobriety.
When it ends – and it always ends, even if only because one of you leaves the room and never comes back – perform the rite of small gratitude. Keep the receipt with their handwriting on it. Learn the stupid salad they made better than you. Retire a joke like a jersey. Do not go looking for replacements; understudies are for musicals and grief is not a production. Open your window. The Infinite Friend will pass again, badly disguised as someone who appears to be intolerable. Let them in. Make tea. Hide the good biscuits. Fail, and give them the good biscuits.
If you need a rule, take this one: honour the interruptions. Friendship is an interruption of yourself by the world and of the world by yourself. If nothing interrupts you, you are not living; you are a screensaver. Go be interrupted. Go be available to be changed. The door is heavy, but it’s on your side of the hinge.
And when your friends finally betray you by prospering, or disappointing you by healing, or abandoning you by not dying on schedule, sit on a bench and bless them with a curse that works in reverse: May you be spared the version of me that needed you to keep being exactly who you were. Then stand up. Walk to the shop that sells nothing you need. Look at everything like it might suddenly speak. It will. It does. It already has.
NEXT TIME: An Existential Guide to: Making Money
