Friendships are everything

I haven’t always been a good friend. For a long time, I didn’t even fully understand what being a good friend meant.

I didn’t grow up with clear role models for friendship. My parents’ social lives were tightly woven into family life. Their friends were relatives: aunts, uncles, and cousins who were part of an established, ongoing cycle of connection. Check-ins were assumed. Presence was built in. Friendship, as a separate relationship to be nurtured intentionally, wasn’t something I often saw, at least not in a way that lasted.

When you’re in school, you’re surrounded by peers your own age, which can make connections easier to find. Similar interests are almost inevitable. Even so, there have been few times in my life when I felt my friend list was at capacity. Even fewer times when I truly belonged to a group. Most of the time, my friendships existed one by one. Individuals. Stragglers. I was probably someone’s straggler friend too.

I have tried to bring friends together. When I hosted sleepovers in elementary school, every girl in my class was invited. Everyone. I have always leaned toward inclusion. I can’t say my friends have always done the same for me. Even now, I don’t often get included with their other friends, and that has been quietly painful to notice.

Graduate school was different. My social calendar was full. There was always someone to grab coffee with, always someone to talk through a research project with. We were mostly aligned in how we navigated our education, and that alignment carried over socially as well. I always seemed to have something to do, sometimes too much to do. There were parties, dinners, drinks, walks, casual writing hangouts. During the years when I was on campus every day of the week, I felt connected and deeply human.

To my advantage, I have often been in a relationship. I never took the role of friend within those partnerships for granted, but there was something warm and comforting about having a built-in best friend for everything. Even the mundane things like grocery store runs, Target errands, or going to vote. Sometimes life feels better with a body by your side.

Without a partner, and for me also without family, friendships take on a much bigger role. They become essential. They cannot be casual. There are simply too many spaces to be filled in my life for them to be. I often feel like I need friendships more than the people I meet need me. Friends already have friends. They have partners and, often, families. Even when they want to build something, it rarely becomes their priority. It almost always becomes mine.

I was on Bumble BFF off and on, looking for exactly what the app promises: a friend. Instead, it felt eerily like dating. Endless texting. Flat first meetings, if they happened at all. No lasting connections.

Admittedly, my attempts to make friends often coincided with lonely times. I showed up when my life felt uncertain rather than grounded. People can sense emotional weight, even when it’s unspoken. And then there’s the layer of being a queer woman. I sometimes wonder if straight women feel hesitant meeting a lesbian under the label of friendship, as if they worry I might want more. I don’t know if that’s true or just my anxiety filling in the blanks. I tend to worry too much.

What I’ve learned since then is that friendships don’t sustain themselves on proximity alone. They require effort. You have to show up. And sometimes you have to do more of the work at first, “until they catch up,” as my friend Eva puts it. Reach out, and reach out again. Invite, and invite again. Don’t keep score. I think about the times I waited for others to reach out, not because I didn’t want connection, but because I didn’t know how. I know better now. I can help guide a relationship forward.

But if, after sustained effort, someone still isn’t meeting you halfway, it may be time to let that relationship go. Just like any other relationship, friendship requires reciprocity. It’s painful to say goodbye. It can feel like a breakup, but protecting yourself matters too. There will be other friends who come along and fill your cup differently, but fully.

I’ve also come to believe that real friendship requires vulnerability. It asks people to share their thoughts and feelings, and to be present when someone else does the same. People who only show up for an activity or a surface-level conversation are not friends. They may be pleasant company, but they are not the ones who will hold you when things fall apart.

Living in Germany gave me language for this distinction. There is a clear difference between Freunde, Bekannte, and Kollegen. At first, those categories felt harsh to me as an American. Over time, I’ve come to appreciate their clarity.

Kollegen are colleagues. It isn’t reasonable to expect them to provide emotional depth, especially when work itself carries its own weight and stress.

Bekannte are acquaintances. People you like. People you might grab coffee with occasionally. But they are not the ones you call when a tree falls on your house at three in the morning and you need somewhere to sleep.

Freunde are different. Friends sit with you when your heart breaks. When betrayal consumes you. When you fear your life is hanging by a thread. They leave work early for you. They stay on the phone for hours listening, comforting, supporting. They rearrange their plans to show up. They check in without being asked. They count the days you haven’t cried with you. They celebrate your successes and want you to speak your truth. They believe in your skills, your passion, and your drive.

Those distinctions no longer feel harsh to me. They feel honest. I am in a difficult season of my life. I am looking for Freunde, the real ones. I know it takes time. And I am learning how to wait without giving up.