CHAPTERS on Why it's so hard to find friends

The rare magic of real friendship ✨

Dec 10, 2023

silhouette of three woman with hands on the air while dancing during sunset

The Rule of Three

If I had to choose a favourite superstition, it’d be the one that things “come in threes.” As far as superstitions go, I think there’s something in this one, hear me out. There’s a pattern. There are the good threebies like the musketeers, Neapolitan ice cream and primary colours. As well as bad combos like, traffic lights and triathlons.

Then there’s my friends. Throughout the definitive chapters of my life so far, I have collected trifectas of close friendships from each stage.

High school - Three friends.

Uni - Three Friends.

Post-uni housemate friends - three.

First job in London, you guessed it - Three colleagues who became friends.

There are exceptions outside of the rule of three but they are special cases.

Finding real friends is hard

Making friends is something I have never thought myself to be particularly good at. I would look enviously at people with a huge circle of friends and wonder how they had made them all. And why I had only made, well, three. (I’m talking about those ocean-deep friendships btw, not the friends you see for a beer once a year.) When I’d found my besties at uni, I closed the friendship shop for business. All applications would go straight to junk. I knew my people and I need look no further. Perhaps that was my problem. But those friendships were so precious to me that I was prepared to be all in. It paid. They are the best investment I could have made - arguably much better than the degree I paid for. But I reflect on that friend-limit mindset with a tinge of regret and wonder if I missed opportunities for a bigger network of relationships. As I’ve got older I’ve tried to be more open to building connections and keeping in touch. (A work in progress.) But this has only further confirmed my suspicions that finding real friends is hard. Maybe it’s harder in London. Maybe it’s harder in your thirties. Maybe it’s harder with less people working in the office. Maybe I just don’t like that many people. Maybe it’s all of the above.

What I can say for certain is that finding true friendship is like discovering some incredibly rare magic. It’s not something you can easily go looking for. If you’re lucky it will find you. You will stumble upon it when you’re stumbling through a day. Someone meets you on a wavelength you weren’t aware you were on until they appeared. They make you feel seen. And you can’t believe you haven’t been friends with them for your whole life already. Sometimes you have to work hard to keep your friendship alive through the winters of life. Sometimes they walk with you, arm in arm, on a warm summers day.

What’s the magic?

It’s a hilarious story via voice-note. It’s sharing a weird, unfiltered thought and being met with the words, “exactly”, “agreed”, “same” or non-judgmental fits of laughter. It’s yelling in their ex-boyfriends face. It’s knowing the intricate nuances of their family dynamic. It’s shared memories of past trials and triumphs, the dream jobs, the bad bosses, the questionable haircuts. It’s sitting on a McDonald’s floor at 2am and declaring your love through a mouthful of nugs. It’s knowing telepathically when something is off with them and being proven right every time. It’s sitting on a sofa watching reality TV and finding it way more entertaining than if you were watching alone.

It’s a phonecall in which one of you is absolutely not fine, goes into great detail about how not fine things are before saying, “anyway I’m fine, how are you?”. It’s sitting in their car outside your house but not getting out for ages because that car feels more like home in that moment than the house does. It’s being a cheerleader and having a fan club. It’s proudly telling everyone you meet all about them. It’s a shared language which allows you to know what to say when they need to hear it. It’s spending every day together and never tiring. It’s spending months apart and picking up where you left off. It’s crying laughing, it’s drunk crying, it’s happy crying and sad crying, sometimes all at once. It’s a feeling of freedom to be you. It’s telling them a story which you don’t have the emotional energy to repeat but you trust they’ll recount it with word-for-word accuracy when you say, ‘can you tell the others.’ It’s a knowing side-eye. It’s a loyalty card. That’s the magic.

That’s the real reason it’s hard to find. It’s not because you’re bad at making friends or other people are good at it. It’s because that bond is rare and tough to maintain when lifestyles and geography get in the way. Whether it’s with one person, three people or you’re lucky to find a whole football team’s worth. Work for it. It’s precious. Hold on tight.