partial record of modern day friendships

3 forms of platonic chemistry

1 | COWORKER FRIENDS (should i be saying this?)

For the first time ever I think I’m friends with my coworkers. It’s a warm and bubbly feeling, but with the thinnest overlay of discomfort keeping me on my toes.

A and I carpool home together after in-office days and we’re always mid conversation when she reaches her stop. We have to say something like “anyways, let’s definitely continue this convo later.” or “yea tell me more about this tomorrow”. It feels like we could yap for hours if we had it - we bounce off each other’s thoughts in the most energizing way. Yet I think I’ll always feel weird about our friendship as long as we both work in the same capacity and proximity. There are just so many micro interactions and work circumstances that make being friends more complicated. For example, we have to go from yapping about our embarrassing drunk stories straight into “oh yea, could you also review my PR, plz and thank you 🙏😊”

But I think genuine coworker friendships have a few unique layers of context that make them extra precious. Like, despite sometimes word sparring through slack threads, catching each other’s work fumbles, and just spending 8+ hours a day together in the office, you’re telling me you actually still want to come over and wrap dumplings with me? And play pickleball on Thursday morning? Also, not only have we seen each other in a casual, hanging-out setting, but we know what the other person is like when facilitating meetings, giving demos, and working together on projects. I think it’s pretty epic to have many different lenses through which we view a person; you see sides a one-dimensional relationship doesn’t necessarily reveal. Being friends with a coworker is kinda analogous to being classmates with your siblings, or doing business with your partner, or going to the same gym as your dentist, etc.

matching profile pics w the designer squad >>>

2 | ONLINE FRIENDS (you’re shorter than i thought)

I was introduced to the concept of internet friends when I started sharing more online - turning my instagram profile from private to public, vlogging a bit and posting on substack. The first time a stranger left me a long, personal comment on one of my blogs, I remember thinking “wow I feel so seen”. It felt like this person and I existed on the same metaphysical, emotional plane, even if we were physically thousands of miles apart. It was cool to realize the beautiful expansiveness to friendships online, and the possibility for them to be without too many expectations except for each other’s presence on this world, another existence to loosely orbit yours.

In SF, I’ve noticed an especially large number of friendships born out of discord servers, twitter communities, and substack reader meetups. I kinda like how everyone here grew up on the internet and is actively contributing to it too. They’re tweeting, reading, thought-posting, and constantly creating new corners of the web, seeking each other out all to converge in this fog-swept city. A byproduct of this wealth of internet energy is a whole lot of online friends. Many of them do convert to offline status. Over the weekend I met these two dudes K and N who had befriended each other through a discord design community awhile back but were meeting in person for the first time. It was fascinating to witness their interaction because you could tell they knew each other but also not really. “Wait so, how old are you actually?”, K had asked N half an hour into our group conversation. Some things that seem basic and obvious when making friends offline-first don’t actually matter that much when you start virtually.

Still, in spite of all the platforms and mediums we now have to facilitate our friendships, it’s not easy to actually feel connected. I think friendship today is kinda a paradox: wider in reach yet narrower in bandwidth, easier to start but harder to deepen. There are tradeoffs such as: it’s wonderful to turn online friends into in-person ones, but it’s less wonderful to turn primarily in-person friends into online ones. And we now have to more intentionally filter through an overabundance of noises to make time for building and maintaining genuine relationships in our busier lives.

tag yourself

3 | MAKING FRIENDS (i am once again awkwardly trying to be your friend)

All of my friend crushes form within minutes, friend at first sight. It might be an endearing, perplexing laugh. A shared side-eye. An admiration for the way they dress. Honestly a lot of wanting to be someone’s friend can be chalked up to indeterminate factors of friend chemistry (“it’s just the vibes”)! But I have noticed a few foundational qualities among my friend crushes that made them especially friend crushable.

Here are some traits that drew me to them:

1. they are a curious person. They ask you a lot of questions and appear to genuinely, truly want to know the answers. Sometimes they ask questions they don’t even expect you to know the answer to, but it just popped into their head and now you’re wondering too. This indicates a deep desire to learn and a breath of interests that usually also makes them good conversationalists.

2. they have strong (or least medium intensity) opinions, held loosely. They’ve formed internal values and thoughts about many different questions, and they’re able to back up their beliefs. Yet they also believe that very few ideas are absolute, and they’re always willing to consider another side. In a way, this makes them kinda neutral people.

3. they seem to find most things at least a little funny. They have a low threshold for laughter which means they probably don’t take themselves or even life that seriously. They know that most problems aren’t that big of a problem in comparison to other bigger problems out there, or at least they can find some light and humor in it anyways. This makes them generally fun to be around.

4. they’re kinda cringe sometimes but self-aware about it. Cringeness is adjacent to corniness, or mushiness, or a high intensity of sentimentality that I actually find pretty charming. The self-awareness part is important though because the cringe despite knowing it’s cringe reflects a very respectable level of confidence and bravery.

5. they exude lover behavior. Lover behavior is basically the opposite of being a hater. They like to do things like: participating in sunrises, taking care of plants, saying yes to new experiences, laying directly on the grass, and dancing and enjoying good music. They’d rather love you than find fault with you. Or maybe they’ll find fault with you but love you anyways. You can take them to an upscale multi michelin starred restaurant or the run down neighborhood deli and they can have a good time either way. They probably very much appreciate nature.

Pursuing friend crushes (and perhaps some romantic crushes), I believe, is all about patience. You have to be in it for the long run - and I mean long run in the magnitude of potentially years, but trust in the spine-y senses of your friend crush radar, and it’ll happen eventually. Certainly there’s a part that requires timely work on your part, like proactively reaching out, or going to events they probably will go to too, or at least finding and following them on [insert social media of choice]. But these are short term actions that should only supplement a longer term strategy!

In the words of ChatGPT:

Is it just me or chatGPT is getting funnier

Part of what my friend crush radar is detecting for is some sort of affinity between our future paths. The idea here is if you’re someone I want to have in my life, then chances are you’re figuratively located in the vicinity of a vision of mine - maybe you have interests and ambitions that align with mine, or a confidence I too want to embody. These are the types of things I trust will bring us together somewhere down the line.

There have even been times when I have developed friend crushes on people I don’t actually think would be able to be great friends with me right now. Usually it’s because our circles are just too different or he’s a guy and I don’t want him to get the wrong idea. But if the friend chemistry is there and I have some inkling that we could be good friends eventually, I will be manifesting :) Several of my closest friends now were friendships born out of friend crushes manifested over the course of many months.

Of course, the best feeling is when you find out they were friend crushing on you too. That usually expedites the process drastically. This happened with me and L in senior year of college when we spent one month awkwardly bumping into each other at group events and telling our friends we wanted to be friends with each other. Another month later, we went on a Europe trip together.

Sometimes, friend crushes blossom quickly and other times they have to simmer, but either way I like how they make me invigorated by people! And it’s fun to recognize friend chemistry when it’s there, because if there’s enough of it, we might just be forever 💕👉👈

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More ounces:

• this love story powered by AI I discovered from connie, an offline turned online turned offline friend :)

• this video of Eric Clapton playing Layla live (peak aura)

• 3 songs of late