Friendship Is A Garden You Have To Tend

Spontaneity is a key element of maintaining and strengthening friendships. Why have we made that so difficult?

A friend texted me 2 hours before first pitch on last Monday if I had any interest in going to the game. I checked my calendar. I had been eyeing Strokes tickets all day on the secondary market but they refused to budge, staying stubbornly above $200. Fuck it, I thought, that plan is not going to happen, and even if I had no real interest in the Phillies (I‘m a child of the AL), it’s always fun to go to a game. So I texted back yes, shuffled some things around, and got myself over to the ballpark in time for the first pitch. It was a fun game, the Giants didn’t win but at least they remembered how to score runs, and we wended the hours chatting about baseball and other sports and music and SF politics and whatever came up

Last Thursday, after a long discussion about whether or not Would You Believe? is deserving of legacy status on the YIMBY Slack, I did some investigating with a couple of friends. We had some beverages, we talked about everything happening in the Richmond, and we rendered judgment (a perfectly serviceable neighborhood bar but not much that screamed legacy!). Perhaps I was out a touch later than I intended, but it’s in the neighborhood, it was a quick trip home and while I could have gone to a show instead, that was a fun way to spend the night as well.

On Friday, I went to a friend’s birthday downtown. As that birthday was shifting towards other locales that I was not vibing with that night, another friend happened to be in the neighborhood as well. He texted to see if we could get a mutual friend who was in town to come out with our combined powers. We failed (I blame the rain), but we ended up chopping it up at a couple other spots downtown until the small hours with a fun cast of characters. Benjamin Cooper may be gone, but the spirit lives on at The Valley Club. Again, not really my plan for the evening, but it was enjoyable to shout along to “Catapult” by Counting Crows on the ride home.

These are just some instances from last week, but they go back to an important lesson I’ve learned over the years: growing and maintaining friendships requires some spontaneity. The ability to quickly shift plans, to go from not doing something to doing something, or the reordering of plans to accommodate something else? All crucial elements to help foment a deeper friendship in my opinion. Which is not to say plans don’t have their merits, or that everything in this life can be impromptu. Certainly, there’s a balance there, and I definitely lead a life that allows for more flexibility a lot. No kids, no partner, I can shift gears pretty quickly.

A lot of people cannot, though. The structure of our lives makes it hard. And it’s not just having kids or a partner or a demanding job. It’s where many of us are living, in places that physically separate us. It’s one of the reasons I love San Francisco, in addition to a lot of people being around, it’s a destination. People come through here all the time. And while I cannot always shuffle everything away (my life isn’t that structureless), it’s nice to have the ability to meet the moment when I get a last minute text. It feels a lot like in college when someone would just poke their head in your door in the dorms and see what you were up to.

It’s one of the aspects I love about cities! A good dense city like San Francisco can replicate that sort of feeling. Live here long enough and you have enough friends who do enough different activities in enough corners of the city that you can still have those kinds of “what’s up?” moments. Most of us live the kind of life where we have a lot of unstructured time for spontaneity and live in close proximity to a bunch of friends or friends-to-be only for a short time (college and maybe the rest of our 20s), and we treat it like a novel period in our lives, never to be replicated again. But why is that? Why do we lock ourselves away in cul-de-sacs and overscheduling only to look up and realize that 20 years have passed?

I’m not the first to observe that in modern life we live increasingly isolated lives. Which is weird considering we have way better tools to stay in touch. But texting isn’t quite the same as being together, is it? I don’t say that to slight the tools we use to stay in touch, they are important in keeping us in contact with each other so we can do stuff together. I just say that because there’s still a premium in our ability to get together, face to face, to talk between pitches about our favorite sports memories, to share a drink while debating local minutiae in Inner Richmond, to catch up on our lives over a late-night burrito on a night when you didn’t expect any of it. And it’s not just all the other demands, it’s opening ourselves up to saying yes to those moments, in whatever form or fashion they may look like to you.

And again, this isn’t to say that structure doesn’t matter, that we can’t and shouldn’t make plans. Frequently, solid plans are foundations. I went out for a friend’s birthday. That was a planned activity, and a good excuse that all of us can pin to our calendar. It’s a structure undergirding the spontaneity that followed. As with anything, it’s a mix. We all got some friends that we need more time and planning to make things happen with. Friendship is a garden you have to tend, planned and impromptu activities are both an important way we do that. Why do we only use a limited palette of tools so frequently?

I’ve put together a life that gives me a lot of ability to be the flexible one, to join someone else’s plans last minute, to improvise. I love this life and I love that role, I take it seriously, but I also think it’s something more people should embrace a little bit more. Maybe not on my level, that’s okay. I frequently get a couplet from Japandroids “Younger Us” stuck in my head: “Remember that night you were already in bed / said fuck it, got up to drink with me instead?” Perhaps I’ve never quite outgrown that and that’s a little extreme to you, but I’d encourage you to embrace it just a bit more.