She's having a baby!

And she's one of my closest friends. What now?

Dear Evie,

As I cross into my mid-30s, a lot of my close friends are moving into a new phase of life: marriage, house in the suburbs, babies. It’s a lifestyle that is not only very distant from my own, but one that I have never wanted for myself and find challenging to relate to. But I love these friends and I want to keep them in my life. Is it possible, and if so, how do I do it?

— Left Behind in Brooklyn

Dear Left Behind,

I kind of hate the cliché “nobody tells you about [some specific aspect of adulthood],” because the expectation that you ought to have fair warning for every minor and major challenge that exists after the age of 18 is just… kind of deranged. But it is certainly true that nobody tells you that friendships get a lot harder as you age. And I think we unconsciously expect friendships to be easy, because they’re not normally considered a marker of life success, as I discussed in my last newsletter.

But it’s also because when a friendship is good and fun and fulfilling, it does feel like the easiest and best thing in the world. When you have a friend who understands you and knows all of your secrets and you can talk for hours and hours about everything and nothing, it is legitimately better than like 98% of the sex you will have in your life. I’m sorry! This is why when Taylor Swift writes about the sweetness of a really, really close friendship, people think she’s a lesbian.

This is a screenshot from the Taylor Swift music video where she sings about being young friends in Pennsylvania, the most beautiful experience a person can have.

It is also why, when something happens that interrupts the ease of your connection, it elicits this complex, ineffable pain. Aging is fundamentally about building the life that you want — or attempting to, at least — and that involves trying on combinations of geographies and romances and jobs to figure out what feels best. You try to fit the old friendships into those new combinations, and become frustrated when it isn’t easy.

Contemporary empowerment culture tells us that if something doesn’t fit into your life, you get rid of it. Protect your peace, live your truth, you don’t owe anyone anything. This is not a helpful philosophy when it comes to pretty much any relationship, and true friendships do not endure on the basis of compatible lifestyles. It’s how they might form — you live in the same dorm, you go to the same parties, you work in the same building — but it doesn’t determine how they last in your life.

You want to know if keeping friendships alive is possible when the lives that you are respectively building are very different. Yes! It is! But — and this is a bit of a hard truth — only the friendships where the connection is strong enough that you want to put in effort to keep it intact. And then, only if three conditions are met: That you do not mentally erect barriers and resentments out of differences in priorities; that you maintain empathy; and that you are willing to at least temporarily forego an accounting of effort expended by you vs. your friend.

A few years ago I began to feel that as friends got married and started families, their lives became more insular. I felt a loss of closeness, like we were suddenly having our conversations through a chain-link fence. That in turn made me feel greedy for the intimacy we had had, and ashamed of the greed. How dare I demand to be a priority in the life of someone who wants to do the ostensible most selfless thing in the world, which is become a parent? At the same time, I felt resentful of having to adjust our friendship, of which I was ostensibly an equal part, to choices I had not made.

This is a screenshot from another Taylor Swift music video. Or I guess “lyric video.”

This brings me to an uncomfortable factor that I’d like to identify in your dilemma: that getting married, starting a family, buying a house are all viewed as active choices that mark progress on a certain path, whereas deciding not to do any of those things is considered passive. You feel left behind! You said it yourself! And it’s hard to avoid a little resentment when you feel left behind, even when you’re exactly where you want to be.

But — and here’s where the empathy comes in — your friends have made choices that are not necessarily easy for them, and could in fact make them feel left behind! There are a litany of forces that make starting a family in 2023 in the United States a potentially isolating proposition. Housing is unprecedentedly unaffordable, which means that when you want to buy a house in which to stably raise your family, there’s a good chance you’ll have to look outside of your community to find something you can afford. (That becomes a very high chance if you live in a city like New York, and explains the suburb migration you mention.) That’s a huge destabilization!

None of this is news, I imagine, and it probably has something to do with why this path does not tempt you. People choose not to start families usually because they don’t want to lose their freedom. But unfortunately, since you are the one with more freedom, you are going to have to be the one to do more work to keep these friendships going, at least in the very early stages of parenthood — which is where abandoning the effort balance sheet comes in. This is the definition of support!

Another screenshot! This could be you, at a child’s birthday party with Taylor Swift.

I said earlier that choosing to be a parent is the most selfless thing you can do, but it doesn't mean that the singular expression of selfless love is cleaning a compound of bodily fluids you never even imagined off an infant’s body several times a day. The reality is that friendship as an adult — when lives are more demanding, more rigid — does not exist without generosity. In this particular case, you will spend some Saturdays taking the train to the suburbs; your conversations will be interrupted by baby meltdowns; you will learn, against your will, what Cocomelon is. You will have to ask what they need and follow through on giving it to them.

You will also have to accept that there is a distance between you, in both miles and elements less quantifiable, and find ways to reach across it. There will be more phone calls and FaceTimes where there were once long nights out, and there will be moments when those modes of communication make you sad that simply talking is not as easy as it used to be, but any way to keep talking is really crucial.

You’re probably thinking that this all sounds like a lot of work, and what’s the point of a relationship that’s just hard? It won’t be. Your friends will be tired and frazzled but they’re also the same people, and eventually — when the more acute stressors of suburb-moving and infant-raising subside — you’ll be able to talk about everything and nothing again. They will be there for you in your own times of crisis, and to celebrate your successes. And you will be part of the life that they want to have, and it will make your own life more expansive.

In friendship, and in honor of it,

Evie