I was super excited for the Best Man: Final Chapters to premiere. Yes, my excitement was mostly because Taye Diggs is my celebrity crush (not necessarily Taye Diggs the person, but more so all the characters he plays. See Brown Sugar) and I will personally never tire of seeing Morris Chestnut shirtless on my screen. But also because I have always loved the Best Man franchise. A story of male and female friendship, love, betrayal, and forgiveness starring a never-aging black cast? What’s there not to love? So best believe I put in my $4.99 to Peacock the day it came out and spent the next few days savoring all eight episodes.
I’m not here to do a deep dive into the series - though there may be some spoilers, so beware. I do want to share what I’ve been mulling over in the weeks since, and how well the story depicted something I’ve been running around in circles over for months:
The complexity and difficulty of adult friendships.
Different Scripts, Different Casts
I know I’m not the only one feeling this confusion over these specific relationships. For a long time, romantic relationships took up all of our mental and emotional space. I think I’m finding that I’m a lot more clear on what I want/expect out of a partnership at this age, but I’m still trying to figure out friendships - the kind of friends I want and the kind of friend I want to be. I’m finding it difficult to maintain old friendships and make new ones, to figure out when to set boundaries, to decide when to let a friendship die and when to show up and fight for one that matters. It’s sometimes even harder to untangle yourself from the love of a friendship than it is that of a partner. Some of my friendships are easy and simple… until they’re not. Some are just hard for no apparent reason. And if the anxiety of everything that is adulting wasn’t enough, the familiarity and comfort of people we have always called friends seem to be replaced with yet another form of anxiety too.
I’m getting ahead of myself, though. Before I unpack how I think we can reframe our mindset around navigating friendships in our 30s, I first want to pose a theory on why I think we’re here, to begin with.
When I asked a friend what she thought of the Best Man finale, she said she didn’t like it because she thought the storyline was ‘everywhere’. I completely agree with her. But I think I loved it precisely because the storyline was everywhere. FOR ONCE, a script that depicted real life. There was no clear plot. Everyone was experiencing completely different things at the exact same time. Some people were happy while others were sad. Some were celebrating love while others were grieving loss. Someone was not a mother but helping her friend navigate his bad parenting. World-renowned success came on the back of a crushing divorce for one person, while quitting a high-powered corporate job brought joy to another. Harper was absent for a lot of the group celebrations because he was off chasing his own definition of success. No one was there for Quentin when his business was failing, or his father was sick. Jordan, Julian, Robin, and Lance were each dealing with personal and family crises on their own.
What the Best Man finale illustrated for us is that life is not some perfect script, and the reason - or at least one of the reasons - adult friendship is so difficult to navigate is that we’re not only in different lanes, we’re each living in a very different story. While someone is experiencing their most extraordinary chapter so far, another is becoming the villain of their own story.
A Side Note on Envy…
I’m not even going to factor in comparison or envy into this conversation on why adult friendships are difficult. I see all the new year posts about cutting friends off, and if you think this is about affirming that feeling, you either don’t know me well enough or don’t know me at all (either way, welcome to my mind, we don’t do the norm here). Like it or not, envy and comparison are both normal and valid feelings that don’t always come from a bad place. I’m not saying malicious people don’t exist, or that there aren’t people who pretend to like you but secretly don’t wish you well. I’m saying that comparison and envy are not always malicious at their root. They’re often from deep insecurity or fear of people who haven’t yet reached their own potential. It’s easy to tell someone to be happy for their friend who gets the thing they desire the most. But they wouldn’t be human if they didn’t feel left behind, or envious. Envy is not jealousy - let’s be clear. We often conflate the two or think envy is worse. Envy is the painful feeling of wanting what someone else has. Jealousy is about feeling threatened and fearful of losing one’s position to another. Envy is this weird mix of admiration and discontent. It’s a very normal feeling - the same as anger and dislike and fear. They’re not ‘good’ feelings, or useful in and of themselves, but they do give us valuable insight into ourselves, our insecurities, our desires, and perhaps even needs that aren’t being met. I don’t think people being envious of you or finding it difficult to be around you when you’re up because they’re in a down place is a sign of a difficult friendship. I think we need to allow people to process things and their lives in a way that feels right to them without thinking that it means something about us (hold this thought, I’ll come back to it). And the more we normalize feelings of envy, the more we won’t feel like such horrible people for truly wanting to be happy for others, but also feeling miserable for ourselves and about our circumstances. Those two feelings can coexist and intermingle and you are not a bad person for it. What matters is what comes out of those feelings - do you choose to celebrate people even when you wish it was you being celebrated? Do you choose to go to the baby shower and love on your friends when the doctors have told you you may never have your own and it’s causing you physical pain? I hope you allow yourself - and your friends - the space to be human, and this detour frees you up in your spirit and gives you permission to explore all your feelings - even the ‘bad’ ones - without guilt or shame, and find some healing.
The Great Divergence…
But I digress. Back to the adult friendship metaphors. If you’re not into black 90s nostalgic cinema/TV (which I’m severely judging you for) you can think of it like a game of Ring-A-Round the Rosies. There was a time when you and your friends found it easy to keep your hands locked as life spun your round and round in circles. Back then we were all on similar life trajectories. Primary school. High School. Apply for college. Spend 4 years working hard - or not so hard. Party. Get an internship. Struggle as an entry-level employee. But then things start to diverge. Someone gets a job straight out of college while someone struggles in an internship for three years. One friend loves their job, and the other hates theirs and cries every day. Connections, networking, or nepotism help one friend in the same career field get ahead of the other. People start moving away and start earning different salaries. Accessibility changes - someone is living with 6 roommates and can barely afford the transport to work each day, and the other has a penthouse and is first-class flight hopping. Then people get married - yay! And you dutifully show up as a bridesmaid again and again. Then it’s your turn - and all the while your maid of honor is going through a gruesome divorce. Another has lost their sister to cancer. They cannot show up for you in the same way you once showed up for them, no matter how much they want to. Another friend starts to have kids, and another is battling infertility. Someone becomes a widower. Someone gets promoted to C-suite, and another loses their job. People are evolving and deciding who they want to be, others figuring out who they’ve always been, and you might be in the middle of your own major personal/financial/mental crisis. In the game, life has begun to spin everyone so fast, that no matter how hard you try to keep up and hold on, people keep falling out of sync while others remain standing and it can feel like people don’t want to hold on when really they’re either tired of standing or constantly getting knocked down.
This is my thesis on why adult friendships are so hard: it’s less envy - or jealousy - and more that it’s just so much more difficult to expect everyone to be on the same page of life as you are, much less in the same novel. It would be like if Cinderella showed up at the Enchanted Forest and asked Snow White to come to a ball with her. Girl, I just choked on a poisoned apple! Or like if Aurora expected Tiana to leave her restaurant in the middle of the day to take a nap with her because of her post-spinning needle sleeping sickness. She’s working class, she can’t afford to sleep.
The Unsolicited Advice Part
Here are some personal truths - the pills you’re not going to want to swallow - that have helped me over the last few months as I’ve tried to figure out how I want to approach my friendships in the future:
People may not value their friendship with you in the same way you value your friendship with them. This is a very hard pill to swallow. You may have people higher up in your hierarchy than they have you and you may have to demote people to stop yourself from constantly feeling disappointed. And this isn’t on some New Year cut-people-off-ish. This is honestly just that people have other people to worry about in their lives - including themselves - and being there for every single person you care about can be exhausting. This brings me to number 2:
People not showing up for you isn’t always about you. Maybe they’re on a difficult chapter of their story and do not have the bandwidth to give you more than a like on that bomb-ass picture. I wrote this in my journal the other day: “People’s decisions to be silent/not respond to me have nothing to do with me and everything to do with their desire to be alone/their inability to communicate whatever issues they do have or their desire to be alone. I am not responsible for the actions or inactions of others, and it doesn’t make me a bad person if everyone doesn’t want to give me their time and attention”. Which is a great segue to number 3:
Your feelings about people not showing up for you may say more about you and your unmet needs than the fact that they didn’t make an IG post for your birthday. If that’s really the hill you’re willing to kill your friendship on, you need some self-reflection. Why do I have this expectation? Why do I want to be publicly celebrated? If this person is showing up for me in other more valuable ways, doesn’t that matter more? Why is this the thing that grinds my gears?
You can go where you are wanted/needed/valued. You are not a stone. You can move. And don’t say you don’t have anyone who cares, or no one loves you - I saw a [tiktok] video of a woman saying her therapist checked her for saying that: who do you want to give you time and attention who isn’t, causing you to catastrophize like no one cares? People care. The people who you want to care may not - or might not have the capacity to. So go where your energy is reciprocated. Go where people give you what you need out of a friendship. Again, it’s not about cutting people off, it’s about shifting your expectations and getting your friendship needs met in a place and way that makes sense to you. I’m learning to do this.
On reciprocating energy, another note from my journal: “…my need for others to respond positively to my care and attention is a me problem. People are not obligated to want what I offer. I am free to rescind the offer if I don’t feel it’s been reciprocated or received well. I can take my energy back.” People don’t have to want your offer of friendship just because you think it’s good. You do not have to take it personal or think that it says something about you. People may not care for your thoughtfulness or affection - or it may not be in their hierarchy of needs in this season. That too is OK.
We too easily label people as bad friends. It’s OK to be upset that someone isn’t showing up for you how you expect them to. It’s OK to expect more from a friendship. But not everyone who drops the ball in your life is a bad person or a bad friend. They may just not have the bandwidth to be a friend to you/the kind of friend you need.
People are not obligated to let you in on their stories. No one owes you their vulnerability or the degree of it that you think you deserve. This is the one that catches me up, I’ll be honest. Because I so badly want to be a good friend, to show up, to care for people the way I want them to care for me if I ever need it. But people do not have to need me for me to be a good friend. Read that again. Your need to be needed is a you problem - probably stemming from some sort of parentification in your childhood, but I’m not your therapist, and I don’t get paid $300 an hour to unpack that for you, so please see a specialist. Point is, not all your friends want your help, or need that kind of friendship from you in this season. Some people will not take your offer of help. And that too is OK.
People don’t know what you need unless you tell them. Yes, you remember everyone’s birthdays. Everyone is not you. And your problem is you expect everyone else to show up as you. Allow people to show up how they want to and decide if that’s enough for you. And if it’s not, communicate that it isn’t. You should be able to converse with your friends and have honest conversations about your needs in the friendship. You can’t complain someone keeps buying you apples when you prefer oranges if you haven’t told them your preference. ‘ I wish we would talk more’. ‘I wish we spent more time together’. You can ask for what you need.
You’re not the great friend you think you are. We’re all self-biased, especially when we’re not getting what we hope for in our friendships. We think we’re the absolute best thing since sliced bread when we’ve probably dropped the ball a lot in our friendships too. Take ownership of all the ways in which you haven’t been the best friend instead of always pointing fingers at others. Some of my closest friendships are ones where I can say, ‘I’m so sorry I wasn’t there for you the way you needed when you needed it. I didn’t know how to be there for you because I was going through my own storm’. Sincerity goes a long way.
You need too much out of your friendships. Some of us are just high-maintenance friends who expect everyone to show up for us at the drop of a hat. Read, co-dependency. Either that or we have some weird arbitrary expectations of the people we call friends that aren’t actual measures of friendship. People cannot be your everything or do everything. If you’re having difficulty in your friendships, it’s worth asking, do you feel like I require too much of you as a friend?
You might be thinking your friends don’t give enough, and it’s not just that your expectations are too high, it’s that you do too much. You do not need to send birthday and Christmas gifts for every single one of your friends’ kids. You do not need to buy your friend a car when you hit the lottery. I promise you people are not expecting from you what you think they are, and you and I both know you’re only going to be upset when the energy isn’t returned in the same fashion. Save yourself the disappointment and stop always feeling like you need to prove how good a friend you are through your actions. A good friend will appreciate the new frying pan as much as they will the vacation to Dubai. If you are someone who truthfully enjoys spoiling your friends without it being reciprocated, or you are in the tax bracket where you can view it as a write-off, then you are better than most of us and should definitely keep being your magnificent self. Point is, stop overextending yourself to prove your friendship to people who should really just love you for you and not what you do for them.
You don’t actually recognize who your friends are because you value the wrong things in friendship. Is your friend buying you a Dior bag for Christmas? A great gift, but not a measure of friendship. Remembering every single significant day in your friendship? Replying with 5-page essay texts? These are not measures of a good friend. A generous friend, a talkative friend, maybe. But not a good friend. Who calls when you’ve had a tough breakup? Who does nothing on Instagram for your birthday but sends flowers out of the blue to remind you they believe in you? Who reminds you of the promises you made to yourself and holds you accountable to your goals? Who is there when you ask for help? Who calls you to just chat? Not who you’ve known the longest, or who you have the most fun with. All great traits. All important friends to have but know who your friends are and what you can expect from each of them.
Adult friendships are work. There’s no ease to it anymore. You have different lives and are on different schedules. You have to have traditions and create spaces for your friendships to thrive. Pencil in calls with one friend each week. Plan annual trips. Be sure to let them know when you’re going to be in their city. You will have to take that phone call sitting in the car parked in your garage because you know the moment you walk into the door, you’re Mommy and not the ever-so-affectionate b-word anymore. If you want strong, meaningful friendships, you have to put in the time and energy to keep and grow them.
Your friendships will change and you must let them. If you are evolving, and your life is changing significantly, don’t expect your friends or the relationship you have to remain stagnant. You’re going to have to adapt your friendships to include these new, more complex versions of you. Mother. Wife. Widower. Divorcee. Unemployed. Student. Be adaptable and flexible to what different seasons will do and how they will change the dynamics of your friendship. Plan activities that are kid-friendly so your stay-at-home mom friend can join. Think about your friend who has severe anxiety - what kind of trips would make them comfortable and cause the least amount of stimulation? What restaurants can your friend who got laid off afford, without always just assuming you’ll just cover for them? Give advance notice of big dates to friends who live far away. Be amenable to plan changes.