Friendship Dips, Pajama Friends and Feeling Disillusioned

Friendship Explainer to the rescue

As a professional friendship explainer, I was vibrating with joy that so many newsletters have been raising questions about what the heck is going on it our friendships lately.

Me, wearing a purple blazer and balancing a small notebook on my knee

First, author

Catherine Price

wondered in her newsletter where all her pajama friends have gone.

They’re the people who don’t require coffee dates to “catch up” because—in the ideal pajama friend scenario—you’re such a part of each other’s lives (sometimes to the point of living together) that you already know everything that’s going on with each other.

Price asked:

How do adults—like, married adults with jobs and kids and phones, who don’t just happen to regularly stumble upon all of their closest friends hanging out in a coffee shop—achieve the easy intimacy of pajama friends? Is it even possible?

In response, journalist

Isolde Walters

asked her newsletter subscribers if our 30s are our loneliest decade. She’s feeling disillusioned that her friendships don’t look the way she thought they would too:

By the time you reach your mid-thirties more and more people have moved away in search of more space and priorities like marriages and children push friendship to the bottom of the list, it’s hard not to feel a little hopeless that by not tying the knot or popping out a sprog you have doomed yourself to a lonely life.

Next,

Culture Study

’s head honcho Anne Helen Peterson talked about the tumultuous period of social churn in our 30s, which she calls the Friendship Dip.

The Friendship Dip makes everything harder. It’s lonely; it’s alienating; it’s confusing. It shouldn’t be this hard to balance the maxims of adult life.

The reason our friendships look like dilapidated gingerbread houses is because most people don’t have a strategy to keep their friendships afloat into adulthood.

Think about it. We have strategies for how we’ll advance in our careers (internships, networking events, advanced education). We create strategies for finding romantic love (dating apps, blind dates, approaching hotties at the club). We create strategies for growing, or caring for, our family (wills, health insurance plans, doctor checkups).

But when it comes to adult friendships, most of us have no strategy to maintain them.

I like my friends’ pictures on Instagram. That’s a strategy, right??

Call it what you want –– The Friendship Dip, a dearth of pajama friends –– the lack of intimate friendships in adulthood isn’t a consequence of working too much or investing too much time into ourselves, as AHP suggests.

It’s more simple than that.

Most adults in their 30s and 40s never had to have a strategy to maintain their friendships before. Friends just existed all around them at school or work with very little effort on their part.

But, our generation doesn’t usually stick around where they went to school. We don’t stick around at our jobs too long either. We travel more and get married later in life. We usually have to rebuild our social network from scratch several times over.

And we are one of the first generations to have to craft our own social network separate from organized institutions. We’re little Bambis with little experience at this organizing-our-own social networks thing.

Should I call my friend from high school to say what up? Should I text my old co-worker hello? Am I doing this friendship right???

Imagine you’re starving and need to shop for dinner ingredients. If you’re like me, you’ll toss whatever looks good into your cart: fresh baked bread, a few mozzarella sticks from the hot bar, an apple, a bottle of kombucha, a jar of Carbone’s tomato sauce because it was on sale, maybe a Twix as you check out. Then you think: How am I going to make a meal out of this random shit I tossed in my cart??

A lot of our friendships look like a shopping cart filled with random crap. We collect friends throughout our whole life. We have childhood friends, school friends, camp friends, work friends, hobby friends, etc. Often times, these separate friend groups never meet one another. They’re the Chopped food basket of our social lives.

I hope there’s something edible in here!

A better strategy when food shopping is to write a focused list when we aren’t in starvation mode: salmon, green beans, a potato, maybe some berries. A plan tells you what belongs in your shopping cart and what doesn’t. This will yield a more satisfying and far more nutritious meal.

Friendships are the same way. It’s not that older generations have the answers to these issues and we don’t. Older generations had a social strategy that society designed for them. Join a church. Join a country club. Join, join, join.

Our generation –– people in their 30s and 40s –– have to design our social strategy for ourselves. We’re not looking to religious organizations and neighborhood groups to fill the social gaps like our parents or grandparents did. We’re in new territory.

My book, Modern Friendship, will help you understand these changes and give you the tools to thrive. I will help you understand:

• Desire - who you yearn to spend time with.

• Diligence - who you prioritize spending time with.

• Delight - who you actually enjoy spending your time with.

A wholehearted friendship has all three ingredients. A winning strategy looks like prioritizing hanging out with wonderful people and being an outstanding friend to those elite few.

I’m 45 years-old and I’m enjoying the best friendships of my life. I’ve never felt so happy and content with my friendships. The reason: I came up with an achievable, sustainable strategy to maintain my wonderful friendships. In fact, I DID hang out with a friend while we were in our pajamas two weeks ago. I was able to have this experience because I HAD A PLAN to make our friendship a priority.

You need focus. You need commitment. You need a plan too.

Don’t despair if your friendships aren’t where you wish. Let me help you come up with a plan. Together, we will turn your Friendship Dip into an awesome-as-fuck Friendship Bump.

"Your true job as a host isn’t to create perfection, anyway — it’s to create a shared sense of belonging for your guests." - Me!

I recently wrote a piece for Bustle Magazine talking about how being a good host has nothing to do with what you serve on your plate. Give it a read if you have a minute.

Your buddy,

Anna Goldfarb