The romance of friendship
On my first single Valentine's Day in 15+ years, the Friendship-Acquaintance matrix, and using a spreadsheet to make friends
I did the math and realized that this was the first Valentine's Day I had spent properly single in 15 years.
That number shocked me when I finally tallied it up. It was one of those moments when my self-concept (fiercely independent, solitary, untethered) clashed with the evidence in front of me. I’ve been romantically attached to someone every February since before I could drive. Until now.
Maybe that’s what my sister, Libby, was thinking about when she invited me to join her and her husband for a romantic Valentine’s Day dinner. I declined. They insisted. And that’s how we ended up as a group of three at an extremely romantic, prix-fixe, candle-lit dinner at an Italian restaurant on Valentine’s Day, positively befuddling the entire waitstaff.
“Are we waiting for a fourth to join us?” the smiling hostess asked, surveying the set of characters before her, clearly trying to figure out how we fit together.
“Nope,” said my brother-in-law, Spencer. “Just us three.” The hostess shook her head almost imperceptibly, as if clearing away a difficult math problem, and led us to our seats.
The waitress bounced over to our table. “Will a fourth be joining us tonight?” she asked brightly.
“Nope,” my sister said. “Just us.” The waitress’ face took on a dark look of pity.
I surveyed the dining room and saw their source of confusion: it was all multiples of two, like Noah’s ark. Our table had been set with a fourth place, which they spirited away like something shameful.
After the first course, someone else came by to refill our water. He glanced down at the empty seat next to me: “Are you—”
“NOPE,” I said. “IT’S JUST US THREE.”
I’ve gotten used to moving as a unit with Libby and Spencer. Lib and I have been best friends since birth (as well as mortal enemies during a heated period between 2002–2009). She got married in Apri 2021 and my own marriage ended that May. I spent countless hours with her and Spencer that year in their first house as newlyweds. At the times when everything in my life felt wobbly and unstable, they have always been a solid place to land. Using the parameters of who has loved me longest and best, they were actually the most logical choice for who to spend Valentine’s Day with.
Back at dinner, it turns out we had created a glitch in the restaurant’s matrix to our great benefit. The fixed price menu had been created for even numbers. As a result, we were delivered doubles of everything: two cheese plates. Two antipasti platters. Two massive servings of bucatini. With each course, Libby requested a doggy bag and neatly loaded the leftovers into plastic clamshells, which stacked up on the empty fourth chair. The waitstaff eventually wizened up and only brought us one heart-shaped pizza, but by that time, we were full and happy.
We were the last table to leave, with our takeout containers piled high like conquering heroes.
The truth is: I love Valentine's Day. I always have. I love the theatrical camp of it: Glitter! Silk! Lace! Paper hearts! Red lipstick! But even when I’ve been in relationships, the least interesting part of Valentine’s Day has always been my partner.
In college, my best friend Melody and I had our own radio show. Getting the show was pretty simple other than having to pass a test that required us to memorize and then recite 12 words and phrases we were forbidden to use on-air, thereby burning them into my brain and massively increasing the chance of us using them on air. Our crowning achievement was our breakup-themed Valentine’s Day broadcast. This year, I performed at The Porch’s Heartbreak Happy Hour with a PowerPoint presentation about my ex’s red flags (and some of my own), where I experienced the unique catharsis of having a packed room of friends and strangers alternately laughing and gasping in horror at my romantic misadventures.
This is exactly how I like to experience Valentine’s Day. What I love is love: not between partners, but among friends and in community. I’ve always felt a little lonely in relationships, but I love how heartbreak brings us all together.
When I found myself single again, I didn’t long for another romantic partner. In fact, I felt quite ready to swear off that entire enterprise completely. But it didn’t mean I wasn’t lonely.
Of the many things sending me into a debilitating panic at that time, my lack of friendships topped the list. I was consumed by the fear that I hadn’t built a strong enough community — that in my 15+ years of being in romantic relationships, I hadn’t focused enough on my friendships. Now I had a sense of being terrifyingly untethered.
It wasn’t that I didn’t have friends. There were many wonderful and supportive people in my life. But I was starting to wonder if I had relegated them to second-tier relationships in the frenzied pursuit of romance in my teens and twenties.
I was reading All About Love at that time and, as per usual, bell hooks took no prisoners with this one:
“Often we take friendships for granted even when they are the interactions where we experience mutual pleasure. We place them in a secondary position, especially in relation to romantic bonds. This devaluation of our friendships creates an emptiness we may not see when we are devoting all of our attention to finding romance.”
It should surprise no one to know that, to combat that feeling of deep emptiness and fear, the first thing I did was make a spreadsheet.
I meticulously listed everyone I knew, where they lived, how we met, our current level of closeness, etc. I realized most of my friendships in Nashville had stalled out somewhere between acquaintance and true close friendship.
There’s a legendary episode of Judge John Hodgman, in which the plaintiff constructed an elaborate “friendship and acquaintance theory” to help her navigate the relationships in her life. It starts at Pre-Acquaintance (“I don’t know you”), then progresses to Acquaintance Level 1 (“We know of each other”), Level 2 (“I can handle a 20-minute small talk chat with you and no more”), Level 3 (“We don't see each other all that much, and only when when we plan to meet”), all the way to Pre-Friend (!) before before someone meets the qualifications of an actual friend.
After seven years in town, I knew a lot of people. But they were mostly “Let’s plan a happy hour!” friends and not “Please come sit with me while I sob!” friends. And I was desperately in need of the latter.
Upon reviewing the data, I had to acknowledge a common denominator in this spate of shallow friendships: me. (Shocked yet again by her own culpability: the Lane Scott Jones story.)
I recalled a piece of evidence that had always baffled me: People often said I came across as “intimidating.” I heard this so often, and from so many different people, that I had to believe it was credible, though I didn’t understand it. I thought of myself as welcoming and warm, yet I was being perceived as cold and unapproachable?
But now I thought I finally understood — it wasn’t that I was intimidating; it was that I had made myself impenetrable.
In Anam Cara, John O’Donohue describes the Celtic concept of anam cara, one’s “soul friend”, someone to whom you reveal the hidden intimacies of your life:
“In this love, you are understood as you are without mask or pretension. The superficial and functional lies and half-truths of social acquaintance fall away, you can be as you really are. Love allows understanding to dawn, and understanding is precious. Where you are understood, you are at home.”
True friendship takes root in the imperfections: contradiction, confessions, mistakes, admissions, vulnerability — these are the things that precede real intimacy. But, ever image-obsessed, I had crafted a facade that was as glossy and polished as marble. There were no crags or footholds in which real friendship could take hold.
But then things changed and my life was suddenly all jagged edges. I could no longer mask the complicated, imperfect reality of who I was — which turned out to be the best thing that ever happened to my friendships.
From the spreadsheet, I selected my first-round draft of prospective friends and built an elaborate plan of attack. It was effective, if slightly inelegant. I invited each of them over, made nervous small talk, then inevitably burst into tears, confessed to making a Friendship Spreadsheet™️, revealed myself as an absolute wreck, and let them know — as simply as I could— that I needed them. Amazing what asking for help can do, especially after a lifetime of resisting it. I succeeded in forming some of my closest friendships this way. 10/10 would recommend.
Since then, I’ve become hellbent on building a life around friendship. I was done with isolation. I wanted connection. I said yes to it all. Yes to joining a kickball team. Yes to taking a drawing class. Yes to joining a writing group. Yes to dancing, BumbleBFF, trivia nights. I took classes, attended readings, went on a writing retreat to a cabin in the woods. I said yes to every chance I had to see friends, no matter how far I had to drive or fly to do it: Memphis, Greece, Maine, Italy, NC, NYC. I even went to Tallahassee, Florida. I was no longer under the delusion that I could do any of this alone, or that there was some kind of heroic value in trying.
That February, I spent the weekend in Asheville with my best friends from high school: Emily, Xander, and Alexis. I met them all when I was 14 and I was immediately and deeply obsessed. I wanted to make them mine with an urgency I never felt about a guy. With people I dated, the thrill was seeing myself through their eyes. But with my best friends, the thrill has been seeing the world through their eyes. It doesn’t get more romantic than that.
In Asheville, we got a cabin overlooking the river with a hot tub that acted as a confessional. We ordered takeout, poured wine, and sat in hot water in the freezing cold, warmed by one another’s company.
We were all nursing our own wounds that weekend — various heartbreaks, disappointments, and unrequited yearnings — but Xander was nursing literal wounds, third-degree burns sustained in a campfire accident. Each morning and evening, Alexis (the only one with a stomach for it) would tenderly unwrap the gauze, apply a balm, and gently re-dress the burn. I watched them from a safe distance, thinking about the many ways we’d dressed each others’ wounds over the years.
In All About Love, bell hooks gave me the definition of love that I now live by: “the willingness to extend oneself for another’s spiritual or emotional growth.” She writes:
“There’s no special love exclusively reserved for romantic partners. Genuine love is the foundation of our engagement with ourselves, with family, with friends, with partners with everyone we choose to love.”
My friends have shown me what it looks like to extend oneself for the purpose of love. They’ve shown me what true intimacy looks like: being loved not for the veneer, but for the imperfections underneath.
They are the loves of my life.
That’s it for me! If you want to be added to the Friendship Spreadsheet™️, hit reply. If you noticed that this newsletter is two months late, no you didn’t. 👀 And if you have any European recommendations, let me know — I leave next weekend and there’s absolutely no guarantee I’ll be coming back.
Love,
Lane 💋
Girl, get me on that friendship spreadsheet!
Loved--heh--it. :)