Everything I Know About Friendship Comes From Sitcoms
Myth Number Five: Wacky co-dependency is totally OK
This final myth is connected to the first one, but it’s more important. Besides just always being around, friends on sitcoms always want to be together. Always. They’re weird, they totally get one another, and they socialize constantly!
If I could be in a sitcom, I’d probably choose Cougar Town. It’s a show that fully embraces the ridiculousness that is the sitcom friendship. The characters barely work, they hang around drinking wine and goofing off, and they’re always together. There are very few outside people in their lives – and some of them, like Tom, are quite literally outside, looking in. No one seems to be alone for more than thirty seconds at a time, their vocabularies are peppered with inside jokes and THEY ALL LIVE ON THE SAME CUL-DE-SAC! Seriously. You thought living above a bar or coffeeshop was convenient? This is better.
I imagine her saying that to me.
Other sitcoms support the idea that it’s totally healthy for friends to spend all their time together. Have y’all seen Happy Endings? Those friends are tight. As previously mentioned, the friends on Parks and Recreation and Community exist in worlds that allow them to spend 99% of their time together. New Girl features twenty-somethings who rely on one another much more than what I’ve come to realize is normal.
Making Friends Is Much Harder In Real Life
Another thing about sitcoms: They make making friends look as easy as eating a whole log of goat cheese. (Shut up, that can happen to anyone.) A girl answers a kijiji apartment ad, or some people enroll in community college, or a lonely gal contacts city hall about a pit in her backyard and boom – BFFs! Guess what? It’s not that easy.
In fact, making friends after college is really hard. Every job I’ve had in my professional life since college (so…two jobs) has been in a tiny office where I didn’t manage to make any friends. Most of my friends from college were dudes, and they’re scattered across the country and the world. It’s not exactly easy to keep in touch.
After college, I’d say over half the friends I’d had from high school and college years left town. I live in a small, lovely city, and there are more plentiful and more impressive opportunities elsewhere. It’s a choice, to live here. One I’m crazy happy that I made – I love my life in this little East coast city, I love my fiancée, our apartment, our neighborhood, my friends, my family. I wouldn’t live anywhere else.
There are friends in other cities. There are friends you grow apart from, because you no longer have the same interests (FYI, you can only turn down invitations to hit the local bar-star dance club at 11:30pm so many times before people just stop inviting you anywhere) or the same values (yes, values – not something I’d consider important at age nineteen when the only thing that matters is whether you both loved the Spice Girls back in 1996, but something that does matter when you’re 25 and everyone and their low-maintenance no-commitment cactus plant has an opinion on who the right guy is, or what the right time to marry is, or whether anyone should have kids before they turn 30 and have an amazing career.) There are friends you just plain never see.
These days, I’d like the dance floor to be my kitchen.
If you believe the sitcoms, you think it’ll be easy to forge new friendships that have the same depth of emotion and plethora of inside jokes as your old ones. When I moved into my first apartment last summer, I imagined hilariously pouring too much detergent into the washing machine and meeting my new BFF in all the bubbly chaos. That never happened, and I never met a single person in my building. (Pro tip: It’s easier to make friends in a small building than a large one. My new building is filled with cool people that I could be friends with.) I even read a book on how to make friends – more of a witty memoir than one of those gross self-help books, MWF Seeking BFF by Rachel Bertsche. I didn’t read it for the advice, I read it because a HelloGiggles.com article said it was funny. But it was actually helpful.
The truth is, you don’t fall into friendships by moving in across the hall from dorky physicists or signing up for Biology 101 at community college, or befriending each and every one of your co-workers. You might not always live in the same city, or on the same cul-de-sac, as your friends from high school. In real life, Annie and Pierce would not be friends. Annie and Britta probably wouldn’t even be friends. In real life, Marshall and Lily wouldn’t spend 95% of their time with Ted. (How could anyone stand to spend that much time with Ted?) You have to work at finding new friends, you have to look for people who are your jam. You have to ask someone to go for a drink even if it makes you anxious, and they hardly ever say no.
Offline
Over the past year or so, I managed to make some new friends thanks to nerdy Interwebs things like blogging, Twitter and Yelp. It sounds nerdy, but it’s an awesome way to connect with people who like the same things as you. (For me it’s good food, happy hour, talking about pop culture and playing board games. I know, thrilling stuff. I live on the edge!) We like to joke about building a sitcom around our group of friends – a wacky gang of misfits and a chronicle of our antics. When something funny happens, we’ll joke that it’ll become an episode of the sitcom. (Which is called Offline, get it?)
I just hope I’m not the Alex of the group.
Chapter One: Everything I Know About Marriage I’ve Learned From Friday Night Lights
Work friends have to be one of the worst myths. I’ve been lucky enough to make the odd work friend here and there, but for the most part it’s just not realistic. And a group of work friends vs the one or two people in the office you sort of click with? Has that existed for anyone in real life? It’s the easiest set up for after work drinks and debauchery, but it feels like a situation rife for drama.
I love that our sitcom made it into this installment. Loving this series!
Of course our sitcom had to make it in! I agree, I think the idea of everyone in an office being pals is a total pipe dream.
^What Melanie said. I do have some work friends, but they come and go with the job, and in a lot of cases, I don’t want to spend any more time with them after spending all day with them.
One thing about tv friendship that definitely doesn’t translate is moving on from friends. I largely blame Facebook, but people never really disappear from your life now, whether you still have anything in common or not.
Post-university adult friendship is weird, and nothing really prepares us for it. Every friendship you’ve made up to that point has been the result of geography or circumstance, and when you have to make friends on shared interests, it just gets harder with very little of the comedic potential.
^ What Krista said. And there really is no model for how to break up with a friend when things go south. Can you say to someone, “Let’s just be acquaintances”? Another friendship myth is that friendship = constant agreement. But something I think that Sex and the City did really well was those moments where tensions escalated around choices about jobs and children and partners (remember the whole Aleksandr Petrovsky blow up between Miranda and Carrie or Charlotte screaming, “I choose my choice!” when she decided to quit her job?). These seemed to be some of the most “real” and poignant on the show in terms of debunking some of the false expectations around friendships between women. Of course, it made me think that there was something wrong with me because I wasn’t sitting around drinking martinis and talking about sex every five minutes, but I’m over that now. Mostly.
Love your “Everything I know…” series – keep ‘em coming!
That’s a really good point, Krista. I have people on Facebook that I absolutely wouldn’t consider friends anymore, yet deleting them feels like making a strange statement that I don’t want to make, considering we will have friends in common.
I love that you brought up Sex and the City, Janet. It’s a show that I watched off and on, after it started airing, so I’ve never seen the episodes in order and never feel comfortable referencing it for blog posts. But they did do that well. From my experience, any time you actually break up with a friend it’s pretty ugly. There’s no good way to do it. The post-college friendship is definitely difficult, because I think it’s then that major choices like careers, kids, relationships, etc. begin to really influence your friendships. In TV friendships it always seems to work out, but sometimes in real life you can just never find that common ground.
I’m really enjoying these posts. Thank you
Thank you!
Consider this my formal application to be a recurring extra on “Offline”.
Application accepted!
I’ll apply to be a writer-performer, Mindy Kaling-style. My dream is to write a good Canadian sitcom.
Good post, both of them. As someone who is ahem-a little bit older than you, I can tell you that in your twenties friendships are extremely important, they are the center of your life, but as you get older not only do friends come and go from your life, but the place that friends take in your life change as well. When you hit middle age you start to realize and even become okay with the idea that not all friendships are lifelong and actually very few are and you become okay with the fact the making of a friend becomes more few and far between. Your life becomes more about you and your partner and the family that you build and you don’t have the time or inclination to invest in friendships and you become ok with having less friends and with not making them as easily because your life is more about something else.
Thanks! You make a very good point. I think along with the point you make, for people who are in their 30s and getting married and having kids aren’t a priority for them, it can be difficult to remain friends with people who do have children. It can be hard to gel with two very different lifestyles.