We think nothing of actively pursuing romantic and sexual partners, but why is finding new friends still so awkward? Lonely in a new city, I turned to dating appsโand found among its users a yearning for intimacy more platonic than erotic.
I used to joke that I made friends by fucking them first. Still reeling from the end of an intense, emotionally consuming relationship, I did what any millennial would: I turned to Tinder. I wanted distraction, validation. I wanted to fill in all the time that had suddenly become available to me. I had friends, sure, but mostly the transient kindโcolleagues to get blind drunk with after our fourteen-hour-too-busy-for-a-break shifts; law school friends who existed almost entirely on campus; friends-of-friends who I saw at parties every few weeks.
I dated a lot after the breakup, meeting someone new almost every other week. But that in-between space was hard to navigate. What I wanted seemed elusive, almost impossibleโcompanionship, care, affection, warmth. I was looking for it where people go to look for that kind of thing, but always coming away with something not quite right.
What I wanted, without realising, was friendship. Aristotle divides friendship into three categories: friendships of utility, of pleasure, and of the good. The first two are fleeting, premised on the need for someone rather than anything intrinsic to that particular someone. Friendships of utility are those you make with work colleagues and classmates and which centre around a mutual benefit even where that benefit is often just not being alone. Those of pleasure are grounded in the fact of enjoying yourself with another person: the relationships you have with people in your book club or soccer team, the mates you go drinking with.
These kinds of friendship I had aplenty. But, as Aristotle warned, they were short-lived and passed into nothingness when their utility or pleasure ran out. Friends I had gone out with disappeared when they started dating someone seriously or got graduate jobs, their time suddenly monopolised. It took me a long time to realise that these friendships had expired. Social media makes it hard to notice these things; we were, after all, friends on Facebook, members of the same group chats.
