Just Because Living Nearby to Close Friends Isn't the Norm Doesn't Mean It's a Bad Idea
They make us happy after all
I want to get more eyeballs (and opinions) on the below article. I wrote it for Medium a few weeks back but thanks to a fickle algorithm it languished in the depths of the platform.
This is too much of an important issue to not share widely, so it’s going to form the basis of this week’s Friday Dispatches email.
I’d love to know your thoughts. Drop them in the comments.
When I was a kid I assumed my adult life would look like an episode of FRIENDS.
My besties would live next door, we’d be in and out of each other’s homes like they were our own.
Then, like everyone else on an upwardly mobile trajectory, those ideas got shelved in pursuit of a career and a partner, both of which became the main driving force behind where I chose to live. For many of my friends, creating a little nuclear family of their own was another big one.
Thus we all parted ways physically (and often therefore emotionally).
It’s a modern-day story that feels as old as time.
When it comes to choosing where to live, friendships are rarely prioritized. Family perhaps, careers certainly. But not your mates.
But it turns out that deprioritizing friendships in this could be one of the major sources of our discontent. And those people who have been sensible enough to keep friends close by are reaping the benefits of such a community.
We don’t let friends be a major part of our support system
This isn’t your fault by the way.
We’re conditioned as a society to seek major emotional support from partners, and extended family before we give our friends a second thought.
Then there is our obsession with the nuclear family. Perhaps the best expression of this I’ve ever come across is the excellent Anne Helen Petersen who calls it the fetishization of the nuclear family. The idea that your nuclear family should be the main pillar of your support system, perhaps if you’re lucky bolstered by a nearby parent or sibling.
But it’s not enough. If it was, we wouldn’t have a serious loneliness epidemic on our hands. Parents wouldn’t feel constantly overwhelmed. Things would work better than they do.
Friendships have long been heralded as the antidote to our loneliness woes and yet so few of us have them — especially close ones. Even if we do, they rarely make up the majority of someone’s support system, especially if children are involved.
The idea of relying on friends feels almost infantile. An accepted practice perhaps in college or your early twenties but certainly not the hallmark of a grown-up. And the idea of you all moving close by so you can reap the benefits of a friendship-formed community? Forget it, that’s just childish. Isn’t it?
No wonder people in their 30s and 40s feel so alone.
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Here’s what it looks like to have a close friendship support system
I have a group of friends back in the UK who live within a few minutes walk of each other. They rely on each other for emotional and practical support. They drop in on each other, meet for coffee multiple times a week and help each other in the way many families do. It’s all very informal and spontaneous with no scheduling weeks in advance.
I’m envious of these groups. If I ever manage to stay still in a country for long enough, I’d love to be part of one too.
Apparently, this sort of friendship-based support system is more common among those who are not living within the confines of that nuclear family. This article for instance comments that:
Queer people have also long formed nonbiological “chosen families” and moved close to one another.
I’ve seen a similar situation in some digital nomad communities. Groups of friends will travel both independently but also together, choosing to stay in certain towns and cities to be close to one another, even if they don’t live all together at the same time. I am part of one such group.
In other words, if you don’t fit the societally-approved mold you can make your own rules.
And that includes prioritizing friendships, choosing to live close by to one another, and reaping the incredible benefits that lifestyle has to offer.
But there’s no rule to say you can’t have friendship groups like this if you have other commitments like kids, a partner, or that nuclear family. It’s just a case of dealing with those hefty roadblocks standing in your way.
Give me all your roadblocks
We’re dealing with a concept far removed from what is considered normal so I know there are many.
And they’re likely totally legit. Everything from the difficulty of finding friends prepared to move their lives to be closer to you, to career commitments to family responsibilities.
Then there are the emotional roadblocks.
What if living close by puts too much pressure on friendships and kills it? What if you choose to be close to friends in order to share childcare but your friend has a completely different parenting approach to you? What if a fantastic but far away job comes up and you don’t feel like you can take it, thus fostering resentment?
All understandable concerns.
To prioritize friendships feels weird because we’re not taught to think about them in that way. I’m sure if you told your family you were planning to move to a town to be closer to a friend, they’d throw up a rejection or two akin to the above.
But no one would bat an eyelid if you said you were moving closer to family. We expect family to pick up accountability but not friends. And yet, that’s kind of dumb.
Because some friends are like family.
In fact, they can be better. Again, back to Anne Helen Peterson for some wisdom on this:
We have normalized family accountability
…
But part of the reason we don’t rely on our intimate friends is because we haven’t stress-tested those relationships past their initial parameters. In other words, it’s okay to rely on friends for a certain period of “appropriate” time, but after that, you “graduate” into dependence on partners — with the backstop of family.
…
We need friends as emergency contacts, as people we feel comfortable asking to do small favors for us (and for whom we do small favors in return), friends as primary knots in our interwoven safety nets.
People estranged from their families — because of abuse, bigotry, leaving a religion, life choices, whatever — get this. This is not new knowledge.
But if you’ve abided by those norms, been taught those norms, and internalized those norms for your entire life — the realization that you need abundant support apart from your immediate family can be difficult to process.
In other words, if we start to look at friendships in the same way we see family, it throws a lot of those roadblocks in the trash.
And you can get on with finding a way to live closer to the people you actually like.
Because Lord knows that’s not always your family.
There are so many reasons to not prioritize living closer to your friends. Society and culture certainly seem to prefer it that way.
But there are just as many — if not more — reasons to get on the friendship-proximity bandwagon.
It’s happening already. Co-living setups are becoming a more common way of living. Co-parenting with other people — be it in a formal or informal way — is no longer a crazy thought.
In my world — the world of living abroad — it’s not uncommon to prioritize your friends and live close by, even if you haven’t known them especially long. I am on the fringes of one such friendship group in Portugal.
It’s possible.
And it could be the best thing to happen to you. It could ease the burden of parenthood. It could make you happier. It could be cheaper thanks to sharing resources.
The way we live now is only a speck on the human timeline. For most of humanity, we’ve always lived in groups and tribes. We are, after all, pack animals.
It could be like that again, albeit in a more modern way.
I’ll leave you with the conclusion to this article about living close to friends because it articulates my thoughts better than I ever could:
Many people are prepared to move for a new job, to be with a romantic partner, or even just for an adventure.
Moving to be closer to buddies should be no different.
Friends are not incidental to a good life; they’re essential to one. So why not shorten the distance between you and them?
Why not, indeed?
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We've got our own digital nomad family as well!
Its not my intention to glamorize housewifery of the 1960s-70s, but when my mother was a stay-at-home wife raising kids in the US suburbs, she had the burst-in-the-door/spontaneous coffee/drop off your kids because you were losing your mind kind of friendships that sound a lot like what you write about. Ten years later, as a military wife, when my father was sent to Vietnam, we were part of an enormous group of essentially single parents - crowds of kids and moms would gather on the weekends for support in the form of mass shared childcare over pool parties.
I suspect these structures depended too much on the regular, predictable, planned absence of the husbands - at dinner time (or when the deployment ended), the women would gather their kids and go home. But there was something so full of life and air in the meantime. Life was easy -- and more fun -- to carry in these larger, fluid groups. Close friendships formed in them, but the groups began as sort of informal mutual aid.
Perhaps time, and shared experience, are missing ingredients?