2 days ago
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Recently, I started having monthly Zooms with a friend who lives on the opposite side of the country. I don’t normally schedule these types of regimented chats, but this particular friend is brilliant, empathetic, and extremely well read. He is also an incredibly talented writer (which often happens when you read a lot of books). I like surrounding myself with people who challenge me to be better at things–things I actually care to be better at, and he does exactly that. On our last Zoom, we talked about friendship, particularly the joy of having different kinds of friends.
As you know, the concept of friendship has taken on a principal role in my life these days, as my husband and I continue to invest in creating an intentional social circle here in our new home, Los Angeles. In all candor, one of the reasons we left Chicago was because we felt stymied in our social lives there. I, personally, had trouble connecting with the Korean American community in Chicago. I was born and raised in Chicago, grew up being shaped by the Korean American church community, and yet, as I grew older and my legal career took center stage, I found I had less and less in common with many Korean American women I considered to be my friends.
Instead of settling down and having kids like all my peers, I was recently divorced, living my best single gal life, bending the majority of my energy towards proving to the Firm they’d made the right call when they minted me partner. I also learned I had vastly different desires when it came to the role a woman had inside a household, vis a vis her male “partner.” Put simply, my mother was the undisputed breadwinner of our household growing up, and, well, that particular apple fell quite close to the tree. I have immense respect for women who are the primary homemakers in their partnerships, but I had trouble relating to women who weren’t as familiar with the kind of mindset or pressure associated with my own set of choices.
When I married a non-Korean man and adopted a vegan diet (which, for better or worse, many Asian Americans view as a “white person diet”), the barriers grew even higher. Social media comments calling me a “traitor” to my race popped up often enough to convince me that even if most people wouldn’t say these things out loud to my face, it was likely that many were thinking these things privately. All in all, it was enough to make me feel, well, unwelcome from the community that I had, for so long, viewed as my natural home.
It was also growing increasingly more irritating that I couldn’t just go to any old restaurant and order off the menu. A simple impromptu mid-day lunch with Anthony required an hour of internet research to see what eateries, if any, near our home would offer vegan options. Chicago was and remains a very “meat and potatoes” town, and sadly, the potatoes are usually swimming in beef gravy or butter.
A fresh start might not be easy, but it was worth trying.
Our friendships in LA have been unimaginably rewarding. At this point, Anthony and I know who we are and thus the kinds of people we want in our lives. For instance, it is not a coincidence that the overwhelming majority of our friends are vegan or vegan-adjacent. The majority of our friends also value physical excellence–runners, cyclists, hikers, pickleball enthusiasts. We enjoy being around people who can talk about the same things we discuss ourselves (politics, running, books, art), as if our breakfast debates simply extend and continue over dinner with friends.
Still, as I alluded to at the beginning of this missive, we have a diverse group of friends. Some have kids, others don’t. Some are Asian American, others are not. Some lead creative careers and others work a straight-up 9 to 5. One thing they all have in common, though, is that we became friends or became better friends because of geography.
Among the different kinds of friends we love having in our lives, on my monthly Zoom meeting with the friend who lives thousands of miles away, we discussed the idea of an “everyday friend”–a friend who physically floats in and out of your “everyday life” with as much regularity and lack of fanfare as a sibling or favorite cousin. This is the person you can count on to do just about anything with you: pick through gently used ceramics at the local antique shop on a Tuesday night right after work; be your [platonic] date to the symphony because your spouse had an unexpected work thing; watch reruns of The Seatbelt Psychic for three hours in a row stopping only to order Thai food so that you can watch the remaining three hours with that self-satisfied glow that only really good Thai food and a psychic Uber driver can bring.
This is also the friend who walks into your place unannounced, opens your fridge, grabs the last vegan yogurt, and washes the spoon he used, all before you’ve even noticed he’s there. This is the friend who gets along with you, your spouse, your kids, your dog, your sister, your estranged mother, even your mailman, because that’s how effortlessly they’ve inveigled their way into your ecosphere. The “everyday friend” is the one who can leave in the middle of your 83rd rewatching of the entire trilogy of Lord of the Rings: Extended Version with ZERO warning because you know, indubitably, you’ll see her tomorrow, the next day, or, at the very latest (barring a life-or-death emergency), the day after that.
Fundamental to these types of friendships is safety, feeling comfortable enough to peel back whatever facades we assume in order to be “professional” or “motherly” or “a good person.” Otherwise, it would be too mentally taxing to hang out with them with such regularity. Once the inevitable revelations of such an unpeeling occur, though, common interests, values, and respect must keep the friendship in place and growing. But what about proximity? And by this, I don’t mean sociological, emotional, or other metaphysical nearness. I mean literal nearness. What role does geographical and spatial nearness play in the development, maintenance, and growth of friendship?
I saw a post on Instagram the other day that read:
“Living within walking distance from your friends completely transforms your quality of life.”
It instantly made me think of the “everyday friend,” because that category of friendship requires the kind of convenience that “walking distance” living facilitates. Although I have a couple of extremely close friends who I only get to see once every few years (they live overseas), and other friends I only see a few times a year (they live across the country), and a few friends I see once or twice a month, I’ve never, in my entire life, had an “everyday friend.” Have I been missing out on a potentially life-altering relationship? One that would “transform [my] quality of life”?
In psychology, there’s a thing called “proximity effect,” which posits that “when people spend more time together in close spaces, they are more likely to form a bond and affinity towards one another. This is because the close proximity offers opportunities to get to know one another and find common interests.” In one study that randomized the seating charts of 182 3rd through 8th grade classrooms for the duration of one semester, scientists found “clear evidence for a positive causal effect of proximity on friendship: sitting next to each other at the beginning of the semester substantially increased the probability of students’ mutual best-friendship nominations after the semester had ended.” Scientists further concluded that “even small changes in spatial proximity can substantially affect friendships, not only among the strangers studied in previous research, but also in groups that already know each other well.”
It stands to reason that if spatial proximity can have a positive causal effect on one’s friendships, the elimination of said spatial proximity might have a negative causal effect on that same friendship. Another thing my Zoom buddy and I discussed was the idea that love is not an infinite resource. The time we make for the friends who are physically present in our lives necessarily takes away time from others, including those who are not physically present (by choice or not).
I wondered if others found value in proximity with friends, so, obviously, I went digging around on Reddit. I stumbled upon a thread that discussed this exact issue. Many believed physical presence to be “irrelevant” to strong friendships (I disagree). But one Reddit-er noted, “I do like having activity partners. Rollerblading, going for walks in the woods, going to used book stores, wandering around new places, baking delicious things, and most of the other things I enjoy that aren’t just ‘making messes out of my attempted projects in my basement or at my workbench’ are simply not that much fun all by myself. So while any particular friendship could probably be maintained electronically, and despite needing my alone-time, I definitely do need some close-proximity meatspace friends.”
Others noted that physical proximity can be particularly crucial for friendships wherein one partner really detests phone calls and texting: “I admit I’m often ‘out of sight, out of mind,’ so it’s too easy for me to forget about people not in my everyday life. I hate talking/texting on the phone or any kind of chatting online. This makes me hard to get a hold of or maintain a relationship long-distance.”
I found the latter user’s reference to “everyday life” telling. It speaks to this idea that for some, physical distance can create a hurdle to thriving friendships, while the opposite–spatial proximity–can be the key to life-altering friendships.
Because the truth is, it’s rare that the person you see once every few years can change your life. It’s far more likely that the person you see almost everyday shapes the person you become.
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Parting Thoughts
Last night, I invited my friends over to enjoy a traditional Lunar New Year’s meal: tteokguk (Korean rice cake soup). They piled in after a rousing match of pickleball, faces still flush and ruddy from the brisk temperatures of a So-Cal dusk in January. Nabiha wandered into the kitchen, where I was finishing up some tofu I made to go with our soup, grabbing a cup for some water.
Anthony, Lulu, and I had spent two days in her home when we were out of power and subsequently evacuated out of ours during the wildfires. She, her husband, three boys, and German shepherd, spent a couple nights at our home when they were evacuated out of theirs. For 4 straight days, their home was our home and our home was their home. We watched TV together, played games together, ate pizza together. We laughed together, had provocative conversations together, and, sometimes, just stayed quiet together. We shelved etiquette in favor of convenience in an unspoken acknowledgment of the exigencies requiring space for spending the day in sweatpants or soft onesies. By the time they left our home, I sensed an undeniable shift in our friendship.
Our “separation” would be short-lived. In less than a week, we planned to hang out at their place (subject to evac orders) for their son’s birthday. We called it “game night,” because the plan was to eat delicious food and play games until it was time to sleep. As I mentioned in last week’s newsletter, I had a couple of exceptionally rough days after they left. And, not gonna lie, “game night” was about the only thing I looked forward to that entire week. I realized, then, that what “shifted” between us was weight. For the first time in years and years and years, I’d allowed just a teensy, tiny, unnamed part of the things that were burdening me to shift to them. Not by telling them what was bothering me, but by letting them make me feel better about it.
I’d grown to count on them in my everyday life.
Over dinner, Nabiha mentioned her plan to look for a new home. And for one second, I’d hoped to hear, “we’re moving into your neighborhood” so I could truly test whether living walking-distance from them would transform the quality of my life. But alas, my hopes were quickly dashed. They were thinking of moving into a home that was closer to her husband’s office (which is, inconveniently, on the opposite end of LA). Later that night, right before bed, I opened the Zillow app and for the first time, I looked at homes in the areas they were considering and I said to Anthony, “Babe, do you think we should think about moving closer to the city?”
“Are you crazy? No,” he said.
I chuckled softly. No walking distance, then. For now, our Ioniq 5 will have to do.
Wishing you all the best,
-Joanne
English (US) · 