In Praise of Boring Friendships
In Praise of Boring Friendships
What we gain when we love someone without regard for accomplishment
This Thursday, I’ll be sharing your thoughts on which women set a new standard for you, expanding how you felt you could exist as a woman. And, today, my husband Alexi and I launched a Tolkien-inspired storytelling game on Kickstarter.
Back Again from the Broken Land is a game about small adventurers walking home from a big war, and reckoning with the burdens they carry. It’s meant to be friendly to players who are new to games—I enjoyed running it for Haley Stewart, and her seven and nine year old daughters, all three of them new to role-playing games. She says, “[The girls and I] had so much fun diving into Back Again from the Broken Land. They are desperate to play again.”
And now, back again to Other Feminisms…
I was delighted to contribute a guest-essay for Grace Olmstead’s Granola newsletter this month. Previously, I got to interview her about food for my Tiny Book Club, and she interviewed me about feminism and interdependence for Mere Orthodoxy. All her work is marked by a care for small details, and I’m looking forward to her first book, Uprooted: Recovering the Legacy of the Places We've Left Behind.
I’m excerpting my essay in praise of storge and quiet moments below, and adding a little reflection on how it relates to the project of Other Feminisms. You can read the full essay at Granola.
In the absence of friends to share [chores and errands] with, some people turn to YouTube. “Clean with Me” videos show people doing the ordinary work of cleaning their house—not as a tutorial, but simply as the unspooling of an ordinary chore. When New York Times reporter Ronda Kaysen interviewed fans about what drew them to the videos, many told her that “they watch the videos while cleaning their own homes, playing them on their television as a sort of inspirational soundtrack so they feel less alone.”
Inviting people into the quotidian parts of your day isn’t just, as I used to think of it, a way of staving off boredom or loneliness. It’s a pledge of affection. In the Greek typology of loves, it’s an expression of storge, which tends to be translated as “affection,” though I’ll confess I usually gloss it as “fondness.” In The Four Loves, C.S. Lewis writes:
Affection has a very homely face. So have many of those for whom we feel it. It is no proof of our refinement or perceptiveness that we love them; nor that they love us. What I have called Appreciative Love is no basic element in Affection. It usually needs absence or bereavement to set us praising those to whom only Affection binds us. We take them for granted; and this taking for granted, which is an outrage in erotic love, is here right and proper to a point. It fits the comfortable, quiet nature of the feeling.
Storge sometimes feels like the most counter-cultural of the four loves, because of its smallness. An errand friendship cuts against the culture of striving and hustling that asks us to account for the usefulness of every moment of our time. Instead, it depends on leisure, on being able and willing to waste time.
When a friend goes with you to pick up your library books, or to drop off your mail, you aren’t stepping into the role of hostess or entertainer. You simply are, and so is your friend, and it’s enough to enjoy each other’s company without working to prove your worth to each other.
The pandemic has cut us off from some of these comfortable, fond moments in friendship. But it has opened up another possibility for growth in storge. As we are cut off from our favorite friends, we have the opportunity to deepen our relationship with the unchosen people around us. It is our neighbors whom we ask for help or who are simply the only people we see regularly anymore. We can love them for their particular virtues as we get to know them, but we start by simply being grateful that they are there.
Errands, cleaning, meal preparation—this is all work most often done by women. It’s the work of maintenance rather than creating things de novo. (Cooking strains this distinction the most, but since the fruits of the work are, necessarily, quickly consumed, it still is hard to point to as a lasting accomplishment).
I feel a little bad treating it as boring, since there is a kind of romance in beating the bounds of your life, keeping everything in order. Part of Jordan Peterson’s appeal comes from describing work like making your bed as fighting the Dragon of Chaos. He translates quiet, faithful work into martial metaphors. In truth, it’s much more like digging latrines than charging into the mines of No-Man’s-Land.
There’s a real gift in company for this work, and in resting in the confidence that your friend simply wants to be with you, rather than be entertained by you. But I do also hope we find more ways to genuinely admire the patient presence that the work requires.
I’ll leave you with the same questions with which I concluded my essay at Granola:
The phenomenon, I find, is quite real for me, but I have it *less* in pandemic-times. I moved halfway across the country in July and don't have anyone except my husband to casually hang out with in person. I tried, for a little while, to set up a weekly virtual stitch'n'bitch with a few other friends, but that fell out of practise quickly.
But before I moved, I did have a few friends like this! One of them moved away first, and I was very sad to see her go and I still miss her; she lived down the street from us for about six months, and I loved being able to have her over to hang out while I was working on a sewing project, spontaneously inviting her for cookies that I was just about to make, or planning an apple pie with all hands on deck for peeling. This friend also regularly accompanied us on road trips, since we were often going to the same place, and we started making a habit of buying cheese platters from Wegmans and having in-car tasting sessions. (My husband, on the other hand, describes his taste as "militantly simple" and much prefers string cheese sticks. The lack of my Cheese Friend is a big hole in my life.)
A few years ago I lived in a really excellent house; four women, all creative in some way (two musicians, an illustrator, and me, an architect), and we were roommates. The illustrator is one of my best friends and we shared the biggest room; it had a finished but unconditioned attic attached that we dubbed "the workshop" and set up our projects up there. Between the four of us, we had separately interesting social lives and a wide range of hobbies, so on basically any given day you would hear music, smell excellent cooking or baking, and have a very intense conversation with someone's friend who was visiting -- and that doesn't even account for the painting and sewing in the workshop. But we didn't run errands together so much as just vaguely hang out in the kitchen.
In the pandemic, I've tried a few times to set up regular appointments with friends, even if they're just hanging out virtually and working on something, but haven't managed to get anything new to really stick with any frequency. At least one friend has reached out to me for the same thing, and it works most of the time, but is still not the same. Being able to drop by for no reason at all and jump into the errands and flow of the day, in-person, is a far more satisfying fondness; it's what I miss the most these days, right after "come over and let me feed you," but it's also been all-too-rare in a life where my local friends are not-quite-so-local (big city local is a whole different ballgame) or few and far between.
This resonates with me so strongly. It made me think of my university days, when I lived with my best friends and we all just *were* together, all the time. There was no doubt the occasional adventure but more often than not it was just one of us sitting at the kitchen counter entertaining the person who was cooking, or doing uni work together...or just wandering in and out of rooms and seeing who was around, so you could just be with them!
Nowadays, I keep in touch with friends on the phone, and I usually make these long phone calls while I'm walking. It's a really nice way to get lost in your legs and in another person's voice. I also find that the church is a great place to be with each other non-instrumentally.
As an aside, Anne Helen Petersen had a story up about the "errand friend" which reminds me of this one and is worth a read: https://annehelen.substack.com/p/the-errand-friend.