On creating a friendship tapestry

How to find what we’re missing

What type of connection are you missing at the moment?

When I posed this question to a friend, it became a springboard for clarity. First, she was able to identify that she feels isolated as a sole trader. Then, she was able to articulate that she wanted peers in a similar stage of running their business to meet regularly for in-depth conversations.

It got me thinking about how our feelings of isolation or loneliness can be our guide.

Instead of trying to quash these inner experiences with quick fixes, avoidance, or tired habits, we can listen to what they might be trying to tell us. Broadly, we often mistake a lack of company for loneliness when a more accurate description of loneliness is a lack of a specific type of company.

If we take this definition, the more specific and clear we can be about what we are missing, the more proactive we can be in going about finding it.

Whatever we are looking for exists. That’s the beautiful thing about friendships—they are made up of various textures, warps and wefts, bits and pieces. We may have known our friends since childhood, or we may have sparked with someone we met just yesterday. We might have the friends we made through a certain job or hobby, and the friends-of-friends who are now our dear friends. Friends we lost touch with can pop back up like daffodils, or we might have friends we reach out to for certain activities or when we are going through a similar life experience.

Unlike some approaches to finding a romantic partner with their emphasis on finding 'the one', friendships are—by default—open.

We do not rely simply on one friend to be our everything, but rather create a tapestry out of the distinct connections we have with many individuals.

Yet a common trap we stumble into when we feel something is missing from our connections is to focus on how the people in our lives fall short, rather than focusing on expanding our circle.

Frustration and resentment often arise from wanting someone to be something they are not. Yet we cannot force someone to be who we need them to be. People have different attributes, strengths, and capacities—an emerald green wool cannot become golden silk. Both have their beauty.

When we feel as if something is missing in a particular friendship, we do not have to cajole others to fill that void. Instead, we can get curious about our loneliness or feeling of lack, ask questions about what we want and begin our search.

There’s a plethora of places to look for the type of connection we crave.

For example, we might start with our interests. Many people describe various categories for friendships—“I’ve got my gig friends, my hiking friends, my gallery friends, my dining out friends.”

We might find the friends we seek in a particular life stage. As a friend told me, “My parent-friends have become an absolute lifeline—the way I lean on those other mums is a really different relationship to other friends…”

This is not necessarily bound to parents—you might be seeking specific connections in the form of friends in your neighbourhood, or friends who are also freelancers or business owners.

Besides interests and life stages, sometimes what we might be missing in our friendships is a particular sense of depth or intimacy. We might experiment to see if we can go deeper with existing connections—call someone we’ve never chatted with on the phone before, or have a weekend away with a group you haven’t seen for a while. Or we can put our antennae out for that ‘spark’ of depth when we encounter it—and be bold enough to send an invitation to hang out and get the friendship going.

While a friendship might have its origins in the pursuit of a specific thing we crave—a hiking buddy, a parent-friend, someone to dissect a heartbreak with—the important thing is not to be too rigid.

Speaking to philosopher Mark Alfano on the theme of friendship, he said that one of the most interesting and valuable things about friendships is that they surprise us.

“A connection might start out as choosing someone for a particular purpose, but your hiking buddy turns out to actually be very funny, or the colleague you have lunch with turns out to have a shared interest.”

Allowing for spontaneity and surprise in your relationships canbring new insights and strengthen an attachment—after all, a tapestry is interwoven.

Without such intermingling, there’s a risk that it’s not really friendship at all.

“If you've already decided on who someone else is and their role in your life, it’s instrumentalising,” said Mark.

“But being open to the possibility that someone can surprise you and has their own way of living and their own perspective and their own thoughts about how the world works, I think that's really important in a good friendship.”

Another benefit of having a diverse group of friends is that it allows for some give and take when a particular friendship feels mismatched.

Just as people are multidimensional, so are our friendships—not only in the place they fill in their lives, but also in the reciprocity.

We might find ourselves giving more to another in one friendship, but then taking more in another. A friend in crisis requires more from us than a friend enjoying fairer weather. Sometimes we're the confider, and other times we're the one being confided in. As a whole, there’s a reciprocity of energy. Of course, it’s important to focus on going where you’re wanted, but the point is that not one person can, or should, be everything.

Be it interests, life stages, or needs, our various connections come together to make something collectively.

We keep weaving away, picking up new threads where others might fall. The picture not only changes across our lifetime, but deepens, expands, becomes more vivid, more true, and perhaps more complete.

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Many thanks to editor Susie Thatcher of

Mysterious Realm

for your keen eye on the draft.

For more of my writing, you can peruse the archive of

A SOCIAL LIFE, WITH FRIENDS

and explore my other newsletter, On Things where I share daily observations.

With fondness & friendship,
Madeleine