Letter 31: Life Raft Friendships
When we consider friendships in our 20s ~ Friendship Series, Part 1
Happy Wednesday & welcome!
Earlier this fall, Emily Fleming and I were texting and the subject of female friendships came up. We shared about moving to new towns and how finding your people can be both adventurous and heart-wrenching. I’ve shared here before about “finding my one person.”
After Emily and I talked, I thought more about how our friendships with women change as we age. Wanting to hear from others, Emily and I asked several women (one from each decade) to share their insights about their friendships with women for our first TLC series!
Over the next few weeks, you’ll read their stories—some share responses to questions we asked, others share a view into a meaningful female relationship—about their friendships with the women in their lives. Some of you may read about experiences that mirror your own; or perhaps, you may have the fortune of seeing your future!
Today, Nabil, 29, shares about a friendship from college, bringing support throughout her 20s. Nabil is, as we know, a model of strength through vulnerability, and shares today with a unique perspective.
Nabil offers this lens, “I am a sociologist by training, which means that I am attuned to the nature and effects of what is called ‘social structures’ – durable sets of self-reproducing relationships that work, at a social level, to order, more or less invisibly, parts of the world in which we live. In other words, sociologists study how human social life shapes who we are, what we do, and why we do it.”
And now, a glimpse into friendship in one’s 20s to kick off our new Friendship Series!—Molly
“All meaningful knowledge is for the sake of action, and all meaningful action is for the sake of friendship.”
John Macmurray
I met my best friend Kyle when I was in college. I had just moved cross-country, from West coast to East, and I did not fit in. I didn’t feel like the other girls seemed to – confident, cool, and carefree – and I certainly didn’t look like them. They were mostly white and blonde with straight hair, for example, and the humid New England air made my dark Mexican strands frizz and curl. My alternative style (I called it “reformed-goth”) clashed with their prim, brightly colored Vineyard Vines apparel. I was a strange girl in a strange land.
I had high hopes for what college should have been like. In high school, I had desperately longed to be free and make decisions for myself without the guidance or oversight from my parents. I was excited to meet like-minded friends and go with them to the parties I’d seen in the movies. It seemed like everyone else was having that experience but me. I had changed locations, but my life remained the same.
That’s when Kyle came into my life—into my dorm room—looking for my roommate who wasn’t there at the time. I noticed immediately that Kyle didn’t look like the other East Coast college girls either. Her ears were covered in piercings, and her long, dirty- blonde, wavy hair was unbrushed. She looked like she belonged to the beaches of California some three-thousand miles away. That was a land I was familiar with; it was a look I knew.
Kyle was crying. She told me she missed her home, her dogs, and her boyfriend (even though he was a jerk who wasn’t very good to her). I was missing all those same things too.
At that moment, Kyle’s friendship felt like a life raft: I went from being stranded on a foreign island to meeting a “second self” who would journey with me, just at the time I felt most alone.
What struck me about Kyle, besides her providential timing, was how transparent and vulnerable she was with a complete stranger. In my experience, people didn’t let their guard down like that. In fact, it took a long time for people to become friends. Kyle, on the other hand, had made me feel like we had been friends all our lives within our first few minutes of meeting. Our friendship gave me back to myself and allowed me to experience the freedom which I hoped to find in college—the freedom to be who I was and who I could become.
It’s been over a decade since Kyle and I met. We met before we turned 20 and we’ll be 30 next year. While her unconventional style and manner originally drew me to her, our friendship has become much deeper than that. We’ve been through college classes, birthdays, boyfriends, the death of beloved pets, divorces, and A LOT of sushi together over the years.
Our families have grown and changed, we’ve begun (and quit) careers, and we’ve in equal parts bemoaned and marveled at the two or three wrinkles on our faces and grey hairs on our heads. In short, we’ve gone from being young girls to women, walking together through the joys and sorrows that come with such a transformation.
When I reflect on the nature of friendship in my life, I am blessed to have many loved ones, like Kyle, come to mind. Some are former teachers and others are former students. Some are much wiser than I and others have...other virtues. One I’ve known since kindergarten and another I met this summer. There are those who are staggeringly like me; not literally a “second self,” but close. And then there are others who are utterly unlike me in all things dress, religion, and politics.
What these friendships have in common is that these are people who want for me what they believe are genuinely good things, not for their sake, but for mine. And this I want for them too. It is through the reciprocal and selfless betterment of each other, and with heapfuls of care and humility, that we learn what is true and good about each other and our own selves. It is not, therefore, a stretch to say that we people can literally not develop as persons without the help of our friends.
Aristotle says that “to be a true friend of someone, you have to eat a sack of salt together.” What this means is that a true friend is not a friend of a moment (in other words, not a friend of a single meal), but someone who accompanies you throughout life, sharing intimately in its triumphs and tragedies as if eating from the same sack of salt.
This has certainly been true of my experience with Kyle, for which I am grateful and blessed. Going to college together was a big milestone but we remained kids in many ways. Turning 30 feels like a different kind of milestone. It’s perhaps a more significant one, as we begin to confront our own mortality and the one of those we love.
I’m not sure what lies ahead for us, but I know that the pinches of salt that we’ve added to our friendship over the years will continue to season our experiences, leavening the good and the bad.
“Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art...it has no survival value; rather, it is one of those things that give value to survival.”
C.S. Lewis
With gratitude,
Nabil Tueme
P.S. Did you have a life raft friendship in your 20s? Does it sustain you still today? Share about it with us in the comments and consider sending this letter to that woman!
