friendship is a series of affordances offered and accepted

conclusions from putting my 20-year-long friendships under the microscope

Tyrolese Interior (1915) by John Singer Sargent

One of my biggest claims to life is that I’ve had the same friend group for twenty years. Most of us met in 5th grade, a collection of ten-year-olds uprooted from different parts of the world and brought together by the arbitrary geography of a school hallway in Bangalore. A few others joined the fray over the years, but the link was more or less solidified by the time we turned thirteen, perched as we were on the cusp of physical, mental and emotional change.

Over the course of time, I’ve made more and more friends, expanding this network of personhood. But at its core is this one group of people I return to over and over again.

As with most things you consider foundational to one’s life, I’ve never looked too deeply into the mechanics of this friendship. When you inhabit a house for two decades, you eventually stop seeing the walls. But I think the recent transition from our twenties into our thirties has forced me to take a magnifying glass to this thing, this way of being and seeing, that has shaped much of my life.

Here are my notes from that.

i.

In the hothouse that is adolescence, we are held together by the glue of shared space. Then comes the Great Dispersion, where we become obsessed with the idea of the self, attuned to the north star of becoming.

But the self is a lonely project, and we want less to be an island and more to find a bridge. We return to the Communal. But this time, the glue of proximity gives way to the gravity of shared philosophy. Far from being just a topic of conversation—although it does bubble up to the surface once in a while—thisis a synchronised foundational assumption, an invisible subtext, that allows much to be left unsaid.

For example, all of my closest friends share the belief that meaningful work is crucial to a life well-lived. So when a friend disappears for three weeks into the rabbit hole of redefining their career, we understand that they were simply tending to the fire that we all agree is worth keeping lit. When I (the only person in tech, mind you), decide to change jobs, the questions are sharper and more precise than asking if it will be comfortable or lucrative. When another friend is tempted by the siren of ease, we serve as a collective memory of their ambition.

It’s important to have a philosophy like this that threads otherwise disparate conversations together. The perks of returning to the Communal as a capital S-Self with a shape is that we all come back distinct and interesting individuals. This diversity of experience is enriching, even more so when the point of departure remains the same. Your different ways of being in the world reinforce one another, making the individual pursuit of this philosophy less like a solitary struggle and more like a collective project.

ii.

There’s value in seeing friendship as an aesthetic pursuit: beautiful, non-utilitarian, and self-justifying. Friendship, after all, can be a shimmering end in and of itself, and we don’t get too many of those in life. It is the one place where the texture of a conversation can matter more than its value. The friendship becomes a “non-instrumental” masterpiece, a work of art that serves no purpose other than to make the act of existing feel like a deliberate choice rather than a biological accident. We are, in the end, each other’s most attentive audience.

I was reading Alexander Nehamas recently. In his work On Friendship, he suggests that we love our friends in the same way we love a work of art: not for what it “does” for us, but for what it promises to become. When you meet someone who will eventually become a fixture of your life, you are struck by a certain style of being that feels interesting enough to pursue, align with, and unpack. You’re not sure where the friendship is going, but you certainly want to be there when it arrives.

He says, in his interview with David Edmonds:

The good of friendship as a whole lies in its contribution to our becoming who we are and, in particular, to our becoming—if we do—arresting individuals. Friendship, the totality of our friends—among whom our close friends are the most important—is one of the main instruments or mechanisms that we employ in order to establish a path through life that is distinctly our own.

In this lens, friendship becomes a living work. I often get asked how I’ve remained friends with the same group of people for 20 years, and if it gets boring. My argument is always this: their meat suit is arguably the same, but who they are is constantly being revised. They are far from static beings that I might’ve read once in 2006 and then never again.

To be in a long-term friendship is to be a co-author of a narrative. Just as your gaze defines them, theirs defines yours.

iii.

A friendship is a sanctuary of the unfinished. In a way, this is the grace my friends and I give each other, this wiggle room that a large part of who we are can only be unearthed in the next decade of shared observation.

Most social structures—work, family, the public eye—demand consistency; they need us to be predictable so that we can be useful. Friendship is one of the only domains where we can afford to be “inconsistent”. It is the only place where we can test out new versions of our style of being without the fear that the old version will be used as evidence against us. This is not something that can be witnessed over a weekend or even a year, unless something drastic happens. These changes occur at an almost geological pace. The summation, then, of a long-term friendship is not that you know each other perfectly, but that you have been present for the most number of iterations.

This presence is made possible because friendship is, at its core, a series of affordances offered and accepted.

iv.

If you had two surfaces that were mathematically perfect—perfectly flat and non-reactive—they could move against each other without generating friction. In reality, even the smoothest-looking mirror looks like a jagged mountain range under a microscope. When these “mountains” collide, they create resistance.

The same can be said of friendship. Friction gives you traction; it allows a friendship to move forward and gain momentum. A friendship with no friction is usually one where the two parties aren’t touching deeply enough to matter.

v.

Real closeness requires a circularity of need.

Those of us with a hyper-independent, high-functioning bent often find it hard to want from other people, but are equally happy to give. We work towards a kind of frictionless existence where we give maximum utility to others but need zero maintenance ourselves. We want to be the sun, but the sun is a lonely thing. It sits at the centre of a system, but is not a part of it.

When I refuse to need anything, I’m signalling to friends that there is no shape in my life that they’re required to fill. The circularity of need is the realisation that my messy middle is the gift of agency to a friend. Inviting them in is handing them a tool and saying, “your presence here can change the outcome”. The question of much to ask of them is always a gamble, and one I can’t offer sure-footed advice about. But what I do know is this: To be loved is to be seen, but to be known is to be needed.

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Thank you for reading this essay that was a good few years in the making.

Consider it an affordance offered; if you found a handle here worth holding onto, please share the whole essay or your favourite excerpt on Substack, with friends, on X/ Bluesky, or anywhere else you can think of.

It’s free to read, and the exposure helps a lot. We are, after all, each other’s most attentive audience.