Retaining Friends

In my friend Rishi’s excellent blog post on retaining friends, he outlines 3 ways to delegate retaining friends:

become a part of their friend group

have them join your friend group

create a friend group with them in it

Because the second key to retaining your friendships is recognizing that friend groups are 10x stickier than 1:1 friendships. If you’re like me, you can’t be trusted to maintain a friendship 1:1 by calling and texting all the time. You get busy. In a friend group situation, your amazing friends keep each other engaged. This way, you’re relying on a system instead of willpower.

For years I’ve been hesitant to introduce my friends to each other or inviting friends from different friend groups to trips/events. I’d have one identity with one friend, and a different identity with another friend. Introducing them to each other would cause cognitive dissonance for me.

Now, I’ve surrounded myself with friends where I’m comfortable being myself. It’s one unified identity. This makes it much easier to introduce friends to each other or for them to intro friends to me.

This is what my other friend, Ethan, talks about in his blog post on curating friends:

My stress test for making sure two people get along is if I am the same person around them. We all have different identities, mine differ depending on the person or the place. If I act the same way around two people, then I am confident that those two people would get along.