🔎 The Friendship Trap
💡 Sol Bites: Practical Guide to Friendship
🦉 Words of Wisdom
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Last week we wrote about how to find the right partner. This week, we’re writing about how to find the right friends.
Many people often fall into the trap of keeping score in their friendships: who texted when your dog passed or who paid for the last drink. That's the wrong approach. It makes you an auditor, not a friend. Real friendships can have imbalances. They should be more about bearing witness to each other’s flaws and showing up anyway.
Another issue people have is trying to define a friendship too early. If you create a strict plot arc of how you think it should work, then you're really just giving it a schedule for its own death. Rather than choreographing and analyzing your relationships, allow them to explain themselves as they happen.
Friendships should be rooted in brief moments of care—like how your kind yoga partner always saves you a spot, or how the neighbor you barely know brings in your package when it rains. Those are quiet reminders that connection is everywhere.
Sol Bites: Practical Guide to Friendship
Developing a friendship can feel like hard work (especially if you put too much pressure on yourself to seem like “good friend” material). Here are three things you can do that will make building those relationships feel easier:
1. Do Things in the Background
Connection often happens best when our minds are lightly distracted. Rather than forcing conversation with a potential friend at a bar, put yourself in situations where you’re both doing something else at the same time. Try working in a community garden, taking a group class, or volunteering at an event. Shared effort creates shared ease.
2. Make a Specific, Finite Plan
“Let’s hang sometime” kills more potential friendships than conflict ever will. Make concrete plans: “Can you meet on Tuesday at 7:15 at the dumpling place?” Specificity is kindness, and it shows a clear intention. That structure also will signal to the other person that they can open up safely and you’re serious about building a bond.
3. Be the Convener
Everyone is tired, and everyone secretly wants someone else to take the lead. Friendship, at its simplest, is logistics performed tenderly. Host a low-effort hang-out. Name a time, put potato chips in a bowl, the end. Be the person who makes the relationship easy.
Because friendships are hard. Don’t lose good people to the “we should catch up” void.
Simple Invitation
If you want to form a friendship, then stop overthinking what “needs” to go into the relationship and don’t wait for a “perfect friend” to show up in your world—engage an adjacent one. Text the most nearly-friend person you have and make plans. My easy go-to: “Walk at 11am?”
Let yourself be changed by the people who show up.
Words of Wisdom
In the sweetness of friendship let there be laughter, and sharing of pleasures. For in the dew of little things the heart finds its morning and is refreshed.
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Mona & The Sol TV Team ❤️
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