How well do you know your friends? Do you know how happy they are, the last time they cried or suffered a broken heart? Have you ever sat and listened to them talk about the way they wake up at dawn, turning over the memory of something they regret? Have you held their hand while they confess that they’re lonely? Can you sit comfortably with their pain?
Or, like so many of us, are your friendships mostly confined to three or six-monthly scheduled meet-ups, for two hours at a time, where you rattle through the headlines — work, kids, relationships — before a snatched hug and a promise to “do this again soon” (before diving back into your own life until the next round of negotiations and date-planning begins again on WhatsApp)?
Until recently, my friendships were being ruined by “catch-up culture”. I started to dread the planned dinners and nights out, the ones booked months in advance when my diary was empty. When the date finally arrived, I’d have filled up every other night of the week around it, too, and wish I could cancel. In January, I looked at my calendar and realised I didn’t have a single free evening until April.
It wouldn’t matter if the catch-ups were meaningful and nourishing, but all too often they were bland and “nothingy”. “Dinner with X” – when X has a conversation style more suited to a police interrogation room than a restaurant – didn’t “fill my cup”, it left me empty.
So, as part of my New Year’s resolutions, I stopped. Or, more accurately, I made a vow to myself to swap trite chat for meaningful discussions; to exchange functional “check-ins” and bland “how are you?” texts for specific, intentional interactions. And the best way to put this new way of socialising into practice? I invited 10 of my closest friends to travel from Wales to London to stay with me overnight.
Fast forward to this weekend, and I’ve just said goodbye to seven adults and three kids, after a dinner party that lasted 20 hours.
Some of that was spent sleeping (with guests strewn across sofas and the spare room), but the rest was made up exclusively of slow, languorous conversation. The lack of time pressure meant we sat and ate, then got into the important stuff – talking about dreams and first dates, books and the manosphere, and whether there’s anything new in music now, or whether each generation is simply recycling the bands that came before it.
We talked about politics and tried to name our all-time top five songs; we debated “looksmaxxing” (the pressure on teenage boys to prioritise a chiselled jawline over everything else) and had a lively chat about women’s anger. We rattled through gender disparity in childcare and emotional labour and did a drive-by on Donald Trump’s America. We touched on menopause and marvelled at how we know more about horoscopes than we do the stages of our menstrual cycles.
What we didn’t do was discuss life “headlines”. We skated over those quickly: someone asked me how work was going, I answered briefly and moved on. We skipped the small stuff to focus on the big – our hearts, our feelings – and that continued well into breakfast. Around my table, eating croissants, we mused on the day’s news, laughing openly about a story that claimed earning £100,000 a year could be a “curse”; wondering if men and women approach “catch-up culture” differently. We concluded that it disproportionally affects female friendships — we could see it.
For when the men in the group quizzed us, saying (rightly) that we all have busy lives, which is why “catch-up culture” is so prominent to begin with, we raised the fact that us women are particularly strung out, particularly if we have children (but also if we don’t): research from the University of Alberta, investigating the split of duties in the home for heterosexual couples, found that women not only do the lion’s share of the housework at the start of their relationships – but for years onwards. Studies also show that women are more likely to plan social activities, yet often have less free time than men.
In the end, when I waved my friends goodbye and said “see you in the summer”, for once, I meant it. Because what our conversation taught me is that when it comes to the unpaid cognitive labour of maintaining the bonds of true friendship, it’s more important than ever to make them count.
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