The Friend Zone

A present-day primer on nurturing, savoring, and decoding your relationships with your best pals.

Though so many of us are suckers for romance, friendships may be the true love stories, the bonds that really complete us. A friend knows our secret aspirations, petty aggravations, every daily triumph and despair. She’s our memory bank, moral compass, and reassurance that we aren’t the only person on earth who’s equally passionate about season 1 of Outlander, putting more women in Congress, and Hot Pockets. A good friend exerts a gravitational force in our lives: Even, or especially, in moments when everything threatens to fly apart, she pulls us back to ourselves.

“We see our friends, and our friends see us, with a clarity that other people don’t—not even our romantic partners,” says Lauren Mechling, whose novel How Could She explores the complexities of female friendship. “To be known that way is incredibly important. Friendship helps us define who we are.”

But these days it’s getting harder for us to define what friendship itself is. Social media has turned friend into a verb, not just a thing that we are but a thing that we do—or undo, as in the Orwellian-sounding unfriend. On Instagram we connect with strangers who invite us to join them where we used to hang with our nearest and dearest: in the dressing room at Target, on the couch at wine o’clock. Meanwhile, our actual friends sometimes look like strangers— flatteringly filtered, perpetually #blessed, and often having too much fun with other filtered, #blessed people who don’t happen to be us.

In this universe of insta-intimacy, it’s good to remember that friendship is still a matter of the heart, not heart emojis, and as such must be handled with care. That’s the spirit in which we crafted our guide to being a better friend in the digital age. Because in the vast reaches of cyberspace, the network that matters most is yours.

1 USE THE TECH!