On Friendship

by Idinma | Feb 2, 2024

It’s January 5th, 2022, and I’m watching the sunset from a Southwest Airlines flight (for once, I needed both checked bags to fly free). This is it, I thought, I’m moving to the Big Apple to take my own big bite that would finally propel me into the life of my dreams. The announcement comes through the loudspeakers: “We’re 30 minutes away from LaGuardia, fasten your seatbelts and prepare for landing.” I open Spotify and play “New York” by The Boxer Rebellion to get myself amped up for the new life that awaits me. I’ve imagined this moment several times and even better, I’ve been here plenty of times before, and so I’m no stranger to this bittersweet feeling that comes with saying goodbye to my old life while my new one beckons sweetly from across the horizon. Yet, there’s another familiar sadness that lingers and for a while, I can’t quite place the source. Then, it hits me—I have no friends in New York City and I’m going to have to start all over again for what feels like the millionth time.

I have had a complicated relationship with friendship for as long as I can remember. Part of this complication I owe to the unyielding hands of time. As we get older, we go through so many evolutions of our personhood, and we cannot take everyone through all of them, no matter how hard we may try. For the most part though, I have my nomadic-ish life thus far to thank for the current state of my friendships. See, it can feel tricky to build lasting relationships when you’re always on the move, when you’re not sure you’ve lived in a place long enough to call it home, and when home is everywhere and nowhere all at once.

When I reminisce about my childhood friendships, I think about how much simpler they were, and how everything changed when I grew up. Isn’t that in a way, the story of many of our lives: how everything changes when we grow up? Let’s go back in time for a spell. I moved to Lagos to attend a boarding school when I turned ten and I lived there for the next six years of my life, only going home briefly every three months or so. I won’t regale—or traumatize—you with stories of a Nigerian boarding school experience in the late noughties because we’ll be here all day. But that experience created deep bonds that I assumed, in youthful arrogance, would last a lifetime. I moved to the States ten years ago to continue my education and over time, it would become increasingly difficult to stay in touch with secondary school friends I may have otherwise gone to the same universities as, had I remained in Lagos.

Since then, I have moved a couple more times, from New Mexico to Oklahoma to Paris, from Austin to Boston to Houston, collecting friends like souvenirs along my journey. I’m thankful for all the lives I have lived thus far, all the places I have been, and all, well, most of the people I have met. It may sound exciting to have lived in all these places, and I’ll admit, it has been. But, it has also felt isolating at times, and I have felt ever so lonely. Sure, many friends are only a video call away (I have to pause here and give a quick shoutout to WhatsApp for being that girl), but long-distance friendships, although no less beautiful and authentic, don’t quite hit the same as having geography on your side. Enough of my favorite sitcoms depict close-knit friendships with characters who live right next door, right above or across the street from each other. At the very least, they always live in the same city and can’t seem to stay away from each other’s couches for some reason. But real life is not an episode of Living Single, and my best friend lives 700 miles away in Kalamazoo, Michigan.

So, I moved to Brooklyn two years ago to begin a new career and a new life. Although I would be starting from scratch, I was excited to be here in this concrete jungle where dreams are made of, and it was my dream to finally build a solid community of girlfriends I could count on. There are over 8 million people here, so how hard could it be? Really freaking hard, it turns out. There are so many people passing through New York City in various states of transition without staying long enough to build lasting connections and while there are ample opportunities to meet people, nothing good comes easy, so if you want to make genuine friendships as an adult, especially in this city, you have to put in some work. By that I mean, you have to be a bit more intentional and that requires time and patience and trial and error.

In school, you are thrust into countless situations where you can make friends organically. You see the same people every day in class, you work with them for weeks on projects, you go to parties together and you don’t have to try too hard to build close friendships. If a few of you happen to move to the same city after college, chances are, you can easily pick up where you left off. But, if you find yourself in a city with none of your close friends, you have to build the community you want because it probably won’t come knocking. So, I joined Bumble BFF, an Igbo culture club, a book club, a running club, a writing club, relevant professional networks at my job, and a great church. I went to events people invited me to and I invited people to events. I also went solo to my fair share of outings, and I challenged myself to talk to people, something that hasn’t always come naturally.

Attempting to build community in this way has been far from linear, of course. I’ve been on Bumble BFF dates that didn’t quite amount to much. I’ve been to at least two First Saturdays at the Brooklyn Museum where I didn’t talk to anyone and just went home feeling worse than if I’d stayed in. A girl once told me I was "brave" for being by myself at a concert, which was, mostly awkward but it also made me feel like a loser for a second there. I’ve also said hi to a girl who sat next to me at the movies, and we went out for drinks afterwards. Granted, she left the city shortly after and we haven’t quite met up again, but it was a lovely evening that I still remember fondly. Of course, I’ve also had to be intentional about wa-ter-ing the gardens of my long-distance friendships, knowing all too well how they can slip into nothingness if left untended for too long.

I haven’t always gotten it right, but I have come a long way in my relationships, and I’ve learned some lessons along the way. I’ve learned that being kind to myself helps me be kinder to others. I have come to accept that not every new connection will blossom into a lasting friendship and that I don’t want them all to because that’s a lot of pressure to put on everyone I meet, and frankly because, it’s an unrealistic expectation. I have come to understand that friends will play different roles in different seasons of my life just as I will in theirs. I have also learned that envy is a normal human emotion, that asks me to question my own ego and insecurities because it’s rarely ever about the other person. I have had to mourn some friendships I thought would last a lifetime in order to make room for new connections to bloom.

I don’t have friendships entirely figured out yet. Like most of the lessons that make life worthwhile, I suspect that the practice of building healthy and fulfilling relationships may be a lifelong journey, and I think I’m finally making peace with that. I know that I’ll have to continue being intentional with my current friendships, especially as we get older, and life gets busier. I also know that there are friends I haven’t made yet who will love me still. I hope that we can meet ourselves with kindness, grace, respect, patience, care, and good intent. Most of all, I’m learning that friendships don’t have to be quite so complicated.