Friendship Hacks

When Sara and I launched this blog in early 2021, pandemic-disrupted friendships and everyday connections fueled our desire to write about the importance of friendship. Nearly three years later, life has mostly returned to ‘normal.’  While normal enables us to gather in person and hop on airplanes to celebrate milestones, normal can also be very busy, and a little overwhelming at times.

As Sara shared in an earlier post, my engagement in late August was a great reason for celebration. In September, I started a new job, put my townhome up for sale, and purchased a new home with my fiancée Mark. October is proving to be just as busy, with home closings, moving, and overseeing the biggest employee engagement initiative of the year for my new team at Abbott.

My relationships with friends have had to take a backseat in recent months, which has caused me to alternate between feeling sad for missed opportunities for connection and feeling guilty for being a bad friend. As we have shared in the past in our blog, research to help us cultivate these important relationships is lacking. So, I turned to other resources and inspirations to identify a few ‘friendship hacks’ that you might try as a way to keep connections alive when life is conspiring otherwise.

Reflect with Gratitude

While friendship books are still gaining traction, a lot has been written about how to ‘recapture the magic’ in romantic relationships. Those insights are not necessarily applicable to friendships, and not always helpful to marriages weighed down by busy schedules.

One relationship researcher who recognizes that when life gets busy, it’s important to show your partner some grace is Northwestern University’s Professor Eli Finkel. His 2017 book, The All-or-Nothing Marriage, shares how expectations of marriage have changed over time. He devotes an entire chapter to ‘hacks’ that can help keep connections alive during the busiest phases of life.

Several experiments suggest that deliberate efforts to increase our own feelings of gratitude hold promise for improving our relationships and our overall well-being.

Eli J. Finkel, The All-or-Nothing Marriage

One of Professor Finkel’s hacks that I am personally working on is reflecting on my friendships with gratitude. I have had plenty of opportunity to do this as I scroll through Facebook updates late at night, or look at photos, cards, and letters collected over many decades of friendships. As I’m spending most evenings now packing for my upcoming move, I am enjoying seeing these reminders of how many wonderful people have played important roles in my life. Recognizing how grateful I am for these friendships helps me understand their importance in my life, and it gives me even greater motivation to prioritize these relationships, regardless of how busy I am.

Reach Out

As I sort through memorabilia, I’m making notes in my journal as I recollect long-ago experiences. I also hope to use this as a prompt to reach out to friends and family who’ve supported me over the years. I want to let them know I’m thinking about them and that I’m looking forward to a time when we can reconnect more fully.

In the meantime, I can write a text, make a call or send a letter to let someone know I’m thinking of them. The value of a heartfelt note is meaningful to the recipient, but as Sara wrote in an earlier post, “It has been shown to build trust and community, as well as to inspire other acts of gratitude.”

Connect Over Coffee (or Tea!)

One of my favorite activities with friends is connecting at my local coffee shop, the Glenview Grind. Coffee breaks during the week provided me with much-needed opportunities for connection during my years of self-employment. Now that I’m in the office full time, I enjoy regular chats with colleagues, but I miss these coffee interludes. Of course, it doesn’t have to be coffee–tea, ice cream, or any other break in the action of your regular routine, along with food or beverage to add to the ambiance.

Three years ago, meeting at a cafe was not an option because of the pandemic. Now that many people’s work and parenting lives have become busier than ever, coffee meetups feel like a luxury. However, embracing some creativity for connecting, as we did during the pandemic, allows coffee connections to take on different forms. Earlier this week, I had a short window to walk to a nearby coffee shop before waking my son for school. En route my sister called, thinking she was catching me on my commute to the office.

We caught up as I purchased a cup of coffee, walked home and then woke my 15-year-old. When the call ended, I felt supported and more connected. And with some of my family and friends living hundreds of miles away, a phone call, with coffee as the backdrop, can be the perfect friendship hack.