Friends

Q: Do you have many close friends? A: Not really, no — I think the number of people I'd call close friends has actually shrunk over the years, though the quality has probably gone up. I've got maybe four or five people I'd call at two in the morning if something went wrong, and everyone else falls into a wider circle of people I like seeing but don't necessarily need. I used to measure friendship by how many people I hung out with; now I measure it by how honest I can be with someone. Q: How did you meet your best friend? A: We were assigned to the same project group in university, which is about the least romantic origin story possible for a friendship that's lasted this long. We didn't get on immediately, actually — I found her a bit blunt at first, and she probably found me a bit too eager to please. It was only after we'd argued about something trivial and gotten past it that things settled into what they are now. Q: Is it easy to make friends as an adult? A: Honestly, no, and I think most adults would say the same if they were being truthful about it. School and university throw you together with the same people every day, which does most of the work for you — you don't have to engineer proximity, it just exists. As an adult you have to actually choose to show up somewhere repeatedly, and most people are too tired or too settled in their routines to bother, myself included some weeks.