Friendship before social media

True friendship doesn’t need to be quantified or transacted for others.

We met in elementary school, middle school, freshman year of high school. We played in band together, played paintball together, sat beside each other in English 9, 10, 11, 12. We burned and traded CDs. We gathered for game nights: tossing poker chips across the table, spelling backwards in Cranium Turbo, jamming out to Rock Band. Some of us strummed a guitar, harmonizing to Dispatch around the campfire. We spent a whole evening attempting to crack open a coconut. We paddled around lily pads at the pond, hopped the fence to swing on an old play set at Eastern Point Beach, slid wildly down an icy backyard trail then made scrambled eggs at midnight. We once spent hours filming a fake public service announcement about the right way to walk in the school hallway.

To bring all of this to life, we messaged each other on AIM from our desktop computers in the middle of the living room. We called each other on landlines, then switched to flip phones when we started driving. T9 texting was slow — and for some of us, charged by the message.

It was better to be together in person.

We toted digital cameras on special occasions, but there aren’t many pictures of the band room lunches, the varsity tennis matches, the summer job hauling hay at Allyn’s Red Barn, the ski runs, the beach days laid out on faded towels, the hours and hours and hours together.

We laughed, so much. We teased each other, so much. We watched dumb movies and some good ones: Airplane, Office Space, The Matrix, Monty Python and the Holy Grail. We visited each other at work. We dated, here and there. Two of us even fell in love.

Then came the summer before college. We signed up for Facebook accounts as soon as we got our .edu email addresses, watched from afar as we each made new friends, met the people we would marry, added photos to albums named after obscure song lyrics. We reunited on breaks to hear about these new lives. We had fumbling dinner parties and took the train into the city and the ferry to Block Island. We felt so grown.

After graduation, we spread further around the country: to California, Kansas, North Carolina, a Coast Guard cutter in the middle of the ocean. We looked for jobs and eventually found them (this was 2009, after all). We slowly got iPhones, new numbers, and for some of us, Instagram accounts. We sent Christmas cards but somehow not the new phone numbers. Every few years we gathered for weddings, and they were a brilliant portal, a brief burst of light and color in the otherwise quiet: nights of singing, dancing, laughing, all the old jokes and right back into the old ways of being together.

But mostly, we held each other close in ways not visible to the world. We didn’t have long phone calls, we didn’t follow each other on social media (most of us didn’t have social media), and we only occasionally traveled to see each other in person. From the outside, these friendships must have looked dormant, a fond faded memory.

What you couldn’t see: they were tucked in close like a burning coal, an unconditional and protective love that has warmed us from the inside out for the last two decades.

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Next year is our twentieth high school reunion. Would anyone be interested in gathering? John and I sent this out tentatively, over email, not sure of the response. Yes, yes, yes, yes, came the responses, echoing our own hunger as they rolled in. Yes, we’ll fly in. Yes, we’ll take time off work. Just tell us where and when and we’ll be there. A sigh of relief, of gratification: it’s not just us who feels this way.

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After months of preparation, our long weekend together arrived. Minus two who couldn’t make it, the nine of us traveled back to our hometown with spouses and kids in tow. Ever the consummate planner, I had prepared a feast of nostalgia: a beach day at our old stomping grounds in Watch Hill, a morning hike where we used to run cross country, a pool party at Mike’s parents’ house, a fancy dinner out for our last night together.

It was all magic. I’d relive it a thousand times over if I could.

My favorite part, though, was Friday night. After we tucked kids in bed, we gathered again in sweatshirts and jeans on Jackie’s back deck. We had planned to set up a fire pit, toast marshmallows, but once we sat down and turned to each other we hardly moved for the next four hours. We just talked, and talked, and talked: about politics and religion and politics in religion. About our kids, who they are right now, what they like. What’s something that’s changed about you in the last 20 years? What don’t we know that would surprise us? What feels hard right now?

What you can’t plan: people who are genuinely interested in what each other have to say. A willingness to ask, and answer, deep questions. A hunger to understand all the ways we’ve changed and all the ways we’ve stayed the same over the last twenty years.

You guys know this is weird, right? one of us ventured midway through. Most thirty-year-olds I know couldn’t do this, couldn’t sit for even an hour in conversation.

Something I’ve been thinking about, another of us said. Would we have been friends in high school if we had had social media?

It is a fair question. We have plenty in common, but we are unalike, too. We are an evangelical pastor, an Ivy League admissions counselor, a non-profit data manager, a military officer. We vote differently and hold different opinions and spend our time and money in different ways. While these fissures mostly seem insignificant to us, they’re more than enough to keep others apart in a world of instant outrage, gotcha memes, fake news, keyboard warriors.

Instead, we were just together, back then. There was no striving, no jealousy, no posturing between us. We didn’t broadcast our political opinions. We didn’t know if two of us got together to do something because there was no digital record: no performative birthday fanfare, no Streaks to keep up with, no requirements to comment in the correct way at the correct time.

We know how lucky we were, and how lucky we are. As easy as it is to feel discouraged that teen friendship like this is no longer possible in the year 2025, I remind myself that the real things haven’t changed:

True friendship doesn’t need to be quantified or transacted for others. It doesn’t require constant connectivity or holding all the same opinions. It doesn’t need to be understood by the world, and it doesn’t need to fit in a neatly-labeled box. The currency does not need to compute for anyone but you.

What true friendship does require? Time together. Shared memories. Appreciating idiosyncrasies. Respect for a person’s character instead of their correctly-held positions. Genuine, unconditional love.

If there’s a remnant of contemporaries left to make this possible for my kids, I will fight and fight and fight to do my part. To give them friendships built on time, and proximity, and all five senses, and inside jokes. (Lots of inside jokes.) To raise the kind of people who can be this friend, and receive this friendship in return.

I have hope it can be done, because we were nothing special — but we had each other. And that was more than enough.

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Thanks for letting me share, friends. I’d love to hear your reflections on friendship before social media, if you’d like to share. xo

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