Don't Let Go of Your Bosom Friends
40 Practical Tips and Bits of Lady Wisdom Upon Turning 40 (Part I)
I promised readers that the second half of the 40 for 40 roundup would go up last week. That didn’t happen — I spent a solid 10 hours researching a moving company for my impending departure from NYC (and found one!), before flying to Kansas City for a belated birthday weekend with friends. But the reason for my delay is fitting, because no other kind of relationship has been more central to my adult life than friendship.
I believe our culture might be in a bit of a frienassaince. This spring, Roxy Stone and I spoke with Rhaina Cohen about her fantastic new book, The Other Significant Others: Reimagining Life with Friendship at the Center. Rhaina notes that for most of history, friendship was the most central type of relationship, as marriage met more practical needs, especially for women. She writes about the early days of her friendship with “M.” that felt as swoony as a crush. She and M. embrace each other and have special rituals. Their connection isn’t sexual (Rhaina is married, and she and her husband live with another couple with kids), but it is romantic, the kind of all-in love honored in sappy songs and bad poetry.
I once said to a friend about another friend, “She’s the love of my life.” But I offered the caveat: “Absent a husband…” Yes, it is the case that a spouse would in some immediate ways take precedence over my friends. And most people today who want to get married want a companionate marriage, and that’s all to the good. But I can’t afford to supplant my friends with a hypothetical husband, because life is long, and hard, and we need people who will bear witness to every version of ourselves, whether or not we’re married.
Maybe what Charlotte York says in Season 4 Ep. 1 of Sex and the City (“The Agony and the ‘Ex’-tacy,” the one with the original Hot Priest) is right:
Don’t laugh at me, but maybe we can be each other’s soulmates. And then we can let men be just these great, nice guys to have fun with.
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Or recall Anne of Green Gables and her dear “bosom friend,” that cordial-swigging Diana Barry. So without further ado, here are the next 20 bits of advice and wisdom I’ve gleaned in the first 40 years of life. (If you missed the first 20, I covered books, food and drink, beauty, and dating and relationships.)
FRIENDSHIP
Every friendship is an investment. It doesn’t take long in the post-collegiate world to realize that friends don’t just happen. At some point, both people have to choose to show up for each other, even if it’s a phone call twice a year or texting a “this made me think of you” meme. There’s a couple I go to church with who invite me over for dinner with other folks every few months. I receive it as their saying, “We want to be your friend.” What a gift! That said…
Friendships end, and that’s okay. I’m sure you’ve heard the adage befitting a distressed sign in your aunt’s seashell-themed bathroom: “Friends for a reason, friends for a season, or friends for a lifetime.” I used to think that for a friendship to be real and good, it had to be in the lifer category. I’m coming around to accepting the idea of seasonal friends. That friends effectively move on — whether by circumstance (the most common reason) or diverging values or life rhythms — doesn’t negate the joy and connection, however impermanent.
It’s okay that some friendships are surface-y. Like many of you, I’m sure, I conceive of my friendships as existing in concentric circles, with ride or die ones in the closest circle, followed by solid, long-term friends that have depth but may be more circumstantial, followed by casual friends whose primary purpose is fun. While it’s easy to rank the circles by value, I believe the friends in the outermost ring are just as important, because we all need more fun (Laura Tremaine shared some great thoughts on this in our podcast convo.)
Friend breakups are real, and hard. My freshman year of college, a girl who lived across the hallway and I were inseparable. We ate every meal together, stayed up late watching bad 2000s rom-coms, and went on a couple weekend trips. It was myopic (and, looking back, unhealthy) in the way a college dating relationship can be. And then, after we returned from winter break, she told me she didn’t want to be friends anymore. She was struggling in school and had to focus and had realized I was too negative, or something [insert grimacing emoji]. She said, “I feel like I’m breaking up with you.” I was gutted.
In the same way we lack language for capturing the romance of friendship, we lack language for grieving its end. I’ve both received and initiated friend breakups, and in either direction, there’s pain. And yet there are times when we have to cut our losses and move on, because we’ve felt betrayed, seen insurmountable differences surface, or simply want to invest elsewhere.
Prioritize friendships that grow with you. Despite hundreds of miles between us, different marriage and family configurations, and busy lives, I keep finding deep ways to connect with the women I saw this past weekend. We never run out of things to talk about, ranging from the best eye gel patches to complex family dynamics to the nature of the Incarnation to PEN-15. I love each of them dearly, and I love who I am becoming alongside them. Out of all the beautiful things God has grown in my life, these women have to be top 3, easily.
WORK
Your job doesn’t have to change the world. My friend and podcast cohost Roxy and I talk about this a lot. We both started our careers in Christian publishing and overlapped at Christianity Today magazine. What we lacked in pay, we made up for in a sense of mission. In fact, many nonprofits and ministries stay afloat with young, idealistic college grads who want to lead the church or solve global hunger or reach more people with the gospel. Most Christian colleges promise to create “world changers.”
But there’s a risk in merging your sense of purpose and identity with your job. I struggled to keep work-life boundaries at CT, and stayed longer than I should have because of an overwhelming sense of responsibility. If not me, who will? can sound altruistic, but it can also sound vain. It’s been such a relief, in my job with Brazos Press, to show up and do excellent work while free from the belief that God’s eternal purposes are on the line every time I log in.
Eat the frog. Mark Twain allegedly said that “if you have to eat a live frog, do it first thing in the morning and nothing worse will happen to you for the rest of the day.” Basically, do the least desirable task, the one you’re most likely to procrastinate on, first thing, and the rest of your day will be uphill. I am good at this maybe 30 percent of the time.
Good colleagues are worth staying for. These are the people you’re likely spending 40 hours every week with. And a bad boss or mean colleagues can make even dreamiest-on-paper job miserable. Go to places with a healthy workplace culture of respect, upfront and consistent communication, good boundaries, and collaboration, because your workplace will shape your soul for good or ill.
If your boss is attempting some version of the Billy Graham Rule, run. It doesn’t matter if you’re okay only meet with him with a third party present or in public. If your being a woman requires special, gender-based rules, it means your boss or colleagues will in the end primarily see you as a woman who is not their wife — that is, a problem to be solved.
Institutions are good, actually. After I quit my job at CT but before I joined the Brazos Press team, there was a two-year stretch where I was cobbling together the freelance life with speaking, writing, and editing. The freedom to say what I really thought in public was refreshing; I no longer had to toe the Evangelical Thought Leadership line. Yet I don’t actually know that the lack of accountability was good for my soul. Those two years, I spent a lot of time arguing with male coreligionists on Twitter about the post-Trump fallout, which meant I was angry a lot. I felt pressure to post lots Instagram content that kept me relevant (as my opportunities to write and speak were tied up with the size of my platform), even when I didn’t have much to say.
I genuinely believe specific people are called to be full-time writers or creatives, yet they too need communities that offer mirroring and encouragement. For many of us, institutions —at least decently healthy ones — are where we can bear the most fruit over the long haul without losing our souls in the influencer ecosystem.
FAITH
You can go on a hike, watch a movie, or get tipsy at bottomless brunch with friends on Sunday mornings, and also, that is not church. People opt to forego church for all sorts of legitimate reasons, and doing so might lead to new ways of connecting with God. Listen, I was this close to becoming a sun worshipper while hiking in Sedona this spring, replete with a tie-dye skirt and The Very Best of Enya on repeat. But “church” is not “whatever I choose to do that restores me spiritually.” That posture, in my view, devalues the long tradition of people gathering at a set time and place every week to worship, pray, confess, and share Communion. It’s okay if you’re not part of that kind of community right now. You don’t have to call it church for it to be good.
Church is just people. Having argued for the church’s set-apartness, I nonetheless believe we go wrong when we place expectations on a church community that no gathering of flawed and fallible humans can meet. We either treat our church as a pristine haven from the world, a place untarnished by larger social and cultural dynamics, or as a one-stop shop for getting all our needs met, or the place where leaders are by default trusted because their hearts are in the right place, after all, they love Jesus, and so would never be self-serving or misuse their power. The more we can see church as people — people who are, to be sure, grounded in the love of Christ and uniquely called to witness to that love — the more we can withstand the moments when our church and its leaders inevitably disappoint and fail us.
When at a loss of what to pray, A.C.T.S. isn’t a terrible place to start. Surely many of you grew up with this simple acronym that outlines the steps of prayer: A is for Adoration, C is for Confession, T is for Thanksgiving, and S is for Supplication (with most of us camping out on the last one). Yes, it’s a cheesy holdover from Sunday school, and can make prayer sound like a checklist, but fallible humans sometimes need cheesy handles to practice life with God.
Evangelistic puppet ministries should be a staple of churches across denominations. I was in one called G.G.A.P.: God, Girls, and Puppets.
Quiet times are good, actually. When my parents became evangelical Christians when I was 13, they started waking up early to have a quiet time with God. I was never any good at the waking up early bit, so became a bit proponent of “it doesn’t have to be morning!” Over time, those set-apart bits of time were eaten up by other things, so that my prayer life became a random smattering of Hail Marys.
To this day, both my parents start their days reading Scripture, reading a book, praying, and/or journaling. When I’m home visiting, I come out to get a cup of coffee and see them in their quiet time “spots.” I don’t know if I’ll ever be like them, but their faithfulness to this practice over the decades is one of the most beautiful things I know. In our haste to move on from the legalistic rules of our evangelical upbringing, I never want to lose sight of the goodness of earnestly and daily seeking God.
BITS AND BOBS
Know your neighbors. I’ve lived in the same apartment building for four years. The guy who lives across the hallway from undoubtedly heard me practice for karaoke and yell at my computer screen and belch. We have not once had a conversation besides “hi.” This isn’t right. By contrast, the family who runs the bodega down the street recognizes me. We don’t chat much, but I’m there enough to know they know who I am. These casual interactions actually go a long way to connect us; a lot of us learned that when we could no longer chat with the bodega guy or barista in 2020. Ephemeral friendliness matters.
You don’t have to be friends with the Trader Joe’s cashiers. They’re too thirsty.
You can move from “ought to” to “want to.” It is a legitimate and spiritually significant question to ask, “What do I really want?” and to make decisions based on the answer. Of course, adulting requires we do things out of duty and not desire. But it seems God gives us quite a bit of freedom to decide what to treat as duty, and to walk away from what was never ours to shoulder anyway.
I used to operate with the belief that when fellow Christians ask you for something, you should say yes unless they’re asking for something overtly sinful. I simply don’t believe this anymore. People ask me for book endorsements, job leads, editorial advice, and social media sharing. Honestly, I decline most of it unless it elicits an authentic yes! That’s because …
Every yes is a no to something else; every no is a yes to something else. This has to be one of the rudest wakeup calls of adulthood. But you simply can’t say yes to all the good things that come your way and stay grounded and focused on what you really want your life to be. Other people’s expectations for and demands on you will crowd out your own purpose and true heart. Saying no to even good things is required so that you have space to say yes to the best things.
The person you are becoming includes and transcends the person you were. When we talk about spiritual change, we’re tempted to force a break from our past and claim a “once was blind but now I see” revelation that’s as totalizing as the evangelical conversion experiences we now view with suspicion and disdain. Yet if we are now convinced that reality isn’t black and white, that both/and is more true than either/or, that truth will necessarily start with our very person.
The seeds of ourselves are with us even when we grow in a direction we never could have predicted. God intimately knows and is gracious toward every version of ourselves that’s been. So, we also can be gracious with our former selves, asking them to come with us instead of abandoning them at the doorstep of our break from the past. If we’re confident in who we’re becoming, then we needn’t try to exile who were once were. Instead we can extend embrace. —KB
Excellent second set of 20. As a full-time nomad in my mid-50s, I will add this one more:
You are not limited to the lifestyle of the people around you, even if it is everything you've ever known. You are not too old to ditch it all, sell everything, and travel the world if the opportunity arises. It is a surprisingly affordable lifestyle.
This was really good. My favorite as a 43 year old in the middle changing life seasons is that every yes is a no to something else. I am now trying to guard my yeses more so that I have margin to say yes to the right things, including interruptions or unexpected things or people God sends my way that I’m meant to say yes to.