Kat Vellos - We Should Get Together: The Secret to Cultivating Better Friendships

Copyright 2019 by Kat Vellos
Illustrations copyright 2019 by Kat Vellos

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. Copyright protects artists and creators, encourages diverse voices, and allows artists to make a living. Thank you for buying an authorized copy of this book, and for complying with copyright laws by not scanning, reproducing, or distributing any part of this book without permission. By encouraging others to purchase their own copy, or by giving purchased copies away as gifts, you are supporting the artist/author who created it. Thanks for being awesome.

Subjects: Non-fiction, Friendship, Interpersonal Relations, Happiness, Communication and Social Skills, Personal Growth, Psychology, Self Help, Self Actualization

Interior and cover design by Kat Vellos
Set in Baskerville, Fira Sans, Bebas, and the illustrators handwriting

For information about special discounts for bulk purchases, interviews, speaking engagements, or anything else, reach out at weshouldgettogether.com

Hardcover ISBN: 237-0-00075-256-7
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-73437-971-6

To all my friends near and far

1. Part 1
   Why friendship matters and the elements of good ones
2. Part 2
   The four main friendship challenges and how to overcome them
3. Part 3
   Bold new approaches for cultivating friendship, and next steps
4. Conclusion
   Making It Real

French fries are more delicious when youre not eating them alone. It was a beautiful Saturday afternoon in Oakland, my schedule was wide open, and I wanted to share some time with a friend. The only problem was, I didnt have anyone to hang out with. I had recently moved into my own apartment, so didnt have a smattering of roommates around anymore. The few local friends I had were already promised to other commitments theyd set up weeks beforewhich seemed to be a recurring pattern. To help myself feel less alone, I posted a message on Facebook: Who wants to go eat french fries and talk about life with me?

In that moment, my tiny wish felt impossible to fulfill. Nearly everyone who replied to me on Facebook lived in another state. And there was a bigger wish behind my post. I didnt just want to eat snacks and talk about life. I was craving a different kind of lifeone that would give me abundant access to friends who wanted to see me as much as I wanted to see them.

Id been living in the Bay Area for a year and a half. I loved my job in San Francisco and my neighborhood on the border of Oakland and Berkeley. But I was lonely. Loneliness was an unfamiliar feeling, and its arrival in my life puzzled me because I wasnt socially isolated. I was surrounded by smart, funny, interesting people who I was constantly meeting at every brunch, meetup, and dinner party I went to. On weekends there were dozens of exciting events and activities to attend. I had a great time at potlucks, meetups, and events but I rarely got to see the people I met there anywhere else. The person-to-person intimacies didnt grow. When I wanted someone just to hang out with, aside from a couple of roommates who were often running around with their own lives, I was usually on my own.

When I moved into my own one-bedroom apartment, I was thrilled beyond words. Id wanted my own little sanctuary for so long. I thought that having my own place meant that Id be able to have people over all the time, but it only happened a fraction of the time. Often when I asked my local friends to hang out, they werent free and wouldnt be for a while. Life seemed to be telling me that I had crossed a new milestone of adulthood:

18th birthday: You get to vote!

21st birthday: You get to drink!

35th birthday: You get to make plans six weeks in advance any time you want to see a friend!

So in the summer of 2015, I did what I thought any normal person would do. I started a couple meetup groups around topics that matter to me. (Ive since been informed that this is not what any normal person would do.) I organized a professional community group for other Black people who practice design (my line of work) and I created an event called Better than Small Talk for people who value good conversation. Both meetups were successful, accumulating hundreds of members, and Bay Area Black Designers was even profiled in Forbes. Running both groups over the next four years required a herculean amount of work, and ironically, they only provided me with a few reliable friends that I got to see away from the meetups. When I wasnt running those groups, I devoted time and energy to deepening connections with my tiny set of local friends. Turning lovely acquaintances into close friends was my passion project.

One day I wrote down the names of all the people I really liked and wanted to be better friends with. One by one, I set out trying to nurture and develop each friendship. Id contact the person and set up a get-together for tea, a meal, or an activity. Wed share conversation and get to know each other better. Repeat.

It worked with a few people:

• Adrian became a good buddy, but then he started a business. All his time got sucked into doing that, understandably.
• Jabu became a dear friend that I admire and love deeply, but then she moved from the overpriced Bay Area to a gorgeous house for half the price in the southwest United States.
• Marjorie became a semi-regular hangout buddy for about a year. Then we both got into relationships and found ourselves spending more of our free time with our partners. Our texts and hangouts went extinct.
• Once, someone on a listserv that I was in wrote the group saying that she was looking for a roommate. I saw that we lived two blocks apart. I emailed her and said that I didnt want to be her roommate since I already had a place to live, but asked if she wanted to be neighbor friends? She did! We got dinner at a Thai restaurant on the corner, and had a great conversation full of laughs and things in common. But then the new friendship spark fizzled out. We texted a couple times after that but we never managed to hang out again.
• Feeling like Id struck gold, I got lucky when a few friends moved to the Bay Area from other cities where Id previously lived. I tried especially hard to nurture these pre-existing friendships. But most of these friends moved away less than two years later. Going-away parties became a regular occurrence, and with each one, more air was let out of my balloon.

I made attempts with many more people, with similarly frustrating results. Making friends as an adult, Id discovered, is work. Its not like being a kid on the playground where having the same color sneakers or a fondness for swings is enough to call someone a friend. Its not like being in high school where simply sitting around the same people every day in class is enough common ground to knit you together during the afternoons and weekends too. And its not like college where being roommates or classmates is enough to cement your common bond and then, poof, youre best friends for life.

Nope. Building friendships and community as an adultespecially in a new cityis hard work. Its such hard work that some folks have told me theyve given up trying, and theyre not the only ones. The average American hasnt made one new friend in the last five years.