group chats

500 words on casual friends

what happens to group chats when we grow up? do we still crave the dopamine hit of a barrage of texts hitting in reaction to a meme at 2 p.m. on a tuesday? do we lose the feeling of laughing at an inside joke shared by 20 people? does groupme disappear, only to be replaced with, idk, strava?

it’s a question i asked myself a lot when i was about to graduate college, mostly because it was what i found best articulated that our sense of community - and reason to have one - was going to be thrown out the door. after all, adult friendships sounded too autonomous. i wanted a shared wall, frustrating professor, a shitty bar, or even annoying traffic light (true story, don’t ask) to have in common with everyone i met.

(of course, this is a worry i reserved for my 20s and 30s when life isn’t stable by design, my mom’s whatsapp suggests that the groupchats are even stronger when you settle down in one neighborhood, have kids, get married, and have a go-to butter chicken recipe that everyone wants)

now that i am over three years out of college, i care less about the answer than i’d thought. there’s less obvious entrants into community - i am not the type of person to strike up a conversation at a bar and leave with a group of friends - but there’s also less barriers, too. now you don’t need to be neighbors who go to the same extracurricular every day to be friends, you can hang over a shared interest, opinion, or affinity for that one coffee shop on polk st.

it’s relieving.

friendships feel different, and at times, more casual than what you would feel with someone who has known you for all 25 years of your life. this reality took me a while to come to terms with: i’d constantly give up on budding friendships because the hangouts didn’t feel like home. super fair, i know.

but, as i’m learning, variety is healthy! it helps you unlearn things you haven’t been challenged on for years. it is fulfilling to lean on your girlie when work exhausts you to your core, but it’s also a special feeling to play volleyball on tuesday evenings with a group of friends who just want to play volleyball on tuesday evenings.

adulthood brings a less risky, but harder to find version of community to our lives. you could surround yourself with whoever is nearby, but your standards are higher than before. it’s more difficult to make friends, but that’s not because you’re a difficult person, it’s because you’re learning what you like to be surrounded by, and who you have the energy to show up for.

so, for many people including myself, adult friendships are a work in progress. we know, now more than ever before, that the people in our lives are there not out of convenience but out of choice. looking back, i’d tell myself that the group chats stay around. the memes and inside jokes continue. it’s still community, in the most vulnerable way and casual sense, just with a different context.