June 2026

Investing in Connecting: Friends Are Beautiful

Friends are the most beautiful thing. Thank God for friends.

I’ve been thinking a lot about what makes friendship so powerful and why we still have such inadequate language for describing it. We have an extraordinary vocabulary for romantic love, marriage, family, and even professional relationships. Friendship, by comparison, is often treated as something that simply happens alongside the “real” relationships of adult life.

But what if we paid more attention to it?

What if we thought about friendship not simply as something we have, but as something we invest in?

I want to spend some time exploring the different kinds of friendships we form over the course of a life: female friends and male friends; individual friendships and groups; mixed-gender friendships; intergenerational friendships; friendships that emerge organically and those that are created by circumstance or assigned by an institution. Some last decades. Some last a season. Some are intimate; others are expansive and social. Some are central to our lives, while others simply make a particular chapter better.

And yet, when you look at the research on friendship, the message is remarkably consistent: our relationships matter enormously to our wellbeing.

Michelle Obama talks about the importance of surrounding ourselves with people who sustain us. Oprah has spent decades talking about the transformative power of friendship. Scientific research increasingly gives us the same message in different language: connection is not ornamental to a good life. It is part of the infrastructure of one.

Which makes me wonder why friendship is so often discussed in comparison, or competition, with romantic partnership. What gets to be at the center?

I’ve been reading and thinking about books that challenge the assumption that a romantic partner has to be the central relationship of adult life. One of the things that interests me is that the examples are often people whose lives don't fit neatly into the conventional romantic script: an asexual man and a straight woman; a celibate gay Christian and a straight man; two straight men whose friendship has extraordinary emotional intimacy.

These relationships force a useful question. Why do we assume that emotional intimacy belongs primarily inside romantic partnership?

I realize that I sometimes make assumptions about people whose most important relationship isn't romantic. Perhaps we assume they are somehow unable to form a conventional partnership for any number reasons. But maybe that's precisely the assumption worth questioning.

Maybe the more interesting distinction isn't between romantic and platonic relationships at all. Maybe it is between relationships that are intimate, sustaining, reciprocal and meaningful—and those that aren't.

That shifts the question considerably.

Rather than asking, Who is your person? perhaps we should ask: What is the quality of the relationships in your life?

The quality of the connection

This is something I think about constantly.

One of my daily challenges is to find ways to make other people feel good—to make an interaction a little more generous, interesting, encouraging, or joyful than it might otherwise have been.

It may explain something about why I've always preferred education to corporations. I like environments in which the quality of the interaction matters. You teach someone something, they learn something, they teach you something back. You invest in another person, and something comes back—not necessarily immediately, and not necessarily in the same form.

That's what I mean by investing in connecting.

It's not keeping score. It's not networking. It's not accumulating relationships as social capital.

It's paying attention.

It's asking another question. Remembering something someone told you. Making room. Introducing two people who should know each other. Showing up. Being curious. Making someone laugh. Creating the conditions for another person to feel seen.

The investment is often tiny.

The return can be enormous.

What belongs at the center of a life?

And this brings me back to a question I can't quite answer.

If intimacy isn't at the center of someone's life, is there something wrong? Is that person okay?

And if intimacy is important, does it have to be concentrated in one committed partnership?

Could we make up in volume for what we lack in focus?

Or is there something fundamentally different about having one relationship at the center of your life?

Maybe the problem is the category itself.

We tend to organize relationships according to familiar categories: spouse, partner, parent, child, sibling, friend, colleague. Those categories carry assumptions about how much time we spend together, what we owe one another, how intimate we should be, and how long the relationship is supposed to last.

But real relationships are much messier.

I think about a friend of mine, Grace, and the way we might diagram the relationships in a life. If you actually mapped the connections around one person, I suspect the result would look less like a hierarchy and more like an atom: different relationships exerting different kinds of gravitational pull, sometimes moving closer, sometimes farther away, sometimes becoming more important as others recede.

Maybe the point isn't to determine which relationship belongs at the center.

Maybe the point is to understand the whole system.

More is more

I believe more is more when it comes to relationships.

More friends. More kinds of friends. More opportunities for connection. More intergenerational relationships. More people who know different versions of us.

That doesn't mean every relationship needs to be deep. Or permanent. Or equally important.

In fact, I'm increasingly convinced that one of the most freeing things about relationships is that they don't all have to be forever.

People come into our lives. Circumstances change. We move. We change jobs. We become parents. We retire. We lose touch. We reconnect. Sometimes a relationship has done exactly what it needed to do.

I find the expectation that every meaningful relationship must be permanent strangely constraining. I prefer unclassified relationships.

There's something liberating about a relationship that doesn't have to fit neatly into a category.

As one of the books I've been reading puts it, “There is freedom in the unfamiliar, when the kind of relationship you have exists outside of well-worn categories.”

And another idea from the same book has stayed with me: “There is an abundance of ways to live life well.”

Of course there is.

One model of a fulfilling adulthood is not enough to accommodate all the different scenes and character changes in the long drama of our lives.

I am a friendship freak

A friend once accused me of being a friendship freak.

I have decided to accept the diagnosis.

I am a friendship freak. Freaky friendly. I want to connect deeply, pretty much all the time.

And maybe that's another reason I'm interested in this question. My instinct is almost always to skip the small talk and go straight to the real conversation. I want to know what you think, what you're worried about, what you're excited about, what happened to you, what you're learning.

But lately I've wondered whether there is another skill worth developing.

Could I practice not connecting deeply?

Could I practice networking? Small talk? Flirting? Being friendly without immediately trying to know someone?

There is something to learn there, too.

Because investing in connecting doesn't necessarily mean turning every encounter into intimacy.

Sometimes connection is five minutes.

Sometimes it's a conversation that changes your life.

Sometimes it's a friendship that lasts fifty years.

Sometimes it's simply making another person feel a little better during an ordinary Tuesday.

Maybe that's the point.

A life well lived isn't built around one perfect relationship.

It is built through thousands of acts of connection—some deep, some fleeting, some intentional, some accidental—that shape who we become and what we carry forward.

And perhaps that is the beginning of thinking about friendship as legacy.

Not because every friendship has to last forever.

But because every meaningful connection leaves something behind.

I think this establishes the first essay in the series very nicely: friendship is the immediate topic, but Investing in Connecting is the intellectual frame.

For the subsequent essays, I'd resist repeating the “legacy” conclusion every time. Instead, we can let the series gradually build toward a broader proposition: relationships are among the things we actively create over a lifetime—and among the most important things we transmit.