August 2026

Investing in Connecting: Friendship Is an Investment

“Text me when you get home.” We say it all the time. Especially to our girlfriends. As a single woman living in the city, I hear it constantly.

Except I almost never text.

I forget. Or sometimes I don't, because there is a small, stubborn part of me that interprets it as a dig: You can't get yourself home?

I'm an independent woman. Of course I can get myself home. I don't need a chaperone, an escort, a babysitter, or whatever we're calling it. What do you think happens every other night, when I'm not out with you?

I've gotten myself home every night.

And I have been known to have a bad attitude.

But every once in a while, after one of those magical nights, I remember. I'll send some version of: Home. Thanks. Fun. 'Night.

Because somewhere underneath my resistance to being looked after is something I understand perfectly well:

It's not really about whether I can get myself home.

It's about knowing someone cares whether I do.

The friendship we learn to see

That's one of the things I kept thinking about while reading Text Me When You Get Home: the spectrum between competitive and collaborative female friendship.

I know both ends intimately.

Fortunately, most of my life is spent immersed in the extraordinarily generous, grateful, graceful version.

I am genuinely in awe of my friends. They humble me. They surprise me. They make my life bigger. And sometimes I'm stunned to discover that they look to me as a model for how to live. I wouldn't have a life worth modeling without them.

Whatever joy I have in my life, whatever resilience, perspective, opportunity, or confidence I've developed, my friends are woven through all of it. That is not a sentimental observation. It is an accounting. We learn what friendship is supposed to look like.

Most of the pop-culture references in Text Me When You Get Home went over my head. I wasn't allowed to watch television as a kid, and apparently that stuck.

But what did strike me was how long the cultural trope of women as inherently competitive with one another persisted.

I knew about Dallas, Dynasty, Laverne & Shirley, and all the rest in theory. But I hadn't really considered how deeply those stories shaped the cultural imagination of female friendship.

Then came The Golden Girls, Designing Women, and Beaches. They arrived during my adolescence, when I was learning some of the harder lessons about friendship myself.

I graduated from Mean Girls Central. My teachers were the girls who betrayed you for a higher-status friend. They taught me that friendship could be a hierarchy, that popularity was a currency, and that another woman's success could come at your expense.

I was a quick study. I got out of the mean-girl business pretty quickly.

But I competed, too. Of course I did. School. Sports. Boys. Status. Attention. We absorb the systems we're in. That's why what we see matters so much.

It's harder to imagine what you cannot see. And the path we're shown is often far too narrow.

What if friendship is the foundation?

One of the things I most appreciate about Text Me When You Get Home is its insistence that there isn't only one love story in a life.

That's a deceptively radical idea.

We tend to organize adulthood around a hierarchy of relationships. Romantic partnership is supposed to be the center. Family comes next. Friendship fills in the gaps.

But what if friendship isn't the glue? What if it's the foundation?

What if the relationships that sustain us don't need to fit neatly into the categories we've inherited?

I think we need much more leeway in how we imagine a life. Convention is overrated.

There are so many ways to live well, and so many ways to love other people. Yet the models we see are still remarkably narrow.

This matters because relationships don't just provide companionship. They shape the lives we are able to live.

A friend introduces you to a new possibility. Encourages you to take a risk. Gives you a place to land. Tells you the truth. Celebrates something you aren't sure deserves celebrating. Reminds you who you are when you've temporarily forgotten.

A friend can change the trajectory of your life without ever appearing in the official story of it.

My friends are my life's work

My friends are my life's work. This has become especially clear to me during periods of transition. Moving to a new city. Changing careers. Reimagining what comes next. Navigating the ordinary upheavals of midlife alongside the extraordinary ones.

When so much around you is changing, you discover what is actually stable. For me, it is my friendships.

And what has surprised me most is how much the investment I've made in those relationships over the years has come back to me at precisely the moment I need it.

Not as a transaction. Not because I kept score. But because relationships compound.

The conversation you had twenty years ago becomes the person who calls you today. The friend you encouraged becomes the person who encourages you when you need it.

The people you showed up for show up for you. The introductions you made create communities you eventually become part of yourself.

The ordinary accumulation of attention, affection, generosity, curiosity, laughter, forgiveness, and time becomes something much larger.

This is what I mean when I say that I am rich

This is what I mean when I say that I am rich.

My friendships are my web of abundance.

They are my safety net.

They are my comfort, my joy, and my pride.

And increasingly, I think of them as something else, too: my life's work.

Not because every friendship lasts forever. Not because every relationship is equally deep. And certainly not because I have done everything right.

But because over the course of a life, we are constantly making investments in other people.

Some are small. Some are profound. Some we barely notice at the time. And some appreciate for decades.

We often talk about legacy as what we leave behind. But perhaps there is another way to think about it.

Maybe legacy is also what we build while we're here, the people we strengthen, the worlds we help create, the confidence we give away, the stories we share, the possibilities we open.

And if that's true, then friendship isn't peripheral to a meaningful life. It is one of the ways we make one.

So yes, I'll text you when I get home. Eventually.

Because I know now that the message isn't really about whether I can make it home. It's about the fact that somewhere, someone is waiting to know that I did.