Recently, I started watching Friends for the first time. (Cut me some slack; I was -5 when it first came out.) While there are a few hiccups in twenty-first century translation—some of them hilarious, like clunky computers and competition over the one landline in the apartment, and some less so, like casual homophobia—it’s an addictive, feel-good show.
But besides being jealous of these twentysomethings’ mysteriously massive apartments in New York City, I’m jealous of the show’s very premise: the friendships.
Close friendships are a sitcom staple. A mixed-gender group does everything together, from nightlife to holidays. If they ever fight, the conflict is resolved within the show’s twenty-minute run time (like all of their problems, to be fair). There’s probably at least one mention of how they’re not just friends, they’re family.
This pattern is most obviously on display in Friends (besides the show’s title, its theme song is a litany of adulthood disappointments followed by the refrain “I’ll be there for you”).
But it’s also central to shows like How I Met Your Mother and New Girl. Both of these shows are more or less coming-of-age stories for their protagonists, albeit infused with some new quirky detail. For How I Met Your Mother, it’s the retrospective narration of a romance nine seasons in the making. For New Girl, it’s just the titular new girl’s decision to move into an apartment with a group of men and the subsequent communication issues that arise from that setup.
But though the shows do make use of their unique premises, on an episodic level, they are just romps through the lives of a tight-knit friend group. Hijinks ensue. Jokes are made and entertainment had.
I suppose, growing up on a steady diet of these shows, I assumed that adult friendships would inevitably be like this.
Yet as I struggle to form connections in college that go beyond shallow small talk, I’m not so sure everyone gets a perfect friend group of balanced personalities and witty one liners.
It doesn’t stop me from wanting one.
But it feels too late, as if everyone else has crossed the finish line into permanent, strong friendships and I am still lacing up my sneakers.
I know this is ridiculous, even without aiming for such an idealized fictional goal as the one I’ve developed watching sitcoms. Friendships, like all relationships, are not controlled by a switch. They’re not something you either have or you don’t; they’re a spectrum, from awkward acquaintances to lifelong partners. They take time, and they’re never finished evolving.
And there’s no expiration date for making new friends.
Besides, all of the shows I listed above share an inciting incident: a new person joins the established group. Rachel stumbles across the other Friends while on the run from her wedding, Robin is pulled into the antics of the How I Met Your Mother gang when she moves to New York, and Jess becomes the New Girl among an established group of guys renting an apartment.
Maybe my sitcom friend group hasn’t quite formed yet. Maybe they need one more person.