When asked what the show was about, the showrunners of Friends said, "It's about that time of your life when your friends become your family." As a sixth grader, I looked upon this with a wistful anemoia; I couldn't wait until my best friend lived in the room next door, and my life was a revolving door of gorgeous love interests in a beautiful coffee shop. In the back of my planner, my best friend at the time and I drew a cul-de-sac map of houses and assigned each person in our friend group to one, planning out who was going to live with who when we were finally main characters on a sitcom. Looking back, the irony of drawing a seating chart for adulthood is not lost on me, nor is the charm of such blind and wide-eyed naivete.
All this to say, when freshman year of college didn't feel like Friends, I was devastated. It was a bone crushing kind of sorrow. There was no seating chart, and not enough people in my inner circle to necessitate one, anyway. There were no houses, certainly none I could afford within walking distance of campus. Sharing a bedroom was cramped and charming at best, a nuisance more often than not. The weather was always bad, and it rained so much. My Rachel Green fashion was masked by parkas and melancholia, and as it turns out, Tom Selleck does not guest star as a love interest in real life.
But I got some pretty great news last night, and when my mother and father didn't return my call, a girl I love screamed on speaker phone with me in the airport until I had to board my flight. She kept repeating I'mjustsohappyforyou, breathless and teary-eyed, and texted me again this morning to let me know that she couldn't stop smiling. I sent the baby emoji to a friend and texted, This will be arriving on your doorstep in fifteen years, and he immediately understood what I meant. I called the guy I had panic-dialed at midnight weeks before when it wasn't good news yet (just a stressful opportunity), and told him that I might've just done a thing. I could hear him smiling through the phone as he told me, "Of course you did."
I've always heard that you discover who your true friends are when your ship is sinking. Maybe this says something about me, but I learned last night that the opposite can be true, too. It's frankly pretty instinctual for humans to be kind when another is weak or vulnerable. What's miraculous and rare is finding people who feel prouder and happier when you are just proud and happy. I think the secret to it all is finding people who are better than you. Not richer or prettier, but smarter and kinder and more generous and less prone to self-destructive spirals. What Friends is about is actually transitivity of emotions -- good people finding good people to share good news with, over and over again. A shared life isn't a physical map of houses, but some intangible third space -- scheduling bakery runs on Google Calendar and wanting to go to Trader Joe's with your twin because you just need flowers to ring in the spring. Stealing mannerisms from the funniest girl I know. Contemplating burning my life down with the first college friend I ever made. Sharing straws despite your pathological fear of getting mono. Having to pinch myself every time I look at the people in your life because I'm just so in love with them all.
But of course, that's too long an answer to turn into a pithy tagline for the most successful show of all time...
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