I told people I didn’t know how to do that keep a friend.
Sure, the statement was self-deprecating, but it was also true. I don’t talk to anyone I went to high school with. I keep in touch with only one classmate. I brought no childhood friendships to adulthood.
I had friends, but they were what I called “microwave friends.” We worked together and talked as we heated up our lunch in the office microwave. I developed enough of a bond with some of those people to hang out with outside of work. But when one of us left the job, we left the relationship.
I wanted a friendship that would last. So ten years ago, completely out of character, I sent a cold email to a local blogger asking her to join an article club she was forming.
Yes, an article club – like one book clubbut one in which you read long journalism instead of novels.
The blogger replied. I went to my first meeting. And ten years later I’m still going.
It turns out that you are reading an article about, for example, what the Pope thinks about it people begging leads to the kind of discussion that quickly moves relationships past the microwave stage.
This article club was the hack I needed ensure that friendships last.
How it works
Each month, one person volunteers to choose the three articles that everyone in the group will read. We obtain our items in two ways:
Option A: Someone who has recently read an interesting piece from a newspaper or magazine introduces it to the group. We use that article as a starting point and find two other articles that complement it.
Option B: We come up with a concept that we want to discuss. For one month they were childhood memories. For another month it was the death penalty. (We have tons of them.) Those who choose articles will find stories that fit the theme.
The author (fifth from left) enjoys monthly meetings with other women in her community to discuss articles rather than books. Thanks to Pressley Frevert.
Sometimes we go off script, reading just one article if it’s particularly long, or listening to a podcast episode in addition to reading. One month even read a book. But our mainstay is the three-item slate.
This reading list will give us plenty of material to discuss over dinner, but won’t feel like homework in the weeks leading up to our meeting. I often read our articles during my children’s napa few hours before we meet.
Friendships last
When you see your friends every month for more than a decade, friendships naturally deepen.
But discussing articles unlocked a vulnerability cheat code I wasn’t expecting.
More about finding your community
Take my friendship with one member. About a year after I did, she joined our article club, and I immediately liked her: she was warm, bubbly, and had the ability to make the funniest puns I’d ever heard. Despite this, we had a microwave relationship for years.
Then we got pregnant at the same time and had our daughters within four months of each other.
We started talking more often. At first we just discussed our girls and how our older children were adjusting to life with siblings. As time went on, we got deeper: I talked about my struggle with postpartum anger. She brought up her grief over the loss of a close family member.
I think we felt safe sharing these very personal things because we had talked about so many other difficult topics through the lens of our articles.
Now we text almost every day. We talk about heavy stuff, but also about whether we should get tattoos and the hilarity of a four-year-old’s tantrum, and when a book we read gets better than the first three chapters.
And thanks to the article club, I know we’ll be talking for decades to come. Because I finally learned how to keep a friend.
