Most of the “friends” people make at work are friends out of convenience. You happen to be in the same place at the same time, doing similar work for a similar mission (or so you tell yourself), and so because you have to spend so much time together, you end up forming bonds. You learn each others’ senses of humor, what ticks, what tickles, and it gets comfortable. It’s no wonder so many office romances happen all the time.

But most of the time, all that “friendship” kind of ends once you stop working at the same company. You no longer are forced to spend time together, and you no longer have the same company or set of colleagues to complain and gossip about. Grievances are no longer shared. You move onto your next company and bond with your next set of colleagues in a similar way. So when you do meet friends at work who do remain your friends long after you no longer work at the same company, it’s a really nice feeling, a comforting one that is actually a real friendship.

Tonight, a former colleague and friend from my last company came over to see Kaia and have dinner with us. The last time I had seen her was when I was about eight months pregnant. Since then, she has since moved to Dallas for work, and so our times overlapping in the New York/New Jersey area have been almost zero since her Texas move. We talked like we had never really been apart, and it still felt good and comfortable, almost like we’d been friends our whole lives. Nothing felt awkward or forced. We’d had a few text and Zoom conversations since her move, but no in person time. I caught her up on all of Kaia’s developmental milestones and personality quirks. We shared about our dysfunctional relationships with my parents and her dad. We talked about letting go of expectations for people we can’t control. Even though she’s almost eight years younger than me, I’ve always felt like she was wise beyond her years. I’m sure it has to do with the fact that given her dad abandoned her family, as the oldest, she felt like she had to be the second mom/caregiver of the family amongst her brothers and younger sister. Everyone has their own story to share about how they got to be the way they are.

My friend even came with a gift for Kaia. My sweet baby Pookster has no idea exactly how lucky she is to have so many aunties who love her and oogle over her, near and far.

Endless books have been written about how to “make friends and influence people,” create solid, lasting relationships, and ultimately to communicate better with others. I was recently listening to a podcast where the journalist Charles Duhigg was being interviewed, and he was discussing some stories he shared in his latest book called Supercommunicators: How to Unlock the Secret Power of Connection. He talked about some personal stories, like the types of arguments he and his wife have had and how they’ve improved on their arguing as a result of techniques he talks about in this book. But the part that really got me was when he discussed the simple act of laughter. Most of the time at a superficial level, when people see others laughing, they think they’re laughing because something is funny. But the majority of the time, people actually are not laughing because something is literally funny. They’re really laughing to build a connection with another person or to in some way “match” the emotions or sentiments of the person they are with. People who can “match” emotions (and there’s various definitions/principles around this) tend to be better communicators; those who don’t do this tend to be poorer communicators.

This reminded me of a very painful dinner that I sat through about 12 years ago. My good friend, who I was maid of honor for, wanted two of her bridesmaids and me to establish better rapport. My friend was temporarily living in New York for a year, and these two bridesmaids came to visit. She arranged for all four of us to have dinner together. We all went to high school together, yet I never clicked with her other bridesmaids. In high school, I found them boring, generic, drab, opinion-less, and humorless. I’m sure they had their judgments of me, but my “DGAF” attitude was already apparent back then. But I figured — so much time had passed since then, so why not try to give them another chance?

Well, that second chance was probably one of the most painful dinners I’ve ever had to sit through. We talked about a whole lot of meaningless nothing in between periods of extremely awkward silences, and while it may have lasted an hour or two, it felt like 10 hours of torture. Every time I shared any kind of opinion or anecdote, I was met with blank stares or straight faces. The many times I told dumb jokes or laughed, I was met with silence or shy chuckles with their hands covering their mouths. They didn’t share any interesting or insightful opinion about anything; they were exactly as boring as I remembered them to be in high school. I suppose time does not always change people.

I was triggered to remember this awful dinner because of what Duhigg was trying to say: laughter can connect people, and even if you laugh out of nowhere and the person next to you gives a little chuckle, they’re in some way communicating with you and “matching” your sentiments to build a rapport with you. Back then, it was hard to properly express why their lack of laughter bothered me so much, but after listening to this podcast about this “matching” principle, it completely makes more sense to me and how to convey why this was frustrating. Laughter isn’t just some empty thing that people do; we laugh to connect with each other. And when we don’t laugh, not only are we not connecting with those around us, but well, as Chris puts it, we’re probably just boring as fuck.

When I was much younger, say during my K-12 years, “close” or “best” friends meant something much different than what they have meant in my 30s. Back in those days, close friends were those who spoke pretty much every single day, ate lunch together at school, and would hang out after school and/or during the weekends. I had a number of tumultuous relationships in my middle/high school days, one of which is with a friend who I still consider a friend today. I still remember one day, I came over to her house to hang out, and it had been a couple months since I had seen her outside of school. And she confronted me about it and said, “Do you think we’re actually still close? We’re not. You never hang out with me anymore.” I said I was there at that moment. That did not seem to help her hurt feelings.

Honestly, I can’t remember the reason we didn’t hang out for a few months. Part of it was I just didn’t make the effort. The other part of it was that during that time, I was in a romantic relationship with some idiot guy who didn’t deserve my time, and I was trying to make that work. And the other part of it was that I felt like she was just being overly difficult, and hanging out with her wasn’t as fun as before. But those are complicated teenage times when we had nothing else in our lives going on — no work, no bills to pay, no children to raise, no life goals to really hit. And thus, “closeness” cannot be defined the same anymore.

At most, I will see a friend once a month if they live in New York City. If they live somewhere else, I’m lucky to see them once a year. But that doesn’t necessarily mean we aren’t close anymore. Because we are still connected via text, calls/Zoom, and social media, we still are looped into what the other is up to. And when we do spend time together, we catch up and are comfortable as though no time has passed. And that’s really how I’ve gauged what “closeness” means at my current stage/age of life. It felt like that when my friend came on a side work trip to see me today. We spend a lot of time hanging out together, and even though she had to leave at 5:45am to catch her flight back home to San Francisco, we still stayed up late just talking about all kinds of random things. Some of those things were deep and sad, like my brother’s childhood and his passing, plus how that all informs how I want to parent now. Some were more frustrating life stage topics, like how my friend has noticed some of her child-free friends have seen her choice to have children as an inconvenience to them. But other things were just silly nothing-topics, like my peeling nails and skin on my fingertips because I was just too cheap and lazy to go to the salon to remove my gel polish. But regardless what the topic was, it just felt free and open and comfortable.

It takes a lot of time and investment to get to a stage with any person where you have this level of comfort. I’m lucky I can say that I have a small handful of friends where this feeling definitely rings true. Sure, we’ve had our good times and our bad, times when we’ve fundamentally disagreed with things we’ve done to each other or the respective person’s life choices. But at the end of the day, we all still love and respect each other regardless of how much time has passed since we last spoke or were in person together, and that’s ultimately what matters.