This is part of Advice Week: Friendship Edition. We’ll help you make friends, leave them—and even sleep with them.
In the fall of 2020, I bought a used Kia Spectra, packed my life into a moving van, and drove about three hours north of New York City to the place I’ve lived ever since: a tiny carriage house that I rent in Athens, New York, a village nestled along the Hudson River. You could score the accompanying driving montage—arm hanging out the window and all—with Beverly Glenn-Copeland or Ryuichi Sakamoto. I took to characterizing the move with an exaggeration, to anyone who asked: “Well … I’m off to the woods.”
I grew up in Queens, went to college in Ithaca, and always wanted to move back upstate. The COVID pandemic created an imperfect opening: I was in the midst of a layoff, so relocating would cut my rent in half and give me a chance to chase a dream of being surrounded by forests and streams and mountains. Moving made sense, like a needle settling into the grooves of a vinyl record: crackling uncertainty, then a song. On the first night in my new home, I cooked a frozen DiGiorno pizza, rolled a chubby joint, and sat on my lawn as Amtrak trains whistled across the river. I had peace, and I was grateful.
Months later, as pandemic restrictions lifted and my new life came into focus, my penchant for solitude started to rub up against a society that was ready to hug, kiss, and gather again. My closest people came up from the city to visit on some weekends. I went down for plays and birthdays. But when the shows were over and my weekend guests packed their bags, my day-to-day life was hermitic. That solitude was giving way to loneliness. And now I had little excuse. I needed to make friends and build community where I lived.
In many ways, friendship is the most important project of my life. I’d spent years trying to be a more present friend, learning to navigate conflict, and relishing in the thrill of writing an evolving script with people I love. Because I’d put in so much work into forging the friendships I already had, I found it hard to set aside my ego in the pursuit of new ones. It felt as if I was betraying a life that I wasn’t entirely ready to let go of. I struggled. I’d sneak in Google searches for “how to make friends in a new place,” as if someone were looking over my shoulder.
Advice of this genre tends to feel like Ikea furniture-assembly instructions: useful in theory, frustrating in practice, translated from Swedish or something. Attend a basket-weaving workshop! Find someone who weaves the baskets in a clumsy way, like you do. Deepen the connection until those baskets are just your origin story. Twist Screw B into Slot 20. Repeat. The mechanical nature of friend-making advice is born out of necessity, though: If you want results, you have to do things (this is especially true in a rural place). But starting from square one was more daunting than I’d anticipated.
Still, I followed the familiar guidance. I picked up volunteer shifts at my county historical society, tasked by the head archivist with logging local film photographs and postcards from the late 1800s. My fellow volunteers, mostly in their 70s, passed me Hudson Valley gossip as we spoke through masks from separate tables. Although our hangouts were confined to the research library, they helped me start to feel invested in the area.
I turned to my neighbors. After some warm hellos as vaccinations rolled out, a young couple across the street started inviting me to their backyard for wine while their toddler played in the sun. When winter came, they saw me shoveling in a snowstorm from their window and texted the most beautiful question in the English language: “Hi! Do you need help getting your car out?” I was less successful with a neighbor around my age, whom I’d met after a package of his was accidentally delivered to my door. I brought it to him and we exchanged numbers, but my invitations to hang out went unanswered or were politely declined. I hope his rug is working out for him, but like advice columnist John Paul Brammer suggests: I kept it pushing.
The best tactic, I found, was the well-trodden tip to join shared-interest groups. This was difficult to swallow for someone like myself, who thinks meetups are plagued by the uncomfortable energy of a college freshman orientation. Someone I met on Instagram invited me to his weekly RuPaul’s Drag Race watch party in a nearby town. I joined Upstate Color, a BIPOC community group started by the artist Jordan Casteel, which hosts happy hours and outings. But finding these groups was only half the battle.
What a lot of this advice doesn’t prepare you for are the ways loneliness will follow you like an attendant spirit, even as you meet new people. How it tells you grand lies while you navigate the unpredictable alchemy of making friends: that you’re unwanted, incapable of being loved, on an island sequestered from the party cruise. I had to learn to accept its presence, to accept that there would be no immediate fix that could conjure a community overnight. Some days I was simply alone, off to the woods, and that was OK.
When I first thought about moving, I got on a Zoom call with a few folks I knew who already lived upstate, to suss out the idea. They lived a few hours from the town I’d eventually land on. One of them, Julia, I’d known for a while. We were former co-workers and there was a lot of admiration between us, but we hadn’t spent much quality time together. After I moved up, I got to know Julia and her partner, Steph, a lot more. We’d eat oxtail and curry goat on their deck, share notes on freelancing, and check in on each other.
As we grew closer, I realized that I’d put rigid guardrails around the kinds of friends I thought I needed, and the ways that would happen—convinced that I’d find the most comfort in a cocktail of similarities. But one of the most generous things someone can do as their life shifts into a new stage is to invite you into it. After getting engaged, Julia asked me to officiate her and Steph’s small, informal wedding ceremony on a hill overlooking the Hudson River. My version: When I finally got a primary care doctor upstate, I asked Julia to be my emergency contact.
My foundation of community is still in progress, but the bricks are settling into place. I’ve given myself over to the same unknown that led me to the people I love down the river and beyond—that magnetic pull that anchors some of my deepest friendships. I’ve sucked it up and gone to more things. I’ve tried to be kinder to myself. I like how writer María Saldana puts it: “Putting pressure on yourself to find deep connections quickly might also get in the way of you enjoying the process along the way. Realistically, finding chosen family will take time. But it will happen.”
My contribution to the advice canon for making friends follows a similar vein: Think of friendship as a tapestry. It starts with its first seams—a meeting at a party, an introduction, a spark at a concert. Sometimes you’re knitting it together, sometimes one person is working overtime, and sometimes you stop and look at what you’ve made and know that it’s time to set it down, let it breathe, or let it evolve. But the making of it is a brilliant and bespoke collaboration. And its most intricate patterns might not reveal themselves right away. Doing things isn’t enough. Taking action isn’t enough. Time has to pass—and you need to be patient.
Julia came with me to my first Upstate Color meetup a few months ago. The second time, I went by myself. I met someone who’d just moved to the area alone. I fumbled through a conversation about Star Trek. I talked to an artist about how he navigates his creative process—if our quiet surroundings help or hurt it (it depends). If he ever writes instead of paints (no, sounds awful).
Later, as I walked to my car to head back home, he waved me down:
“Hey! Hit me up sometime. I think we’d be good friends.”
