On Making Friends & Partial Solutions🫸🫷

or, love the one you’re with

On Friday I asked whether there was any interest in me importing some of my old essays from The Art of Simple, the blog I ran from 2007-2020. Enough people said yes for me to at least test out this little idea, so this is me, officially testing it out.

I first wrote the following essay in the second half of the website’s life, but like most of the topics I wrote about there, its idea had long been taking root in my mind for years, slowly growing from a seed to a spout to a full-bloom leafy plant. Five-plus years later, I’m relieved to say that not only do I still agree with my original ruminations, but I’m on the other side of my need as witness to how well God meets heartfelt desires like this.

As with all my essays I plan to republish, I’ve edited it for clarity (because I’m a better writer now, thank goodness) and content (because some of my ideas have deepened or even changed with earned wisdom, also thank goodness).

Enjoy.

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Friendship, by Jef Leempoels (1896) #

The topic of friendship has been a common one around our house lately. We have several kids who’ve shared a desire for more—or for more like-minded—friends, and after taking off my mom hat when the kids are in bed, I pour myself a drink and confide the same thing to Kyle.

I, too, would like to have more like-minded friends. It’s a weird thing, to be a full-grown adult and confess that it’s hard to make friends. It conjures up playground emotions of vulnerability and awkwardness because it puts you in a position of need, which feels uncomfortable.

Being on the receiving end of years of emails and private messages from readers: a lot of us feel this way.

Some of you who’ve written me are in your teens and have confessed a desire to find friends who share a kindred-spirited value of people over things, quality over quantity, meaning over status.

Some of you are in your twenties, doing the career-building thing and feeling alone, or doing the young parent thing and likewise feeling alone, and overall feeling alone as you navigate some pretty big waters.

Some of you are in your thirties and forties, like me, realizing how isolating our roles can be, whether they be breadwinner or stay-at-home parent or something in-between, longing for more local support and camaraderie.

Some of you are older than me, walking ahead and confessing that it’s still hard as we get older to make friends.

Let’s just say it collectively: finding friends can be hard. But finding friends is also so very worth it.

Here’s what I’ve told my three children for years now¹: partial solutions. It’s something my therapist in Thailand taught me years ago, it’s something I’ve also been writing about for years, and I say this phrase at least once a week at home.

Life is full of partial solutions—where there’s a way to get a need met, and it might not be the ideal way, but it’s a way that still works.

Partial solutions apply to almost every area of life, from decorating our home, to getting dressed in the morning, to carving out a career for ourselves, to making dinner, to electing a politician. We can’t do the absolute ideal thing, but we can do the good-enough. And of course this is the case with friendships, too.

When I espouse the idea of partial solutions to my kids, I’m telling this to myself, too, because it’s easy for me to build a wall in order to hold on too tightly to my ideals, because when it comes to friendship, I really would love to find more kindred spirits², so I embrace my must-have list of qualities in a person in the name of holding on to my integrity.

I’d like my ideal friend to be uber-local to me (as in, lives in my neighborhood), an entrepreneurial breadwinner who gets the challenge of providing for her family both financially and maternally, a Christian—with the same theological convictions as me, please—and while we’re at it, it’d be great if she also currently lives in a fixer-upper renovation and deals with all those challenges therein. Oh, and a mom with kids the same ages as mine.

I’m unintentionally treating real human beings as caricatures of personhood instead of divinely-made souls walking through real life on earth, like me. Ridiculous, right? But when I’m feeling pouty and pitiful, I take a step back and realize that this is precisely what I’m doing: being ridiculous. (Another word for this is picky.)

Here’s what I’ve been telling my children, and therefore myself, too: Pray for and hope for close friendships. This is a good desire. But don’t be so idealistic that you’re blind to the opportunities for friendship right in front of you. The person in your life that you least expect might end up the answer to your prayer.

This looks like pursuing that person already in your life instead of waiting for someone who might not exist. It looks like looking out for who might need a friend more than you. It looks like taking the initiative to get together when you’d rather wait to be invited. It looks like keeping healthy boundaries when you feel particularly vulnerable about all this, not turning to social media for a facsimile of the real thing.

It looks like continually keeping your eyes peeled for someone who fits the bill, but it looks even more like keeping partial solutions at the forefront of your mind when you yearn for companionship. Maybe God’s already answering this prayer; you just need to recognize who it is He’s really bringing to you.

We can be each other’s kindred spirits in the most surprising ways; it doesn’t need to look how we think it should look. Very often, the path to finding a good kindred spirit is to simply reach out first to that one person you already have in mind. Ask her to coffee; ask him if he’d like to go on a walk during your lunch break. Go first and initiate, because even though it feels like you’re the only one who’d like a friend—you’re not.

Remember what the wise sage Winnie-the-Pooh once said: “You can’t stay in your corner of the Forest waiting for others to come to you. You have to go to them sometimes.”

Don’t ignore the friendship possibilities God has already put in your life in the name of waiting for that one perfect kindred spirit that may not exist. Embrace partial solutions, in this and in all of life this side of the veil.

Partial solutions is the best answer to the question of where and how to find deep, meaningful friendships.

1. The original essay noted that my oldest was almost a teenager. She’s now in her early twenties, my second-born is also a newly-minted bonafide adult, and my youngest is right in the middle of adolescence, almost with his driver’s license. I’m happy to report that the topic of this essay is still true.

2. I’m so happy to report that over the past decade God has truly met this need. He is good.