I used to tell people I didn’t know how to 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 stay in touch with just one college classmate. I have brought no childhood friendships into adulthood.
I had friends, but they were what I called “microwave friends.” We worked together and chatted while we heated up our lunches in the office microwaves. I developed enough of a rapport with some of those people to hang out outside of work. But when one of us left the job, we left the relationship, too.
I wanted a friendship that would stick. So 10 years ago, in a wildly out-of-character move, I sent a cold email to a local blogger asking to join an articles club she was forming.
Yes, an articles club — like a book club, but one where you read long-form journalism instead of novels.
The blogger replied. I went to my first meeting. And, a decade later, I’m still going.
It turns out that reading an article about, say, how the Pope feels about people panhandling sparks the kind of discussion that quickly moves relationships beyond the microwave phase.
This articles club was the hack I needed to make friendships stick.
How it works
One person volunteers each month to choose the three articles everyone in the group will read. We source our articles in one of two ways:
Option A: Someone who recently read an interesting piece from a newspaper or magazine proposes 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 we want to discuss. One month, it was childhood memories. Another month, it was the death penalty. (We contain multitudes.) The person choosing articles finds stories that fit the theme.
Courtesy of Pressley Frevert.
We sometimes go off script, reading just one article if it’s especially long, or listening to a podcast episode in addition to reading. One month, we even read a book. But our mainstay is the three-article slate.
This reading list gives us enough material to discuss over dinner but doesn’t feel like homework in the weeks leading up to our gathering. I often read our articles during my kids’ nap, a few hours before we get together.
Making friendships stick
Seeing your friends every month for more than a decade naturally helps friendships deepen.
But discussing articles unlocked a vulnerability cheat code I wasn’t expecting.
More on finding your community
Take my friendship with one member. She joined our articles club about a year after I did, and I liked her instantly: She was warm, bubbly, and possessed the ability to make the funniest puns I’d ever heard. Despite that, we had a microwave relationship for years.
Then we got pregnant at the same time, giving birth to our daughters within four months of each other.
We started talking more often. At first, we only discussed our girls and how our older kids were adjusting to life with siblings. As time went on, we got deeper: I mentioned my struggle with postpartum rage. She brought up her grief over losing a close family member.
I think we felt safe sharing these very personal things because we’d talked about so many other hard topics through the lens of our articles.
Now we text almost every day. We talk about heavy things, but also about whether we should get tattoos and the hilarity of a four-year-old’s tantrum, and if a book one of us read gets better past the first three chapters.
And thanks to the articles club, I know we’ll still be talking for decades to come. Because I’ve finally learned how to keep a friend.
