Every cultural event has associated with it thinkpiece articles, this one uses Friends to discuss wrong expectation of adult friendship.
Do you think you've been given the wrong impression by media of what an adult friendship should look like?
"Friends" and the illusion of perfect adult friendships
The TV show sold us an idealized vision of these relationships. For young adults, the real thing is far harder to find.
www.vox.com
Television and movies have long given us unrealistic expectations for romantic relationships. There are rarely any perfectly timed meet-cutes or mad dashes to the airport, and the chances of an ironic misunderstanding that lead you to the love of your life are slim to none. But less attention has been devoted to how television and movies shape our perception of friendships, too, in ways that don't always reflect reality.
Modern adult friendships aren't just challenging to create and maintain — some evidence suggests they are also in decline. Twenty-two percent of millennials in a 2019 YouGov poll said they had "no friends," compared to 16 percent of Gen Xers and 9 percent of baby boomers. The reasons can be pinned on a variety of factors: Americans today lead increasingly busy lives, and as members of our friend groups grow into their careers and relationships, incomes and schedules start to vary. People move away for new jobs or to be closer to family. Distance and time become barriers in a way they weren't when everyone was young, single, and devoted to their found families.
But you'd never know that from watching television. From Friends to Living Single to Grey's Anatomy to New Girl, TV reinforces the fantasy that true friendships are and should be deeply close but require no real effort to maintain. It's a stark difference from the way we know friendships operate in our own lives — as meaningful but sometimes fleeting relationships that can eventually dissolve because we have no language, script, or social expectation for how to seriously integrate friendships into our adult lives.
As an audience, we want closure when stories end. We spend years with characters and invest in their lives. It makes sense that our journey ends as they exit the phase of life in which we met them. But over time, this accumulation of choices has trained us to associate friendships with the spaces where they initially thrive. And we don't have great models for how friendships should endure when they exist outside the realm of convenient proximity, despite the fact that in the real world, people's locations and jobs are constantly changing: The average American adult moves 11.7 times and changes jobs around 12 times in their lifetimes. Millennials in particular are lonelier than they've ever been and have less time than ever to cultivate the kinds of deep, meaningful friendships we see depicted on television.
Do you think you've been given the wrong impression by media of what an adult friendship should look like?