The Intimacy We Forget to Keep: What Friendship Teaches Us About Being Human
By Natalie McCarty
For the past month, I’ve been living in Arizona, sleeping in my best friends’ beds—sometimes even all piled together downstairs on couches and in Stella’s dog’s bed. I never imagined that, in my adult life, I’d stumble into a group of friends like this. Fifteen of us crowded around a table for Postino’s midday happy hour, passing around six-dollar glasses of wine and laughing so hard over inside jokes that something in me shifts on a cellular level. Like a living organism, we’ve built something small and radiant together—fragile, but undeniably alive: friendship in a time of uncertainty.
Outside our bubble, the world feels precarious. Politics is unraveling, the climate is collapsing, and the news cycle hums with dread. Many of us are only just beginning our careers, moving in with boyfriends, and starting new relationships. Some of us are focused on graduating; others are navigating the tender growing pains of living away from our hometown or parents for the first time. We go out dancing and come home to play board games, our nights oscillating between the most thrilling and the more mundane moments (however, it is always these that somehow feel the most precious).
In this moment of our lives, we’ve found what feels almost impossible: real, true, deep love and fierce friendship. Our lives are a collage of tiny moments stitched together: snapshots of youth, of becoming. These are the stories we’ll tell our future children, the ones that will make us ache for who we were and how it felt to love each other so openly. So unconditionally. So reverently.
It’s been a long time since I could say, “I’m surrounded by my closest friends.” It’s the first time since college that I’ve lived with people again—really lived, in the way that blurs the line between days and nights. Where weeks feel like a mere 24 hours. We stayed up until four in the morning, talking and laughing until the sky began to pale. We pulled all-nighters not for work, but because no one wanted to be the first to admit they were tired. We just wanted to be together, to laugh ourselves into delirium.
I’d forgotten what that felt like: the ordinary magic of shared life.
It’s strange how adulthood teaches us to ration our connections. We start treating friendship like something to be scheduled—a dinner squeezed between deadlines, a phone call postponed until things “settle down.” And in fairness, life is busy. The friends I don’t get to see often are still, and always will be, the loves of my life. But when time slips away and you start to fear that maybe it’s only the memories you have left to share, something in you retreats. You isolate.
Of course, this isn’t accidental. Society rewards the self-contained, the self-reliant. Independence becomes a kind of armor, and intimacy begins to feel like a luxury we can no longer afford.
But I’ve started to believe that the most radical thing we can do in a world that prizes individualism is to love our friends deeply. To let them in, to allow ourselves to be known.
When I was younger, friendship came easily—in dorm rooms and late-night drives, in chance meetings at coffee shops and classes shared. Connection didn’t require much effort; it existed in proximity, in possibility. But as I grew older, it became harder to find spaces where vulnerability could breathe. We drifted into careers and commitments, long-term partners, marriages, even parenthood. We learned to talk around our loneliness.
It’s a quiet tragedy of adulthood: how easily we accept a watered-down version of connection. How often do we settle for proximity when what we really crave is presence? What we crave are our real friends.
This is one of the many reasons I’m so grateful for my friends in Arizona: that no matter the miles between us, there’s never a real distance. They hold me close, a kind of chosen family stitched together by time and tenderness. I’ve always known how lucky I am to love them, but on this trip, something deepened. Holy shit. I love these people.
Friendship is not merely comfort but a mirror. It is the place where we are both reflected and revealed. It’s through our relationships that we uncover the subtler edges of who we are: our capacity for patience, tenderness, forgiveness.
To love your friends fiercely is to resist a culture that asks you to be palatable, unbothered, detached. It’s to choose depth in a world obsessed with surface-level connections.
I’ve started to think of friendship as a form of witnessing. In many ways, friendship is the vows you make to stand beside someone as they change, and to let them do the same for you. It’s the laughter that disarms you, the silence that doesn’t demand to be filled, the small things that tether you back to yourself. Friendship steadies us through the blur of growing older. It heals your wounds. It reminds us that no amount of achievement can replace the feeling of being understood.
Friendship, I’ve learned, is not something you outgrow. It’s something you return to, again and again—like a childhood home that remembers you, even when you’ve forgotten the way back.
I love you, my friends. What a joy it is to know you.
