What would happen if your friend relationships had a lot more similarities to romantic relationships? Scheduled outings, regular discussions about what is pissing you off, regular apologies, mundane/unscheduled time together, discussions about hopes and dreams, declarations of affection. Probably less physical touch...

Anyway, I feel like people think they can let friendships develop by osmosis. I don't think ANY deeply fulfilling relationship can just happen without real relationship work.

This is exactly why we built Soonly (https://soonly.com)! It's about scheduled time to connect with friends rather than relying on osmosis like you mentioned.

Cool idea! My hot take is that people can be reminded to reach out to friends, but it's the actual relationship skill-building that is the hurdle. Are you addressing that as well somehow?

Yes.

I think what everyone wants to do with all this postulating and explaining is avoid the fact that it is hard and takes time and is awkward and there's no clear metric of success. But still worth it, somehow. Like life.

>Do you feel that politically "extreme" movements are a reaction to that and actually mostly about community and community interaction?

Yes. Great writing on this from Jonathan Haidt (The Righteous Mind), Robert Putnam (Bowling Alone) and Ezra Klein (Why We're Polarized) and Vivek Murthy (Together). Haven't read these, but I've read about them. One of their main ideas is that when people lose trust in institutions and feel disconnected, they’re more likely to embrace extreme ideologies or groups that promise belonging.

This sounds the most legit to me out of any comment so far. I think there's a tendency to want to either 1.) innovate our way out of this with a novel solution, or 2.) be really passive like "this happening to me and it's hopeless." I think the way out is less profound, less complicated, and ultimately more fulfilling and efficacious than people imagine. Virtually everyone who is researching/writing in the friendship space talks about finding common interest groups, regularly occurring interactions, consistent effort (supposedly 200 hours to form a close friend), candid conversations to strengthen commitment, etc. Honestly, it's all the same stuff that a romantic relationships requires, just with a couple significant variations ;)

A helpful corollary (from writer Shasta Nelson author of "Frientimacy") is that we all understand that working out requires some amount of pain and struggle (also fun, enjoyment, accomplishment, etc...) in order to get a great bod. We would do well to expect the same experience in friendship. It's not a question of access to people, like Facebook, or even Bumble BFF would have us believe. Again from Shasta "We don't need better friends, we need better friendships."