Why It's Hard to Make Great Friends in Adulthood
And how to think about asymmetries, power hierarchies, and relationship enhancing strategies.
Instead of beginning the year with cliché thoughts and research on New Year resolutions, I thought it would be more apropos to discuss friendships. How hard they can be and how to improve them.
But before we get to the main event, enjoy a few articles of mine you might have missed, where I bounce between story and psychological science…
Provoked is for playful, intelligent, creative, and discerning readers. If you enjoy this article, support the mission (be a free subscriber or get premium benefits).
Every friendship is a negotiation where both parties are lying about what they brought to trade.
The transactional barrier isn’t a regrettable side effect of shallow modern relationships; it’s the barrier. You’re constantly calculating: Did I listen to their breakup story long enough to justify three days of radio silence? Do I owe them dinner because they helped me move, or was their couch-carrying sufficient payment for that time I talked them off a career-change ledge?
This accounting never stops.
However, there are exceptions, which is why we adore them. The ones who drive two hours to bring you soup when you’re sick. Very unlike the friend who somehow makes you feel like a sociopath for not instinctively knowing their mother’s birthday three years later.
Now, the more fortified barrier isn’t the transactional element itself. It’s that we are all using different currencies and exchange rates.
When researchers at MIT analyzed friendship networks across multiple countries, they found that only about 50% of the friendships people report are reciprocal. That means when you say someone is your friend, there’s roughly a coin-flip chance they don’t consider you theirs. The kicker? In 94% of cases, people expected their friendships to be mutual. We’re systematically terrible at perceiving how others perceive us (link).
The Status Casino
Status inequality murders more friendships than betrayal. Not the obvious kind: rich person, poor person, one gets weird about dinner checks. That’s easy to spot and adjust for.
The killer is perceived status inequality. When someone views themselves as fundamentally less-than, they turn friendship into a mental game. Every interaction becomes evidence they need to analyze: Did I talk too much? Not enough? Were they actually laughing or being polite (fuck polite)? They’re so busy auditioning for the role of Your Friend that they forget to be one.
Meanwhile, the higher-status person, who may not feel high-status at all, is dealing with someone who keeps trying to pay them back for something they never charged for in the first place.
You end up with one person constantly trying to prove they deserve oxygen, and another wondering why their friend treats every acai bowl date like a referendum.
Recent longitudinal research confirms that yes, this is annoying and also, psychologically damaging. Scientists tracked 388 adolescents over a year and found that perceiving your friend as more dominant predicted increases in both depression and anxiety symptoms. The mechanism? Self-esteem gets chipped away every time you feel subordinate to someone who’s supposed to be your equal. Power imbalances in friendships, which we’ve long pretended don’t exist, have measurable mental health consequences. (link)
The Terrible Math of Low Self-Worth
People with catastrophic self-esteem don’t just struggle with friendships, they actively sabotage them using one of two strategies:
The Inflation Model: Constantly performing, over-giving, becoming indispensable. They’re available at 2am, remember every detail you’ve ever mentioned, and somehow always bring exactly what you need. They're building up credit because they’re convinced that without it, you’ll realize they’re worthless and leave. The friendship becomes their full-time job, and eventually they burn out and resent you for taking advantage of a dynamic they created and you never asked for. (See Adam Grant’s first book - here)
The Discount Model: Preemptively diminishing the other person to achieve equilibrium. If they’re a 7 and you’re a 9, they work overtime to convince themselves (and sometimes you) that you’re actually a 6. They find your flaws, magnify them, and bring them up at weird times. Not because they hate you, but because the alternative - accepting that someone they perceive as better chooses them - is psychologically unbearable.
Both strategies try to solve the same problem: “I don’t believe I’m equal to you, so I’ll manipulate the equation until the math works.” If you have never experienced this, let me tell you, it is an atrocious experience.
The Sanity Tax
Healthy friendships require one person to occasionally ask for more than they give. Not chronically because that’s parasitism. But episodically, when life gets heavy.
The insistence on perfect reciprocity at all times is neurotic.
You break your leg, your friend brings you groceries for two weeks, you cannot reciprocate because you literally cannot walk, this should be fine. The friendship doesn’t collapse because the ledger temporarily shows red. But it does collapse when someone’s so terrified of being a burden that they refuse help and then quietly resent their friend for not being there (after they explicitly said everything was fine).
Or when someone keeps tabs so meticulously that the friendship feels like a debit card with a spending alert.
The sanity tax is accepting that sometimes you carry someone, and sometimes they carry you, and if you’re constantly calculating the weight, you’re not in a friendship.
The Perception Trap
None of this exists in objective reality. It’s all happening in the funhouse mirror room of perception.
You think you’re lower status. They think THEY’RE lower status. You’re both performing superiority and inferiority simultaneously, reading everything through your respective distortion fields. You think that pause before they responded meant they were bored. They think the same pause meant you were judging them.
The outside world perceives you both completely differently than either of you perceive yourselves or each other. Your mutual friends think you’re equally matched. Your families have entirely different reads. Some rando at a party clocks you as the dominant one in the friendship; another rando clocks them.
Status in friendship isn’t a vertical hierarchy. It’s a kaleidoscope that changes pattern depending on who’s looking and when.
The obstacle is not the way. Ryan Holiday, when discussing friendships, you are sort-of-kind-of wrong (link).
When the Hierarchy Dissolves
The friendships that work are the ones that know how to temporarily demolish the scoreboard, the bank account ledger, and the endless tracking.
🔒 For the Curious
You’ve made it this far, which means you probably have been on one or both sides of the equation. Well, let me tell you a story of how this is playing out in my own life…and what you can do about it.
The best friends develop signals, pet phrases, rituals, transitions that communicate “power doesn’t exist for the next hour, and nothing you say will be held against you.”