The other week, I was reading Jennifer Senior’s article “It’s Your Friends Who Break Your Heart,” and thinking about friendships past and present. Moving to a new city brings with it the opportunities to make new friends; but, it’s also rife with loneliness at the friends left behind. Throughout my life, most of the times I’ve moved have also been in sync with a number of other people moving. College in Holland, Michigan, followed by grad school in Nebraska and Tennessee all brought with them a cohort of students starting out. We were in it together. Even starting work in Missouri and Arkansas was in conjunction with a wave of new hires at both Washington University and Hendrix College so there was a group of us who were all newly arrived. I should also say that those previous moves were before I had kids and when we moved to Arkansas, Ruthann and I were newly married. Even if a global pandemic hadn’t descended soon after our move to Boston, it’s much harder to make friends at this point in life.

While I was thinking about friendship though, it reminded me of the theory of play. While mentoring a student’s independent study on games and interactive fiction, we read a book called Man, Play, and Games that defined play as being:

1. Free: in which playing is not obligatory; if it were, it would at once lose its attractive and joyous quality as diversion;
2. Separate: circumscribed within limits of space and time, defined and fixed in advance;
3. Uncertain: the course of which cannot be determined, nor the results attained beforehand, and some latitude for innovations being left to the player’s initiative;
4. Unproductive: creating neither goods, nor wealth, nor new elements of any kind; and, except for the exchange or property among the players, ending in a situation identical to that prevailing at the beginning of the game;
5. Governed by rules: under conventions that suspend ordinary laws, and for the moment establish new legislation, which along counts;
6. Make-believe: accompanied by a special awareness of a second reality or of a free unreality, as against real life.

These components of play resonated with me in regard to friendship. Friendship is free, separate, uncertain, unproductive (interpreting as non-transactional), and has rules. One could argue whether or not friendship is make-believe. I’ll say it’s not make-believe, but if you feel strongly about it, then send me an email.

So what does friendship mean to you? Have you reevaluated your friendships over the course of Covid-19?