I’ve been writing this Living Single blog here at Psychology Today since 2008. That’s more than a decade, and in all that time, one of the true joys has been the lively and insightful discussions in the comments sections. Some of the people who comment have contributed so consistently and with such intelligence that I feel like I know them. A few, I actually do know, because I have gotten to meet them in person. There have also been some commenters whose perspectives were so important, I invited them to write guest posts so their wisdom would reach more people. I’ve learned a lot from the comments section, and I know others have, too.

Lately, though, the conversations have been soiled by people posting hateful, ignorant, racist, sexist, anti-immigrant screeds. I delete them as soon as I see them, of course, but I don’t learn about all of them instantly; by the time I get to them, some people have already read them and been hurt by them.

The trolls are persistent. One person came up with a snide comment about single women that he has posted over and over and over and over again. I mark it as spam every time, then delete it, but he just doesn’t stop. Another found a misleading factoid that he picked out of a large literature that I reviewed in detail. He, too, continued to post it again and again, no matter how many times I pointed him to the extensive review that included his one preferred statistic.

In a previous blog post, I mentioned my favorite article from The Friendship Files, the wonderful new series over at The Atlantic. The article was about several dozen women who have a decades-long friendship that all started from their exchanges in the comments section of the Jezebel blog. But even some of them have become disillusioned with comments sections. As one of them noted, “it’s just horrible people being horrible.” At this Living Single blog, the comments are not uniformly horrible, even now. Some continue to be enlightening and civil, which makes the need to close down the comments all the more disappointing.

To figure out whether I really wanted to get rid of comments, I looked into other sites that have done so, or considered it. When The Atlantic closed down its comments section in 2018, the editor, Jeffrey Goldberg, said:

“Over the years, robust conversation in The Atlantic comments section has too often been hijacked by people who traffic in snark and ad hominem attacks and even racism, misogyny, homophobia, and anti-Muslim and anti-Jewish invective.”

NPR got rid of comments years ago, in 2016. A blog post discussing the decision offered several reasons, besides the viciousness of many of the comments:

“In July, NPR.org recorded nearly 33 million unique users, and 491,000 comments. But those comments came from just 19,400 commenters, Montgomery said. That's 0.06 percent of users who are commenting…

“…a Google estimate suggested that the commenters were 83 percent male, while overall NPR.org users were just 52 percent male.”

Women and people of color are favorite targets of abusive commenters, as Michelle Goldberg noted in “Feminist writers are so besieged by online abuse that some have begun to retire”:

“Women, urged to tell their stories, are being ferociously punished when they do. Some — particularly women who have the audacity to criticize sexism in the video-game world — have been driven from their homes or forced to cancel public appearances. Fake ads soliciting rough sex have been placed in their names.” 

That’s all the convincing I needed. So, goodbye and thank-you to everyone who has contributed constructively to the Living Single comments section. I hope to see you in another online space, where discourse about single life is more civil.

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Comments sections on other sites have been closing down. Now this one is, too.

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Living Single

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Comments posted to this blog have become too cruel. Before I have a chance to delete them, people read them and are hurt by them. I will miss the commenters who were constructive.

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“With little cultural celebration or even recognition, friendships have emerged as the essential twenty-first-century relationship. They are, as Liz Spencer and Ray Pahl said in the subtitle of their book, Rethinking Friendship, our Hidden Solidarities Today.”

That’s what I said, not that long ago, when I published How We Live Now: Redefining Home and Family in the 21st Century. (See the longer excerpt at the end of this post for an explanation of why friendship is the key relationship of our time.) Now, just a few years later, things are changing in heartening ways. Friendship is starting to get the recognition and celebration it deserves.

You can see it in popular culture, in the themes of the latest movies and TV shows. In memoirs and personal essays, grown-ups are pouring out their hearts in tribute to their friends. Or they are sharing the scorching pain of losing a friend. Social scientists haven’t quite caught up; if you skim the titles of scholarly papers about friendship, you might think that friends are just for kids, and scholars of adult relationships still focus overwhelmingly on romantic relationships. But even some of them are starting to see the light.

My favorite indication that friendship may finally be getting its due is “The Friendship Files,” Julie Beck’s ongoing series of in-depth interviews with pairs and groups of remarkable friends, published by the prestigious Atlantic magazine. When she introduced “The Friendship Files” in February 2019, Beck described it as:

“…a weekly conversation between me and two or more friends, talking about the history and significance of their relationship – how they met, the way their friendship evolved over the years, what they mean to one another, that time one of them borrowed a sweatshirt and didn’t give it back for 20 years, and so on.”

Beck recognized that romantic partners have been getting all the attention and respect and celebration, and she sees The Friendship Files as “a corrective to that” and a reminder that friendships “shape and anchor our lives.”

Even though The Friendship Files has only been around for a few months, Julie Beck has already introduced us to a diverse and fascinating collection of friends. They include a group of 14 Vietnam vets who have been enjoying reunions for decades; two women from the Midwest who first connected when one took over the other’s internship at the United Nations; an intergenerational, different-gender friendship forged from a competition on a British baking show; two women who were raised in the Mormon faith and bonded as they left it; co-writers of some of the iconic Sesame Street songs; two young women who are co-pastors at a Lutheran church in Simi Valley, California; two men whose friendship was forged in the days of LGBTQ activism in the 1970s; a group of parents whose kids have all been diagnosed with the same rare disease; and many more.

I think my favorite is the one about a group of about 25 women who met online about a decade ago in the comments section of the Jezebel blog, then moved to other online forums, then starting meeting in person. They’ve enjoyed some amazing vacations. Now they have a Facebook group where someone starts a new thread every day.

Stories of friendship offer so much potential. They don’t devolve into hackneyed narratives, such as the meet-cute genre of romantic relationships. They aren’t limited to just two partners, as most stories of couples are. They are less constrained by age differences. Friends also seem to have more autonomy; other people are less inclined to butt in and try to steer them toward or away from one another. Friends don’t feel the need to ditch an old friend when a new one comes along. Friendships can last for decades or a lifetime, even surviving during periods of sparse contact.

About her experiences writing The Friendship Files, Julie Beck said:

“People are at their most generous, their funniest, and their most fascinating when talking with and about their friends. Doing these interviews has been one of the greatest joys of my career so far, and I can’t wait to do more.”

And I can’t wait to read more, and to share The Friendship Files far and wide. My hope is that this feature will eventually rival or maybe even surpass the popularity of the esteemed Modern Love column at the New York Times. And I hope it will inspire other publications to create their own ongoing tributes to friendship in their own way.

Here’s that excerpt from How We Live Now, explaining why friendship is the key relationship of the 21st century:

The Friendship Model of Twenty-First-Century Relationships

An ideology of marriage and coupling that is celebrated in popular culture is intensive coupling. Couples who invest in it really do see each other as The One.

They look to each other for companionship, intimacy, caring, friendship, advice, the sharing of the tasks and finances of household and family, and just about everything else. They are the repositories for each other’s hopes and dreams. They are each other’s soulmates and sole mates.

A friendship model is about the ones instead of The One. A friendship relationship is usually specialized rather than comprehensive. We can have friends who are great for socializing, others who feed our passion for sports, some who are always there in a pinch, and a few who always know what to say and how to listen. Ideally, friends are not envious of the other friends in our lives; they know that friendship is not supposed to be possessive.

As young adults step into their first marriages at older and older ages (or not at all), as the rate of divorce remains high, and as women continue to outlive men, more and more Americans are finding that they cannot draw a spouse in the center of their social circles—they don’t have one. As more and more individuals live their entire adult lives without ever raising kids, they are finding other people to be there for them in later life—and earlier in their life, too. As family size continues to dwindle, individuals are growing up with fewer siblings—if any. That, too, changes the potential look of the social convoys that accompany contemporary Americans over the course of their lives.

With little cultural celebration or even recognition, friendships have emerged as the essential twenty-first-century relationship. They are, as Liz Spencer and Ray Pahl said in the subtitle of their book, Rethinking Friendship, our Hidden Solidarities Today. National surveys of Americans ranging in age from twenty-five to seventy-four have shown that adults have an average of ten people they see or talk to at least once a week and a few more online-only friends.

The values exemplified by friendship also grew ascendant, as they are the values of modern life. As essayist William Deresiewicz noted:

Modernity believes in equality, and friendships, unlike traditional relationships, are egalitarian. Modernity believes in individualism. Friendships serve no public purpose and exist independent of all other bonds. Modernity believes in choice. Friendships, unlike blood ties, are elective; indeed, the rise of friendship coincided with the shift away from arranged marriage. Modernity believes in self-expression. Friends, because we choose them, give us back an image of ourselves. Modernity believes in freedom. Even modern marriage entails contractual obligations, but friendship involves no fixed commitments. The modern temper runs toward unrestricted fluidity and flexibility, the endless play of possibility, and so is perfectly suited to the informal, improvisational nature of friendship. We can be friends with whomever we want, however we want, for as long as we want. (Emphasis is mine.)

We do not have quite as much free choice in friendship as Deresiewicz suggested. We cannot select friends the way we choose T-shirts—the people we want as friends have to want us back (even on Facebook). He was right, though, that friends become a part of our lives in ways that are different than for biological or adoptive family members or the in-laws who get added to our networks not because we invited them directly but as familial plus-ones. Friends like each other; they want to hear from each other and see each other just because the mere presence of friends is so pleasurable. It is that fondness that is the beating heart of friendship.

[End of excerpt]

I want to share one more excerpt, this one from Singled Out. It is the opening section of the last chapter in the book, “The Way We Could Be.”

In 1999, the Chicago Tribune began printing an occasional series on relationships that continued for years. The relationship partners who were interviewed described how they met, what they valued about each other, and what sealed the relationship. They said the predictable things: “We fell in love.” “We are planning a future together.” “We use the exact same expressions, sighs, and body language without realizing it, often at the same time.” Many experts were consulted. Some of their observations were predictable, too. “They [the partners] are memory banks for each other,” one of them said.  Not all parts of the series were about relationships that lasted. Break-ups were described, too. Several people told the reporter that they continued to dream about their partner for years after they split.

            In other words, it was just the kind of series that qualifies as utterly ordinary. Except for one thing. The relationships were friendships.

            Friendship is rarely taken quite that seriously. It should be.

Finally, for more about friendship in the lives of single people, check out this collection.

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“The Friendship Files” is a weekly gift to people who care about friends

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A new and ongoing series of stories about friendships shows us why this relationship is so significant.

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