Thirty, flirty, and grocery-shopping with friends

The case for inviting companionship into your to-do list

In mid-October, my (normally stable) mother fell down the stairs and fractured both her elbows. In the weeks afterward, she could not feed or dress herself, much less remove her contacts or floss her teeth. Helping out became an all-other-hands-on-deck family affair. Not long afterward, Sam and I offered to host Thanksgiving for our collective families. Would we have done this if she had not fallen? I’d like to think so, but I’m not sure. The accident compelled us all to show up in new and somewhat intimidating ways. 

The dinner, though, was a success. Within an hour of cleaning up, we both agreed that we’d do it again. I went to bed feeling a surprising amount of both joy and revelation.

First: Do catastrophizers have more fun?! My goal was not to host a lot of table laughter but just to avoid salmonella. I had similarly low expectations when publishing my book: Surely nobody would like it, someone (??) would sue me, and I’d have to return all my money to the publisher. Was I bummed when Wolfish didn’t sell x copies or get on y or z end-of-year list? I guess, but mostly I was just thrilled many readers did get it. I think this means I’m ready to endorse Strategic Catastrophic Projection (SCP?). Super low expectations = consistent delight.

Secondly: Is it time to accept how much I like socializing while doing tasks?! As a kid, I associated “family time” on weekends with unloading firewood, elaborate cooking experiments (RIP the chicken covered in clay), and helping with various projects on my grandparents’ farms. I rolled my eyes back then, but my sister and I had a ball rolling them, together. Today, “hanging out” so often means spending money for leisure: going to a movie, going out to eat, going to drinks. I love those things, but to relegate “hanging out” only to when we are done with the labor of being a human is to miss out on a lot of giddy companionship.

My favorite relationship moments aren’t cool cocktails in cool bars, they’re feeling like I, in a we, pulled something off. The haul-ass roadtrip Sam and I took across seven states to make it to both a wedding and a funeral; the weekend we spent with his family in the San Juans helping build his step-brother’s house. Wasn’t it

Haley Nahman

who once wrote that the way to make deep friends wasn’t to go to happy hours but instead to help each other move? 

Even walking to the grocery store for an over-ambitious haul…can be fun…

Recently, a friend of mine lovingly called me out for that essay where I said my favorite vacations were writing-alongside-friends. Her point: Lol you suck at relaxing! You love to be productive! She was right that I am a little enneagram 3-wing-2 freak trying to deprogram myself from efficiency culture, but I’m also just someone who loves people and appreciates getting stuff done. Just as the delineations between work and play are murky as a freelance writer, so too do the pleasure-lines blur between 1) leisure-time socializing and 2) laboring socially. If my Montessori childhood taught me anything it was: Tasks together can be fun.

I once resisted letting friends or loved ones see these maintenance parts of my life. If a friend asked to meet me for coffee when what I really wanted was to go browse the nursery, I would not even ask if they wanted to come with me. I would go to coffee, then I would go to the nursery, alone with Google. It wasn’t until a big break-up, when suddenly I had to do all life maintenance alone, that a fellow single friend and I started inviting one another into the messy corners of our lives. We went to the grocery and Home Depot together. We cooked big pots of soup then swapped yogurt containers of leftovers. We got super close, but we also kept ourselves sane.

I’m not here to glorify domestic labor, only to say that we live in a world where we are insufficiently cared for by institutions, so we need to do a lot of caring for ourselves and one other. I get that barn-raisings are out and grocery deliveries / airport Lyfts / Taskrabbits are in, but rejecting the systemic inequity of the gig economy while deepening relationships is…good. As my friend Danielle says: We don’t get closer to one another by offering help; we get closer to one another by asking for it (and

Anne Helen Petersen

has written about just how bad we are at doing this).

“A barn raising with all the neighbors” is the title of this photograph I found free from Underwood Archives when I searched “barn raising with neighbors.”

A few hours before Thanksgiving dinner, I crossed paths with Sam in the yard. He was glowing in the sun, but we’d been orbiting each other all day, cracking jokes amidst the cleaning and cooking, sweating (emotionally, physically) then propping each other up. I was surprised to hear myself humming as we worked. This snapshot of collective labor made me think of the 1820s French Utopianist Charles Fourier, who envisioned futuristic living arrangements where lovers would work side by side in orchards, spurred on by a love of the fruit, friendly competition, and flirtation. He called this “attractive industry,” believing it would restore pleasure to labor while, with increased fruit yields, bolstering the health of the larger community. 

But the pleasures of boring-but-fun-together-work shouldn’t be limited to our romantic lives. All my relationships have gotten richer in my 30s because I know how much my friends can teach and assist me, and they know it’s a two-way street.

Rather than a holiday gift guide, I offer you a year-round list of *non-leisure-oriented things you might similarly enjoy doing beside loved ones* Chummy errand time is…now.

1. Co-harvesting persimmons (etc) in a friend’s yard

2. Co-searching for holiday gift-wrap at the reuse-craft-store 

3. Carpool date to the Chinese/Russian/Japanese/Indian/etc supermarket (adjacent to: going to Costco with the friend with the Costco card)

4. Long chatty walk to pick something up from the local Buy Nothing Group / drop something off at the post office 

5. Golden-hour walk to forage fruit via this website

6. Rotating yard-weeding parties

7. Meandering drive to pick up someone’s CSA / Craigslist find

8. Collaboratively bake cupcakes then split them up for respective family member birthdays 

9. DIY dumpling party where you cook a bunch, eat a bunch, then everyone goes home with giant freezer bags. 

10. BYO textiles for a hand-mending party 

11. Invite green-thumb friends over to drink beers and swap plant/garden advice; smart-money friends over to talk about how they use that budget app; savvy-friends over to talk about earthquake/wildfire/etc prep

12. Donate blood together then theatrically linger over the free swag and snacks

13. Sit in the auto shop waiting for a tire to be replaced, drinking bad coffee and making up stories about everyone who walks by 

14. Rent a U-Haul then collectively fill it with yard debris/basement junk at various people’s houses, before all driving it to the compost/dump HQ

Lol the endorphins on this stick-throwing Saturday.

Have you done errands/chores with your friends? Did it spark joy?

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What else?

• I wrote about why we love nemeses for The Financial Times Weekend Magazine. 

• I had fun doing this Q+A with

  Vanessa Chakour
  , about reawakening animal instinct, over at Orion!

• January Zoom class: Are you struggling to get a big project off the ground? Unsure how to find the blueprint of the story you want to tell? I’m co-teaching a two-class generative structure-based Zoom workshop from 10-1pm PST on Jan 24 and 31st with my friend Jules Ohman, a brilliant novelist and writing instructor. We’ll be talking craft techniques from both fiction and nonfiction in this supportive, hands-on class. Learn more and sign up here.

• March weekend class: I had a stellar group of writers for the winter weekend memoir intensive at the Attic Institute, and am teaching a redux March 8-9 in downtown Portland. All experience levels welcome!

• Remember summer? I’ll be on faculty this July at Summer Fishtrap, a gathering of writers in Oregon’s beautiful Wallowa County. Sign-ups open in February, but please reach out if you have questions before then. I attended Fishtrap as a participant in summer 2016, and scrawled very early pages of Wolfish while sitting on a sunny rock.

Hope you’re hanging in there. It’s been a hard fall! I am decently astrologically agnostic, but I would like to believe that Pluto now entering Aquarius for 20 years (which it last did during the French Revolution) does mean that “the collective is about to reclaim its power”! 

xxE