Friends and the illusion of perfect adult friendships

THE friendships of Friends are something of a marvel. Six vastly different people in their young adulthood with disparate wants, goals, professions, and relationships all closely orbit one another (and a single coffee shop). Whenever they need each other, there's always someone available to help or comfort them. Whether it's Monica letting Rachel move into her apartment at the series' beginning, or Phoebe rushing Ross to the airport to try to win Rachel back at the series' end, the tightly knit bonds of their lives are so interwoven that they experience all of their milestone moments together.

But the cruel lie of Friends, and so many shows like it, is that in real life, friendships often don't operate like that at all. Television and movies have long given us unrealistic expectations for romantic relationships. There are rarely any perfectly timed meet-cutes or mad dashes to the airport, and the chances of an ironic misunderstanding that lead you to the love of your life are slim to none. But less attention has been devoted to how television and movies shape our perception of friendships.

Modern adult friendships aren't just challenging to create and maintain - some evidence suggests they are also in decline. Twenty-two per cent of millennials in a 2019 YouGov poll said they had "no friends", compared to 16 per cent of Gen Xers and 9 per cent of baby boomers. The reasons can be pinned on a variety of factors: we lead increasingly busy lives, and as members of our friend groups grow into their careers and relationships, incomes and schedules start to vary. People move away for new jobs or to be closer to family. Distance and time become barriers in a way they weren't when everyone was young, single, and devoted to their found families.

But you'd never know that from watching TV. From Friends to Grey's Anatomy, TV reinforces the fantasy that true friendships are and should be deeply close but require no real effort to maintain. It's a stark difference from the way we know friendships operate in our own lives - as meaningful but sometimes fleeting relationships that can eventually dissolve because we have no language, script, or social expectation for how to seriously integrate friendships into our adult lives.

When Grey's Anatomy's Cristina Yang (Sandra Oh) anointed Meredith Grey (Ellen Pompeo) her "person," she originally meant it literally - she'd put Meredith's name down as her emergency contact for a planned abortion procedure. Still in its early seasons, the show had found a way to signify the depth of their budding platonic romance. Cristina didn't need to say much; Meredith understood her intuitively. The scene was the basis of their decade-long relationship and the seed that planted a whole new lexicon for talking about female friendship.

But Meredith and Cristina's relationship was one crafted in a writers' room. Real friendships are rife with conflict, separations, jealousies, and reconciliations. They are relationships like any other, stretching through their growing pains and sometimes snapping from the stress of ongoing tension. But none of that ever seems to make it to a TV screen.

TV friendships, for example, rarely depict friendships that survive big life changes. In that world, jobs, families, and children are always given more value than the friendships its characters have been building for years. Have you noticed how many TV shows about friendship end with everyone leaving a central, grounding location? The Friends finale had the gang say goodbye to Monica's purple apartment. Even workplace comedies such as The Office and Parks and Recreation end with their characters moving on from the jobs that brought them all together in the first place.

And as an audience, we want closure. We spend years with characters and invest in their lives. It makes sense that our journey ends as they exit the phase of life in which we met them. But over time, this accumulation of choices has trained us to associate friendships with the spaces where they initially thrive.

And we don't have great models for how friendships should endure when they exist outside the realm of convenient proximity, despite the fact that in the real world, people's locations and jobs are constantly changing. Millennials in particular are lonelier than they've ever been.

But in shows like Friends, the characters have no significant relationships outside of the designated group, and when they do, those people are either presented as a threat to the established collective or are eventually subsumed by it.

Workplace comedies are especially guilty of this. In The Office, professional and private boundaries quickly blur. In both Parks and Rec and Brooklyn Nine-Nine, the main characters get married in the workplace itself because all of the people important to them are already there.

In contrast, for dramas like Scandal and How To Get Away With Murder, the chief complaint becomes that the main characters have no friends at all, only colleagues they try to keep at arm's length. Frustrating as that is, in a way it's almost a truer, more honest depiction of how friendships tend to operate in our modern, hyperconnected lives.

The way TV depicts friendship has progressed in some ways. Female friendships especially have shifted in the last decade in largely positive ways. We've come a long way from the catfighting in films such as Mean Girls to the wonderful, supportive vibrance evident in movies like Bridesmaids. And while the new visibility of friendship in media is a refreshing change from its usual focus on heterosexual romantic relationships, pop culture has sometimes swung too far in the other direction: Now, intensely romantic but platonic friendships must fulfil all the emotional needs that should rightfully be spread across multiple relationships.

Cult hit sitcom Broad City is a classic example of a sincerely loving friendship that borders on toxic codependency. Yet disagreements and miscommunications are quickly resolved and very little time is allotted to working through the disloyalties, real or imagined, that have infected the friendship.

Perhaps what viewers really want is for the friendship dynamics of our favourite TV characters to never really change as they do in our real lives. We want them to stay frozen in that inexplicably spacious purple apartment in '90s New York City.

If only our own friendships could be so pat. VOX