"Any Port In A Storm" Friendship

An under-discussed, but vital, notion of adult relationships.

A few Sundays ago, I was sitting in a diner after church and somehow, some way, I came across a random article on my phone that was written by a kid who I was decent friends with at the end of high school. He’s now a professor. Ivy League twice over, baby! Seems to have been at University of Michigan, and is now at Georgetown. (Oddly, that’s where I went to undergraduate.) I had thought about this kid maybe five or six times in the past 25 years, as in: “I wonder how he’s doing.” I had probably Googled him in that time, too, and maybe was vaguely aware he was a professor.

Anyway, in that diner, the first thought that occurred to me is something I had been considering writing for a few days/weeks: the idea of “any port in a storm” friendship. This kid, now a professor so maybe I should stop referring to him as a “kid,” and I were close, but part of the reason we were close is that around the middle of senior year, most of our mutual core friends started (a) having sex and (b) smoking weed, and while I was periodically to extensively doing (B), I wasn’t yet at (A), and I felt sometimes like I was getting squeezed out of end-of-high-school friendship and memories by these vixens. The future professor and I kinda bonded over that, and again, we were close, but obviously it didn’t last. I think we spoke maybe twice or thrice while in college, and when I emailed him last week about his article, it was the first time we had likely communicated in 23 years.

Here is the blunt truth about adult friendship for most, if not all, people: it is valued, but mostly in an abstract way. Most of adulthood is about showcasing some form of success (which might be down-shifted to “surviving” here in a second), finding a partner, defining yourself and your worldview, and having kids (although that is also decreasing, as we note with varied degrees of moral panic).