make more pointy friends

let your friendships breathe

I refer to friendships as “holistic” or “pointy.” It’s a simplified way to categorize complex relationships, but for the sake of brevity, go along with it. These ideas are also not confined to one-on-one friends, they can be extrapolated to groups.

A holistic friend seeks to understand you as a person above all else (hobbies, career, etc.); nothing is off-topic. The closest ones tend to evolve into human encyclopedias and become experts on you.

A pointy friendship, on the other hand, is when someone primarily connects with a specific part(s) of you.

In today’s media, we’ve emphasized building a community of holistic friendships. It’s no surprise — we seek out connections to fulfil our desire to be seen. Holistic friendships satisfy that to an all-encompassing degree. We want to feel like our friends love and care about us for all of our flaws and interests; to validate and accept us for who we are.

This puts “pointy friendships” into a tough spot.

If they aren’t a ride or die, then are they really your friend?

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7 months ago, I moved to nyc, fresh out of college and figuring out who I was without the label of a student. I dove into idle curiosities and began sprouting branches of identities at an exponential rate. They didn’t always relate to each other, so it became harder to package myself into a neat box and explain who I was in a few short sentences.

Throughout my life, I viewed “true” friendships as all or nothing. If you were going to become my friend, you had to get to know every part of me. The pressure of wanting to strip my layers bare to every person who could become a bestie created unmet expectations and one-sided dissatisfaction.

It can take months and years to cultivate holistic friendships. For some, it will happen. We will grow together and support each other through struggles and successes. They will get to dissect those different layers and become the people in my life who know me unabashedly and fully.

As I grow up, though, life gets busy, and I can’t give everything to every friendship I encounter. And that’s fine, it doesn’t cheapen the connection, it’s just a different type. Not every friendship needs to become holistic — believing that they must is what’s holding us back.

I’m still discovering these branches of identities and looking for ways to tie myself to them. I want to invite a variety of people into my life, regardless of whether they become holistic friendships or not. There’s joy in noticing the love someone can bring, even if they don’t care to know everything about you.

Here's an example: I am hosting a pop-up bakery in one month. I will bake and design everything, from the menu cards to the croissants.

My holistic friends know of this sudden interest in baking and event planning. However, they understand this passion in the context of me rather than the craft itself.

They indulge me in looking at photos of pastries because they understand that this is a part of discovering my sense of person and pursuit of curiosity. I could replace those hobbies with anything, and these friends would be equally supportive.

I need this type of friendship, but I also crave someone who can meet me at an obsessively detailed level. A fellow baker who also spends hours practicing different types of laminated dough and reading about the history of danishes (fun fact: they are not Danish — they’re from Vienna!). Someone who wants to debate the finances of hosting an event and how to mass prep hundreds of pastries in a small nyc apartment.

I want to connect with people for all the different sides of me. But I limit myself if I expect this obsessive baker to intensely care about my philosophy on friendships, my New Zealand trip content creation, or the dynamics in which my family operates. They could, but it’s not a pressure I need to put on them.

This is not to say that I can be friends with anyone who shares an interest. I hold a core standard for all of my friends — they must be kind, curious, and open. Though the way they express these traits can be arbitrary and unique in each friendship.

I find that this makes life exciting. It pushes me to connect with people who don’t typically fit the perfect friendship mold. They don’t need to be 100% compatible. I get the freedom to test out connections that tangentially explore a side of me that I’m still developing.

I believe that a mix of holistic and pointy friendships is essential to forming a happy and healthy community, especially in your early 20s or if you are multi-passionate. There’s no need to value one type of friendship over another.

The double diamond in design: I feel like I’m on the discovery side of the triangle. I’m exploring many side interests and pairing them with people at a rapid pace. In a few years, I expect I will converge my interests and friendships, then re-diverge to explore those defined niches (but who knows!).

I will caveat my statements with an acknowledgment that my sentiments come from a place of privilege. My core need to be loved and accepted as a person is being satisfied. It’s easier to look for pointy friends when you have holistic ones. Things can change though, and perhaps my feelings and priorities will evolve at any moment.

But I urge you not to ignore the beauty that pointy friendships can bring to your life. They give you an opportunity to unlock another part of you without restriction or pressure. It’s common for these to transform into holistic friends, but don’t hold onto that expectation. Instead, focus on what they already bring to your life and what makes them a joy to be around.

It’s ok if that pottery friend doesn’t give a flying f about your relationship troubles. Do you like making pottery with them? Do they care about your pottery? Do they support you in your exploration of pottery? If the answer is yes, then great, you have a pottery friend. Perhaps one day, they’ll confide in you about their relationship, but what’s the joy in forcing that? You can be perfectly content seeing each other to just talk and make pottery together. That is still a friendship.

I will continue to nurture my holistic friendships and tie them into the different parts of me. I will also challenge myself to become more open to the definition of friendship. I want to embrace the concept of pointy friends and appreciate the critical parts they play in forming a satisfying life.

I want to stop forcing my holistic expectations and let these new friendships breathe to become what they’re meant to be. I hope they slowly build on top of themselves and eventually reflect a larger picture of who I am.

I am constantly changing, constantly interested in new avenues, and quite difficult to constrain into just one box — so why shouldn’t my friendships reflect the same?