Daria Bignardi: How do we choose friends?

by time news

This article is published in issue 16 of Vanity Fair on newsstands until 16 April 2024.

The thirty-year-old writer Nicola H. Cosentino reported on Lucy. On culture that his girlfriend downloaded a dating app to make new friends. The app is called Hey! VINEYARDhas existed for eight years and is, according to the official slogan, “Tinder for friends”. There seems to be a lot of demand because, especially between thirty and fifty year olds, too busy with work and family, making new friends would be very difficult. Especially for those who have moved from the place where they attended school to another, the topic of “adult” friendship is a source of frustration and shortcomings. Cosentino quotes a video in which Michela Murgia said: «The friends you make between the ages of sixteen and twenty have a specialty that will be unrepeatable in life. You will have other friends, even very qualified ones, but someone who was your witness when you could still be everything… That doesn’t happen again.” And a post in which Teresa Ciabatti wrote: «At twenty I was furious, immoderate, I tried to become everyone’s friend under the illusion that the attention of many would protect me (from loneliness, from sadness). Then I started choosing the right people for me. And then the calm didn’t arrive, the fun arrived. It takes time to choose friends.”

Cosentino wonders who is right between the two. I too suffered from loneliness for at least twenty years, trying to survive too much work combined with family burdens. Then, miraculously, the children grew up, the job settled down, and I felt like a girl again: curious and open to new encounters, subject to love at first sight. Over the past few years I have gained at least five great new friends. But I remember that at the time of the first lockdown I felt the profound need to reunite, at least virtually, with very old friends, I don’t know why. Just as I learned that in the worst crises you often help more “whoever passes by at that moment rather than a family member or close friend”. I believe that both Murgia and Ciabatti were right, and that in friendship, not in love or war, everything is fair.

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