There’s a scene early in one of my favorite movies, Fight Club, where Ed Norton as The Narrator delivers a monologue on the misery of a life spent traveling.
You know the one:
Everywhere I travel, tiny life. Single-serving sugar, single-serving cream, single pat of butter. The microwave Cordon Bleu hobby kit. Shampoo-conditioner combos, sample-packaged mouthwash, tiny bars of soap. The people I meet on each flight? They’re single-serving friends. Between takeoff and landing we have our time together, but that’s all we get.
Shortly after, he “meets” Tyler Durden on one of his flights and after a brief conversation, he says, “Tyler, you are by far the most interesting single-serving friend I’ve ever met…”
And the rest of the movie is about their “relationship” and the forming of Fight Club and masculinity and consumerism and all the things that make it a great novel and film.
BUT… I want to focus on the single-serving friend thing.
Because one, it is clever, like they acknowledge in the scene, and two, I didn’t understand how clever it was when Fight Club came out because I was only in college.
Back then, the very concept of single-serving friends made no sense to me. I had, like many of you, a bunch of friends in my 20s: my high school buddies, my college dorm buddies, my fraternity brothers, the guys I played pick-up hoops with, the guys we drank with, work friends, guys who just lived close by.
In college and throughout most of my twenties, other than my high school friends, these groups were largely intermixed. Work friends came to pick-up hoops and they met some college buddies and they became friends and on and on…
Then you get older and married and have kids and things change.
All of a sudden, these groups NEVER meet. They’re all siloed off doing their own things in their own dad universes with their own wives and kids and new friends who are the parents of their kid’s friends.
It’s a wild thing.
You go from having a ton of friends to having a ton of friends on different group text chains and just a few you see on a regular basis.
In their place, you have… wait for it… single-serving friends.
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These are guys that perform specific functions in your adult male life and you’re ONLY friends for that reason. And it’s perfectly fine. In fact, it’s better than perfectly fine. It’s awesome. Most guys I know have no problem with this at all.
How do I know this?
Because although you never, ever discuss boundaries or your relationship, you know exactly where you each stand and it goes something like this:
“We’re friends because of this one thing, and while we do this one thing, we’ll talk and text and laugh and have a good time, but outside of this one thing, we’re good. No need to cross over. No need to grab a coffee or dinner with our wives or catch a game together. Our friendship is based on this one thing and we’re both content with that.”
Example: Dads coaching youth sports.
I’ve coached probably twenty total youth seasons across a half-dozen sports for my son and daughter. After a few seasons, you usually team up with a coach you get along with (and whose kid gets along with your kid) and you do this season-over-season.
Here’s a fact: I once coached four consecutive seasons with a dad and we never once spoke off of the soccer field. We joked while we had practice. We had fun at games. We’d text random memes about soccer or dumb things about the one athlete we both had an odd fandom for growing up (Kirby Puckett), but that was it. He wore sunglasses every day. I don’t think I’ve ever even seen his eyes. I don’t even remember his last name.
He’s in my phone as:
First Name: Matt
Last Name: Soccer Coach.
I probably spent 100 hours with this guy. Mostly enjoyable. I knew about his wife and kids and sports career and the teams and movies he liked and then we went our separate ways.
When the season would end, we’d say, “See ‘ya next season.”
And we meant it. We never spoke between seasons.
Then four months would pass and he’d text: “Wanna run it back?” and I’d write “Word”. And off we’d go.
In a way, it was a perfect dude relationship.
It was built around one thing. No more. No less. No drama.
I’ve had friends that I’ve swum with on the same team, three days a week, for years now. I see them Tuesday and Thursday nights and Sunday mornings. Sometimes in the middle at random practices.
I know enough about them: family stuff, races they’ve done, teams they’re into, other hobbies, etc…
But I don’t think I’d recognize any of these guys in normal clothes. 98% percent of our time together we’re neck deep in a swimming lane with goggles on.
We’ll hang out at swim meets and that’s it.
Again, it’s almost as perfect as it gets.
Ditto for the dudes I’ve played pick-up hoops with over the years.
You learn a lot about a guy when you play basketball with them week-after-week for years. There’s plenty of time to shoot the shit and talk about sports or life or whatever.
But when the run is over, so is the conversation – and it’s all good because every dude at that game already has his own friend group like we talked about in the beginning: high school friends, college friends, neighborhood friends, etc…
What that guy who drains an insane amount of threes on your team didn’t have was enough guys to play hoops with. That’s where you come in for him. And that’s where he comes in for you. And it’s a glorious dude thing.
Single serving friends. What a concept.
Thanks, Fight Club.
Shout out to all the single serving friends out there.
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Jon Finkel
Editor-in-Chief, Midlife Male
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