Friend Thursdays
No plans, no pressure, just a standing invitation
Twice a week, I know exactly who I’m going to see. Every Monday and Wednesday evening, I’m at the climbing gym with the same seven or eight people. I’m closer with some, and less so with others… but they’re genuinely all people that I’m eager to see. (I’ve not yet written about this element of my routine because the task genuinely feels gargantuan given how important it is to my sense of community and belonging at so many levels. Hang tight! This is one of my favorite elements of this sweet little life I’m building.)
I never designed it this way. It’s just what happens when your hobby doubles as your community.
I’m lucky, because I know how rare that is (having never been able to find community in yoga or solidcore). One of the hardest things about growing up is finding time for your friends. Life gets busy if you’re busy living it. Calendars fill up, responsibilities pile on, and the people who don’t have a standing time slot in your week are the first ones to quietly disappear from it.
A lot of people I’ve met over the years describe some version of the same thing: friends move away, have kids, get busier, and they lose the casual hangouts they used to have when everyone lived down the street in university.
Everything becomes more of a production. If you’re seeing someone, it’s for a birthday, a networking event, some kind of occasion… rarely just the casual, unstructured time that lets a spontaneous, deeper moment of connection happen.
Which is why when my friend Sarah told me about her ritual of “Friend Thursdays,” I thought it was the most beautifully simple idea for fostering friendship I’d heard in a while.
It came out of a conversation with her therapist. She admitted something a lot of us have felt but rarely say out loud: “I don’t feel like I’m good at anything right now. Not good at my job, not a good friend, not a good daughter, because I’m spread too thin, and nothing gets my full attention.”
Her therapist asked her a simple question: “When was the last time you saw your people? They always lift your spirits.”
Sarah realized she’d been swinging between two extremes: either out with someone every single night, which left her exhausted, or a total hermit, which left her lonely. She shared how she wished there was a centralizer for all of her friends. Her therapist asked her if her friends got along with one another. They did. So her therapist asked: “Why don’t you be the centralizer?”
She suggested making a WhatsApp group with friends with the qualifier that if you texted all ten and only one showed up, you’d still be happy to get an hour with that person one-on-one. And if all ten showed up, it’d be the best night of your life. That WhatsApp thread was all the infrastructure she needed.
Sarah created the group and told everyone: I’m starting this thing called Friend Thursdays. You’re all people I want to see more regularly, and I want you to know that when you’re overwhelmed, when you need a friend, or just want a hang, Thursday is always there. Every week, there’s community. Come if you want. No worries if you can’t. There’s no obligation and no guilt.
It’s led to plenty of wonderful nights with friends, sometimes one-on-one and sometimes in groups.
One of the things she didn’t expect to be so touched by was the Thursdays she couldn’t make when a few of her friends, who wouldn’t have gathered without the group, found time together anyway. The group had begun to hold itself.
Friend Thursdays has given her an anchor for her week. She no longer needs to scatter herself across Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday nights trying to keep up with everyone. She has one sacred day. If she’s in town, she’s there - every single week. When nobody shows up, she feels the sting a little but she gets over it fast, because she knows next Thursday is already on the calendar.
My favorite part is that it doesn’t have to be a big night. One Thursday, our friend Allison was leaving town the next morning to train for a half marathon. She said she’d swing by for an hour, tops. In the end she stayed forty-five minutes, overlapping with another friend who swung by on her way home. It wasn’t a ton of time together, but Sarah remembers it as one of the fullest Thursdays. That brief connection point was all they needed.
I admire Sarah so much for this initiative. For having the courage to tell her friends, “Hey, I’d like to see you all more often.” And for creating this container for other friends as well.
A huge part of why it works is that everyone in the group already gets along (many of them are also my friends and it helps that they’re all just really lovely people). Sarah may have created the group, but it’s not just Sarah’s night. It’s a night for everyone.
And Thursday, it turns out, is the perfect night for this. Everyone’s saving their energy for the weekend, so you can show up a little tired, a little unpolished, and it’s fine. Nobody needs it to be a big night out. It just needs to be real.
My equivalent of Friend Thursdays is Monday climbing and beer (which, yes, I’ll get to writing about soon enough). In the meantime, here’s what I’d leave you with: can you plan one thing a week that you look forward to with your people? If you already have one or are thinking about one, I’d love to hear it!
Already thinking about how I can do something like this!
I love this idea!