"Your oldest friends are carrying around versions of you your kids will never meet."

(2 minute read)

Hey Reader,
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I’m back East for August, and this week I caught up with three of my oldest friends. Because I have a one-year-old and a three-year-old, I basically told them they had to come to me. At this stage of life, "meeting up" means someone is willing to step over toy trucks, drink a beer with one hand and catch a toddler with the other.

Watching them with my boys, I realized I'd been thinking about this backwards.

I'd always wanted my friends to know my kids.

I hadn't spent much time thinking about how important it was for my kids to know my friends.

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👥 The Friend

One of the strange things about becoming a parent is that your kids mostly know one version of you.

You're the guy making breakfast, finding the missing shoe, negotiating over popsicles and saying, "Don't hit your brother," for what feels like the 400th time that day.

Your oldest friends know someone else.

Some people know the seventeen-year-old version. Mine remember me at seven.

They remember the bowl cut. The bad ideas. The house parties. The disastrous relationships. They remember the phases I swore would last forever and the dreams I was absolutely convinced were going to happen.

They also have absolutely no interest in preserving my reputation in front of my children.

You are a different person around your oldest friends

You laugh harder. You get slightly dumber. You fall into jokes that don't need explaining. For a couple of hours, a version of you comes out that doesn't get much playing time anymore.

Your kids need you to make breakfast.

Your coworkers need you to return emails.

Your oldest friends mostly need you to remember the time you. got chased out of a park in tenth grade.

Maybe that's why those afternoons feel so good.

Your oldest friends unlock parts of you that don't show up very often anymore.

And maybe your kids need to see that version of you almost as much as you do.

⚒️ The Fix

Stop treating friendship and family life like two separate worlds.

Think about the adults who were around your house growing up.

The neighbors who wandered in. Your parents' college friends. The "uncle" who wasn't actually your uncle.

Those people quietly taught you what adult friendship looked like.

Who fills that role for your family today? If you can't think of anyone, that's a problem.

Your kids shouldn’t just know the names of your oldest friends.

They should have memories of them.

🍑 The Reco

Put peach in everything. Somehow, simple pleasures need a reminder.

We are in that very short window when peaches are worth getting excited about, so use them aggressively.

Add peach to a tomato, mozzarella and basil salad. Replace the tomato with peach if you want to go all in. Put peach in iced tea. Grill it. Throw it into any summer salad. Put in on a burger.

Peaches are one of those foods that remind you seasons are still real. If you need something to get you excited about peaches, I still play this banger "Peaches" by The Presidents of the United States of America every summer.

Take advantage while you can.

Until next Monday,
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Matt Ritter
The Friendship Guy

“Friendship is the original life hack.”

🎧 Listen to The Buddy System on Audible​

⏩ Forward this to an old friend you want to reconnect with. They can join the Friendship Challenge here.