The Crucial Differences Between Community and Friendship, Explained.
I want you to find your people. But first, you have to know what you are looking for.
This is the last free piece of content for the month…… the rest will be partially paywalled.
Does it sometimes seem like everyone else is hanging out together, perhaps by a campfire, looking vibrant in the warm light of early dusk, laughing, eating a delicious meal, having meaningful conversations, and forging powerful bonds... without you?
We are constantly surrounded by aspirational images of human connectedness, from car commercials to Instagram posts to even memories of different stages of our own lives. But the truth is, most people aren’t hanging out all the time. In fact, according to American Time Use Survey data, Americans' time socializing in person declined 20% from 2003 to 2023. Also: we’re turning into homebodies: we spend an average of 99 more minutes at home every day in 2022 than in 2003.
That reality is a long way from the more connected life many of us aspire to. Many of us are still struggling with the basics of platonic adult interactions, like how well you have to know someone to ask them to hang out with. Or, how weird is it to ask a neighbor a favor? This confusion makes it hard to cultivate meaningful connections intentionally, so I am here to help you use your time and energy effectively to find your people. The How to Find Your People Club exists to help you build meaningful relationships, and doing that within a community is an extremely meaningful and practical way to build strong connections. This post will explain the difference between friendship and community. While both are very important, I’ll explain why I’m laser-focused on helping people cultivate the latter.
So, let’s hammer out some definitions. Based on my research and reporting for my book, here's what I've come up with.
What is Friendship?
Friendships are individual relationships based on direct person-to-person interaction. Developing friendships is incredibly valuable to our emotional life, happiness, and well-being. Developing close friendships is also, from a practical standpoint, quite time-intensive. Researchers estimate you need to spend 200 hours with someone for them to become a very close friend. This stat alone explains why so many close friendships form in late adolescence and young adulthood. Spending hours together at band practice, or living together all summer at a camp, hiking the Appalachian trail together, or hanging out non-stop in a college dorm or as apartment roommates are highly practical ways to put in those 200 hours. It also explains why adults have a more challenging time making new close friendships when working full time, partnered, and/or having caregiving responsibilities. You just don’t have the same kind of time. (Related:
has written an excellent essay called The Friendship Dip that outlines the unique challenges of making and keeping friendships in various stages of adulthood, which I highly recommend reading.) Because friendships are individual and time-intensive, they are also high stakes. If you have a falling out or natural parting of ways with a close friend, or they move away or die, you could be left with a huge hole in your web of social support.If we are fortunate to have a bunch of friendships and acquaintanceships with varying degrees of closeness, that’s great. But I think people often confuse what I call “friendship networks” with community, and there are important differences in how they function.
Here’s a visualization of what I call a friendship network:
When our twins were born one month before the COVID shutdowns, we were incredibly fortunate to have a wide network of people sign up to bring us food for our MealTrain for three months. At the time, I would have called this “our community,” but really, it was a random and assorted network of friends, acquaintances, and people we just kinda knew who were kind and generous during a hard time. Along with friends and family, our MealTrain included the woman we bought our house from, the PTA president of my oldest kids’ school, and an acquaintance who used to work for my Dad. The only thing this friendship network had in common was knowing me.
That’s not the same as community.
What is Community?
“Community grows out of citizens deciding to trust each other and cooperate to make this place better. Community is built not by specialized expertise, or great leadership, or improved services. It is built by great local people deciding to do something useful together.” - Peter Block
A community must have a reason for existing. A community needs a “magnet” that draws people to be a part of it. It is something shared to bring people together to form a circle of mutual connection, not just a constellation of spokes orbiting around one person. Here are some examples of what I mean by “magnets” that bring people together:
A shared value: like religious belief or political cause.
A shared activity: like playing board games, knitting, or creating community theater.
A shared identity: being a resident of a specific neighborhood, a fan of a certain college sports team, or going through a similar life experience, like becoming a parent.
A shared sense of purpose: This can sometimes be around a goal, like fundraising for a local elementary school, serving 100 meals at a soup kitchen every Friday, or cleaning up and maintaining a local park.
Some groups have many or all of these elements. But if a group has at least one of these, you are off to a great start toward finding a true community.
But that’s not everything.
Let me add a few more criteria to really bring this home.
To be a real community, not just a gathering or an informal group, it also must have the following:
Mutuality: where members help each other, and there’s give and take among the group.
Ongoing, regular connection outside singular events: not just a weekend conference or a one-off party.
IRL connection: digital tools can be great for coordinating and staying in touch, and there are wonderful online-only spaces that folks get a lot out of. But I want to push you to think about community as something that lives in the flesh.
Here’s a graphic of the most prominent communities in my life in early 2025:
These communities range in size from about 12 to hundreds of people. I don’t know every person in my bigger communities, and I certainly don’t have equal relationships with all of them. Instead, within the larger communities, I have smaller groups of people I know and seek out, who often overlap into being members of multiple communities I’m part of. For example, I know a bunch of people who live in my neighborhood AND are part of our kids’ school community. I also have people who are part of my civic pod (a group of local mom-activists) AND my synagogue.
So, if you put my friendship network and my community circles on top of each other, it would look like this:
Messy, right?
Oh, and the black dots not connected directly to me are people I may know in the community but that I wouldn’t consider a friend.
So you may be wondering, why do I need the big circles? If I have friends, isn’t that enough? Shouldn’t I just focus on making friends?
I have a lot to say about this, which I’ll be talking about in the club all year, but here are the highlights:
Community is a great way to make friends
Community is a great way to see friends you already have
Community is a great way to get to know people who are different than you, who you wouldn’t naturally gravitate to as a friend
Community is often the group that’s best poised to show up for you in a time of need
Community is a great way not to be lonely
All five of these points are important, but let me linger on the first two for a second since this post is also about friendship. Community can be a practical container to hold your friendships rather than compete with them. Most adults have probably had the experience of wanting to get together with a friend or a small group of friends, and 20 exchanges later, you’ve settled on a date six weeks in advance, and then someone still cancels an hour beforehand. In our busy lives full of logistics, it can be so much easier to say, “Hey, will I see you at the 11:30am service this week? Want to get coffee after?” And if that friend and fellow community member isn’t going, you’ll still see other people you know there.
Similarly, community can provide much-needed structure to help people cultivate adult friendships. For example, imagine you really hit it off with someone at a party or the playground. You see major friend potential. Do you say, “Well, I hope to see you around,” and then potentially never see them again, OR do you ask for her number to coordinate more hangouts? Do you have enough in common to hang out one-on-one? Does that feel too forward after one positive conversation?? How do you keep this going??? Because we don’t have great shared roadmaps right now to make 1:1 friends as adults, these are completely valid and anxiety-producing questions that may stop you from becoming friends with this person.
But if, for example, you meet this potential friend at a weekly Dungeons and Dragons group, you can skip all of those awkward next steps and say, “I really enjoyed talking to you. I look forward to seeing you next week!” And there you go.
This month, in The How to Find Your People Club, we’ll explore mapping our connections and identifying the communities we might want to invest in in our lives. Join us for more content, conversation, and support in your IRL community-building efforts.
All right dear readers, I just hit you with a lot of concepts. Do these definitions resonate? And what have your experiences been with community helping you stay connected to friends and make new ones? I’d love to hear about it in the comments.
Call out: For my book reporting I am looking for a parent who’s had some turning point and decided to majorly scale back their kids’ extracurriculars and seen an improvement in their family life overall. This could be that everything stopped during COVID, and you decided to only add back a few things instead of going full throttle when the world reopened, or it could be part of another kind of epiphany or conscious decision at some other time. If this is you, I’d love to hear your story! Message me on Substack or email me at askthedoubleshift at gmail.com
I really like this differentiation between community and friendships. It helps illustrate that you can be in community with people you disagree with or just don't mesh with.
This is such a helpful way to conceptualize the differences. And this really feels accurate as I think about my kids' school communities, neighborhood and book club.