We’re Finally Discovering the Joy of the ‘Slow Cooker’ Friendship
Maybe the best kinds friends are the ones you see a few times a year
My best friend visited me the other day for the first time in eight months. At my door, we squealed and hugged each other for two straight minutes in a Pfizer-aided joy. Then we proceeded to spend the whole day slowly catching up, with no pressure or performance, ricocheting off one another’s expansive realizations of the last year. It felt amazing — but also like we’d seen each other yesterday.
One of the weird benefits of our pandemic era has been an enforced investigation into what kinds of socialization we all need to thrive. For many, like me, it’s been a process of realizing that perhaps we didn’t need quite so many coffee dates and after-work drinks in our lives. That long stretches of alone time are actually preferred, as long as they’re interspersed by what I have come to think of as the slow cooker friendship.
The slow cooker friendship is low stakes, but that doesn’t mean it’s low in meaning. It’s the kind of friend that you see perhaps two, three, four times a year, for longer catch-ups rather than harried, over-scheduled brunches and cocktails or parties. When you do finally get in their presence, it’s as if no time has passed. Their spirit, their…
