Member-only story
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 understanding of your past, and their openness to see how you’ve changed brings an enveloping comfort.
It’s like throwing a bunch of ingredients into a slow cooker pot at 11 am and having an above-average dinner by 8 pm. Low investment, maximum return. You don’t have to remember their birthday, or buy them an engagement present, or apologize for not answering any of their texts in February when you were having a bad month. But if they called you out of the blue one day to help extinguish a crisis—I’m breaking up with my partner! And I think I need to quit my job!—you’d drop what you were doing without question, and you know they’d do the same.
I certainly had these kinds of friendships before Covid changed how we socialize. But I also had a bunch of other ones, which always felt like a lot of admin and work to keep up with. Each week I felt I had to engage in the never-ending task of the scheduling, the canceling, the rescheduling with a given…
