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‘Soup Night’ Might Be the Perfect Way to Maintain Adult Friendships
As a busy parent, I longed for community. So I grabbed the biggest pot I could find and started stirring.
Right now, there’s a giant pot of curried squash soup on my kitchen stove and a sheet tray of tahini shortbread cookies in the oven. In about an hour, three families from my neighborhood will gather in my backyard at the long picnic table I bought with my last stimulus check, with this very scenario in mind. It’s Soup Night.
Every Thursday, our neighbors bring bread, salad, dessert, and beverages. We check in about our lives and then when it gets dark, they head home. It’s become a touchstone in our week, and a way to deepen our friendships.
Connecting with other people and strengthening our social bonds has been touted as the cure for everything from consumerism to ecological awareness, but it’s one thing to say “build community” and another to know how to do it. It’s harder to make friends in your 30s and 40s — mostly because life gets busier and we don’t have the freedom to just go out for drinks after work, or bump into people and hang out like we did when we were younger. And when kids are in the mix, you often spend a lot of time near other parents, but continual interruptions—pleas for a push on the…
