Case Study 1 — Chapter 20: Friendship, Social Networks, and Belonging

Jordan: Deploying Friendship

Background

Dev's question — "what are you doing with your friends this weekend?" — produces a silence that Jordan finds instructive.

He has colleagues. He has professional contacts. He has a team he would genuinely go to bat for. He has a manager who has his back. He has — this is the list, fully itemized — Marcus from college, who lives in another city and who they see at Christmas and sometimes in summer if schedules align; and Dev's social group, a cluster of five people from Dev's previous job whom Jordan likes and who like him but who are, fundamentally, Dev's friends in a way Jordan has never quite moved past.

"I'm going to fix that," Jordan says.

"It's not a proposal," Dev says.

He knows. He also knows that his default response to the awareness of a gap is to design a solution, and that designing a solution to "I don't have enough friends" is genuinely difficult, and that the difficulty is interesting to him in a way that, he suspects, might be part of how he will approach it.

The Network Map

Jordan does the chapter's network mapping exercise. What he finds:

Inner circle (5): Dev. That's it. He considers this for a moment. Marcus might qualify in terms of history and affection, but he doesn't have current-Jordan in his map. He has college-Jordan, which is a different person. One.

Sympathy group (15): Dev, Marcus, his sister Claudia (with whom he has maintained steady contact despite their different orbits), Dev's friends (three of them, at a warmth level that is real but not intimate), a former colleague named Ben who reached out last year and with whom Jordan has had four good conversations.

Trust network (50): He counts, roughly. Twenty-eight. Colleagues, mostly. A few people from his neighborhood who he recognizes and waves at. Two people from a running group he attended sporadically for three months in 2023 and then stopped.

The running group. He had stopped because the initiative had started and the mornings were full and then the habit broke and he never went back. He remembers now that he had liked it.

The Diagnosis

Jordan identifies his pattern: professional relationships are easy because they are role-structured. There is a clear reason to interact, a clear agenda, a clear limit of what is being asked. He is good at role-structured relationships. The skills transfer.

Personal friendships require something different: initiation without agenda, disclosure without professional purpose, the willingness to be known in the non-professional register. These feel slightly uncomfortable in ways Jordan can articulate now that he couldn't have two years ago. They feel like they require him to show up as himself rather than as his function, and "himself" has been, for most of his adult life, a slightly less certain entity than "Jordan the professional."

He thinks about the social penetration theory layers. In professional relationships, he moves comfortably to the second layer and stops: personal experience, some reflection, but not interior values or vulnerabilities. In friendship, the second layer isn't enough — and he has spent most of his adult life not going further.

Dev has the third layer. Marcus has history but not the current version of it. Nobody else has either.

This is the gap.

The Running Group, Revisited

Jordan sends a message to the running group WhatsApp chat — which still exists and which he has been silently receiving notifications from for eighteen months.

He writes: I fell off for a while. Starting back up this Saturday. Anyone else coming?

Two people respond within twenty minutes. One of them, a guy named Leon who Jordan vaguely remembers as being funny about his commute, says: Welcome back from the dead. 7am.

Saturday. Jordan shows up. There are seven people. He runs with Leon and a woman named Chen who works in healthcare and who has a very dry way of observing things. After the run, some of them get coffee.

Jordan does not, for once, treat this as a networking opportunity or as performance. He is tired and slightly out of breath and he drinks his coffee and listens to Leon talk about a renovation that has been ongoing for fourteen months and he laughs at the right places and offers a genuinely useless opinion about load-bearing walls and it is, he recognizes afterward, the most straightforwardly enjoyable social experience he has had outside of Dev in longer than he can place.

He goes back the following Saturday. And the one after that.

The Ben Thread

Ben — the former colleague who reached out last year — sends a message in November. Going to be in your city for a conference. Want to grab dinner?

Jordan nearly says he has something and then notices that he doesn't have anything and that the impulse to decline is entirely about the mild friction of making plans and nothing else.

Yes, he writes. Pick a day.

Dinner. Two hours. Ben tells him about a career pivot he has been considering. Jordan finds himself interested in Ben's problem in a way that doesn't feel instrumental — not because he is being a good networker but because the problem is interesting and Ben's uncertainty about it is something Jordan recognizes. He says so. Ben looks surprised and then more at ease.

At the end of the evening, Ben says: "I forgot you were actually good at this — the actual conversation, not just the work conversation."

Jordan thinks: I forgot too.

He had organized his social identity around his professional competence for so long that he had lost track of the version of himself that people enjoyed independently of what he could do for them. Ben's observation is both a compliment and, quietly, a small grief: a recognition of how much time the other thing had taken.

The Disclosure Practice

In the running group — three months in, by the time it is winter — Jordan is getting to know Leon more specifically. Leon is forty, works in city planning, has two kids who are very energetic in ways he describes with exhausted affection. He is uncomplicated in a way Jordan finds restful: Leon's investment in Jordan's professional significance is approximately zero, which means Jordan can be present to the actual conversation rather than managing impressions.

One Saturday, after the run, Leon asks what's going on with Jordan's initiative.

Jordan describes it accurately — including the version that includes the anxiety about what happens if it succeeds. He doesn't perform the composure. He says: "I keep thinking, what if it goes well and it doesn't fix what I thought it would fix? What if the problem is more interior than situational?"

Leon thinks about this. "Yeah," he says. "I had the exact same feeling when I got promoted. Three months of achievement and then nothing changed except that now I had more meetings."

They sit with this for a moment.

"The meetings did not improve," Leon adds.

Jordan laughs. It is, he thinks, the relief of being heard by someone who is not also invested in helping him be okay. Leon doesn't have a framework. Leon just recognized the thing. That is also a form of connection — different from Dev's thoughtful reception, different from his therapist's clinical precision, but real.

Analysis Questions

1. Jordan's network map reveals one person in his inner circle: Dev, who is also his partner. The chapter warns against networks in which all five friendship functions are carried by one relationship. What specific risks does this configuration create — for Jordan's wellbeing and for the health of the partnership?

2. Jordan identifies his pattern as: professional relationships are easy because they are role-structured. How does the concept of social penetration theory explain why Jordan stops at a certain depth in professional relationships? What specifically would be required to move beyond that layer?

3. The running group works because it provides "repeated, unplanned contact in a shared context" — exactly what the chapter identifies as the most effective adult friendship formation strategy. What made Jordan's initial attempt fail (he stopped after three months), and what made the re-entry successful? What does this suggest about the relationship between friendship formation and habit?

4. Ben's observation — "I forgot you were actually good at this, the actual conversation, not just the work conversation" — produces a complex response in Jordan: compliment + small grief. What does the grief consist of, and how does it connect to the earlier theme of role identity crowding out personal identity?

5. Jordan's conversation with Leon about achievement anxiety is described as "the relief of being heard by someone who is not also invested in helping him be okay." How does this describe a friendship function that is distinct from what Dev provides? Why might it be valuable to have this function served by a non-partner relationship?