The Value of Acquaintances and the Life-Changing Magic of Patio Chairs

How can we create environments that support community and friendship?

Nov 10, 2023

Last week, I wrote a post about what I refer to as “pajama friends”:

“Pajama friends” are friends who feel so at ease with each other that they would be comfortable hanging out in their pajamas (and who see each other so often, and in such familiar contexts, that they sometimes do spend time together in literal pajamas).

To expand on that a bit:

“Pajama friends are people who know you. They’re people with whom you share a library’s worth of inside jokes. They’ve seen you at your worst — and at your best. They’re the people who don’t require coffee dates to “catch up” because—in the ideal pajama friend scenario—you’re such a part of each other’s lives that you already know everything that’s going on with each other. This, in turn, frees you to exist and interact in the present, instead of telling each other about the past.”

In the post, I lamented the difficulty of maintaining pajama friendships after you move out of the age of life (childhood, adolescence, and your 20s, for many people) when it’s easiest to make this type of friends—or, really, friends of any kind. I asked for people to share their own experiences, and their ideas.

The post received more comments than anything I’ve written on Substack so far, and then, in one of those “Oh my god, are we all feeling alone together?” moments, I received three separate Substack newsletters about friendship in one week: one from Anna Goldfarb(author of Friendship Explained with Anna Goldfarb), one from Anne Helen Petersen in Culture Study, and one from Isolde Walters inThings We Don't Talk About (But I Do)(which, I’m really honored to say, was actually inspired by the pajama friends post — thanks, Isolde!).

What’s going on? If we all want more comfort and intimacy in our lives, then what is getting in the way?

The Value of Acquaintances

There are many, many factors at play here, but for today, I want to highlight one that I’ve been thinking a lot about myself recently and would love to get your thoughts on.

I’m talking about the challenge of making—and sustaining—acquaintances. I know that we started off talking about pajama friends, which are, by definition, close and intimate friendships. But when it comes to avoiding loneliness, it’s also essential to nourish acquaintances—people whom you don’t know particularly well (yet).

I say this for two reasons. First, you can’t develop a pajama friendship with someone you’ve never met—you have to go through the acquaintance stage of your relationship first.

Second, there is actually intrinsic value in having acquaintances whom you regularly run into, even if you don’t ever cross the line into real friendship. (These can be thought of as “fleeting relationships,” as my own friend, Vanessa Gregory, once wrote about in the New York Times.)

The problem? Whereas it’s easy to make acquaintances when you’re young, single, and in school, it’s more difficult when you’re an adult. Not as difficult as making new pajama friends, mind you, but not as easy as it is/was earlier in life.

Why is this? Again, many reasons. But as a reader named Amarylis mentioned in a comment about the difficulty of developing adult friendships, some of the primary issues are “likely environment, proximity, and culture—not a lack of desire.”

I agree.

Roadblocks: Culture & Environment

As I mentioned in my original post, social scientists have identified three ingredients that are necessary for close (pajama) friendships to develop: proximity, unplanned interactions, and spending time together with people in contexts that encourage vulnerability. All three are often challenging, especially for parents.

But Amarylis highlighted two other contributing factors that are affecting our ability to make pajama friends and acquaintances: many of us live in places that lack a culture or physical environment that supports the creation and nurturing of friendships. In other words, you’re not going to have unplanned interactions with people in contexts that encourage vulnerability if you do not have a physical location in which to have them—or a culture that supports them.

For example, a reader named Alison pointed out in her comment on my pajama friend post that, as a single mother of a five-year-old, her own adult communication is limited to chitchat with other parents at the playground. I thought that was interesting because it highlighted both of the problems identified by Amarylis: in America, at least, playgrounds are some of the few public spaces that do encourage adults to hang around together and strike up a conversation with strangers. (And that’s, obviously, only if you have a kid with you!)

multicolored playground slide during daytime — Photo by Power Lai on Unsplash

But honestly, how many of us would really list “chit-chatting about after-school activities while standing awkwardly near a sandbox” as one of our top leisure activities? And also, where is the equivalent public space for people who don’t have kids?

In other words, where are the public places where adults can gather casually with each other—or, perhaps even better, where multiple generations can casually spend time together—in a way that encourages connection?

In my experience, at least, America does not have many of them.

Is the United States particularly bad at this?

Interestingly and somewhat depressingly (or I guess maybe inspirationally, depending on your mood?), this is not true in all cultures. AsJill Filipovic recently noted, in America in particular, “even our infrastructure is isolating: We live in a culture that prioritizes largeness and space, and so the middle-class dream is a single-family home, which mostly means driving a personal vehicle to and from work, often in a soulless office park or a central business district where people don’t actually live. And at least the office park has other people in it. Our new work-from-home norm can be great — more time with your kids! — but can also reinforce this nuclear family isolation.”

She continues:

“I’m often struck when traveling even to pretty small European towns to see how much of life congregates around public squares. On summer nights in any given town (or at least in many given towns), people of all ages are out and about, teenagers eyeing each other, parents with new babies staying up well past bedtime, old ladies having drinks with friends. It is profoundly pro-social, and deeply connective.
I cannot think of a single city in America that works like this. In a few enclaves, perhaps, but even in New York it is far from the norm. Late nights are the domain of the young and single. Public parks are not teeming at 10pm with families and gaggles of teenagers and wine-swilling grannies. This kind of multigenerational usage of public space also helps to shore up the social contract: The idea that we’re all part of something bigger than ourselves, and all a little bit responsible for its wellbeing.”

I had this post in mind on a recent trip to New York City, where I walked past Bryant Park, and saw a scene that looked very similar to this photo:

brown concrete balcony — Photo by Krisztina Papp on Unsplash

As I walked around the perimeter of the park, I was struck by the number of spontaneous activities and interactions occurring: it felt as close as America gets to the public square scene that Filipovic describes in her post. There were people reading. There were people having lunch. There were people chatting. There were people listening to a guy play the piano. There were posters advertising weekly poetry readings and yoga classes. I saw multiple examples of what has to be one of my absolute favorite New York sights: random people playing chess together (it’s up there with going to Coney Island and seeing old, walrus-like Russian men playing handball with young hipsters). While it still didn’t achieve the sense of multigenerational community that Filipovic describes—and this same scene would not have happened after dark—it still stood out to me as being a wonderful example of a pro-social, communal public space, and is something I miss about New York.

The Life-Changing Magic of Patio Chairs

As you may have figured out by now, I’m fascinated by how our environments influence our behaviors. So naturally I began to wonder: what is it about Bryant Park (not to mention the fabled European squares described by Filipovic) that makes it so conducive to these sorts of unplanned interactions between strangers? And what changes could we make to our own physical environments to encourage these types of interactions—and maybe even create a culture that values them?

One thing that stood out to me about Bryant Park was the chairs: there were literally thousands of patio chairs, unbolted and technically quite steal-able, if one were to want to furnish one’s apartment with green folding furniture that may, at some point in its existence, been pooped on by a bird.

two white wooden folding chairs — Photo by Najib Kalil on Unsplash

It turns out, though, that the chairs’ stealable nature is in fact an asset, because it meant that people can move them around—either to separate themselves from other people or to be closer to them.

When I did a search to see just how many chairs there are in Bryant Park (more than 6,000, it turns out!), I discovered a fascinating article from Gothamist titled, wait for it, “How Bryant Park’s Iconic Chairs Revolutionized Public Spaces.” It’s all about the history of how the chairs came to be, and is much more interesting than that description made it sound. It, in turn, references a 1972 New York Times editorial by William Whyte (title: “Please, Just a Nice Place to Sit!”), who was the urban planner who inspired the idea of putting more chairs in Bryant Park.

Whyte somehow got funding to gather a small team of people who spent two years watching how people interacted with public spaces such as “playgrounds, park spaces, and the streets of the city” (resulting in some fascinating and wonderfully phrased observations by Whyte, such as the fact that “shmoozing patterns are similarly consistent,” and that potential sitters seem to be drawn to “pillars and flagpoles, obeying a primeval instinct, perhaps, to have something solid at their backs”). His conclusion was that simply by offering people more places to sit, you could change the mood and feel of an entire city.

In terms of Bryant Park, Whyte’s vision eventually became a reality, resulting in the scene that I walked through. As the 2019 Gothamist article described it:

“Over the years, the green chairs of Bryant Park would become one of the most iconic and recognizable pieces of outdoor furniture in New York City. They helped propel the turnaround of a once seedy park dominated by drug dealers and eventually reclaim the surrounding business district that has since made room for residents. They were so popular, Bryant Park officials at one point put them up for sale to the public.
Other parks and cities quickly latched on to the idea. Today, movable chairs are in hundreds of public spaces, from Williamsburg's Domino Park to a sprawling open space in downtown Houston called Discovery Green. . . .
"Bryant Park is the most influential project in making that specific piece of furniture a public amenity in this country," said Philip Winn, vice president at Project for Public Spaces, a nonprofit group that was founded in 1975 by Whyte's research assistants, Fred Kent.
According to Winn, what Whyte realized was that a public amenity has the power to change the "social temperature" of a space. Unlike bolted down chairs or other forms of hostile or unfriendly architecture, free-floating chairs provide park goers with an implicit sense of trust, and with that, a freedom to improvise.”

Where are your “patio chairs”?

I don’t know about you, but I find that fascinating. It obviously prompts a lot of questions and ideas about urban planning, but it also makes me wonder whether there is anything we as individuals can do, whether in public or in private, that might be the metaphorical equivalent of adding patio chairs—something that makes it easier to meet people who might become acquaintances, and perhaps even friends.

I think this is what a reader named Stacey was aluding to when she shared this example of a creative way of encouraging connection between strangers:

A great example I’ve seen is written in “The Turquoise Table” — a nonfiction book about a woman who puts a picnic table in her front yard, paints it blue and just sits out there with her coffee or her laptop and offers it as a hangout spot for the neighborhood. People stop and ask her what it’s all about and it actually builds community.

In conclusion, three questions:

First, has anyone tried anything or seen examples of something like the “Turquoise Table” or Bryant Park’s moveable chairs in their own life or community? Does anyone have ideas that we could try?

Second, do you have any examples in your own community of a public space that encourages these types of casual connections and interactions and that you (or others) regularly hang out in? What is it? How do people use it?

Third, what does this post make you think about or wonder? I really appreciated the comments on the last post, and would love for this Substack to be a place where we can learn from and inspire each other.

Bonus Pajamas:

Here are a few other comments and observations from readers of the Pajama Friends post that stood out to me. (Thank you to everyone who contributed!)

Several people commented on how, for them, being a part of a religious community led to the feeling of pajama friendships. For example, a reader named Sybil wrote,

“I have a wonderful episcopal church in St. Louis. It is very small congregation, but at 9:30 every Sunday we have what we call adult formation — Sunday school. The group of friends in this space are amazing. Our pastor is amazing and brings thought-provoking and well planned lessons. We all check in with how our week was or what we felt about one of her questions. It is a safe space and very confirming and thought-provoking.”

This sounds wonderful, and made me wonder what alternatives there might be for people like me who don’t have a religious faith and, therefore, don’t have this type of community. Has anyone been able to find or create such a space outside of a religious setting? If so, will you please tell me (I mean us) how?

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