What Is Friendship Culture? (And How to Shift It Without Blowing Everything Up)

Why does one friendship feel effortless while another feels tense, draining, or rigid?

In this episode, I’m diving into a concept I think about constantly: friendship culture. The unspoken norms, expectations, habits, and “rules” that shape how our relationships function.

From how you split the dinner bill to who initiates plans, what topics feel safe to discuss, or whether partners are included in hangouts — every friendship develops its own culture over time. And most of the time, nobody consciously decides on any of it.

I’m sharing my hot takes on how friendship cultures form, why they can start to feel restrictive or misaligned as we grow, and how to shift the dynamic without immediately blowing up the relationship.

In this episode you’ll hear about:

• How life transitions like parenting, finances, health, or relationships naturally shift friendship dynamics
• Why the same person can show up completely differently across different friendships and friend groups
• Questions to ask yourself to identify which friendship cultures actually feel good, supportive, and natural to you
• How small “nudges” can slowly reshape friendship culture without forcing a dramatic confrontation

This episode is sponsored by Are We Friends Yet?, Alex’s book on building the support system you’ve been wanting.

Buy the book and submit your receipt before July 16th to get The Connector’s Toolkit free: a private pep talk podcast for the moments that feel hardest, a full year in The Less Lonely Club, and more. Grab your bonuses at alexalexander.com/are-we-friends-yet

This episode is sponsored by Slowly, a digital pen pal app used by over 10 million people worldwide. If you’ve been looking for a low-pressure way to connect with someone completely outside your normal friendship circle, this is it. Exchange letters at your own pace, no small talk panic required.

Download Slowly free and get 30% off Slowly Plus using my link: https://open.slowly.app/miXL/l8ei5iw6

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Transcript

Podcast Intro/Outro: 0:53

All right, gang. Here's to nights that turn into mornings and friends that turn into family. Cheers. Hello, hello, and welcome to the Friendship IRL podcast. I'm your host, Alex Alexander. Each week we talk about what is working(and what is not) in our friendships, community and connections. Have you ever wished you could sit down and have a conversation about what is really going on in your friendships? Well, you found your people. Join us as we dive into real life stories and explore new ways to approach these connections. Together, we're reimagining the rules of friendship Now, the contrast question is to think about where the friction lives, where do you go quiet or bite your tongue? Where do you write off a situation or a norm as just like, well, this is how they are, this is how our friendship has always been, but you actually kind of dread it. Whose comfort is the group organizing around, or the friendship? Is it yours? Is it the other person's? In what situations is it yours or the other person's or another person in the group? You know,I talked earlier about how life stages will often shift a Friendship Culture just naturally. And so an example I have for you here is I have so many friends who are parents, right? I love those little kiddos so much, but sometimes we go out, we're hanging out, and I do realize that the entire hangout has been centered around talking about people's kids. Now I am an active participant in those conversations, but I've also realized that sometimes I will leave, and maybe we haven't really talked about me or my life or what's going on, and I know that this is a common struggle that people, that child-free people feel, right, and a lot of people would just be like, oh, well, everybody had kids, so that's all everybody talks about now. So frustrated, I'm so mad. Why can't they ask me about this? And that's what I mean about focusing on the negative only versus me spending some time being like, okay, well, where does it feel good? Because I actually personally do like talking about all the kiddos, so I don't want that to go away completely. I just want to nudge, and quite frankly, I also want to hear about, like, my friends' lives outside of parenting. I know that's a huge piece of their life, but what other things do they got going on? How was work? How was that trip you took? How are you feeling? How is your health right? And so a nudge now is kind of like I have a sense of what I want, and maybe it's not that the entire hangout is focused on just us talking about ourselves. I love hearing about the kiddos too, but maybe a nudge here would be the first 30 minutes of every hangout, kid-free, we only talk about each other, right, and that would be an example of a shift in Friendship Culture, and I'll talk a little bit more later about how I would nudge that forward, because personally my first instinct would not be to just tell everyone, like, hey, I am so tired of every conversation only being about the kids, we have to talk about each other, that's just not how I would do it, so I'm going to tell you in a minute how I would shift it. But the point of this is you are already noticing some of your Friendship Culture that you like and that you dislike. I want you to pay more attention to the things you like, so that you can find that middle ground sometimes and feel less trapped in these scenarios, because for a lot of people, when the negative Friendship Culture just starts becoming so all consuming, when it just compounds on itself, and there's like another negative added to the list again and again and again. I think that's where people start to say, you know, like friendship, it just doesn't fit me anymore, it's so toxic, it's not the type of friendship I need in this phase in my life, and that might be true. You might have to step away, but before you do that, you might actually be able to just shift the Friendship Culture a little bit and give it so much more breathing room to feel like something you enjoy, that's my hot take. So now let's dive into maybe the hard part, because starting to notice your Friendship Culture is one thing, but shifting it, it's a little bit of another, and I want to be honest with you about why it can feel so hard before I tell you how to do it, so some of the struggles we have when we want to start to shift Friendship Culture are that established things often feel permanent, especially if you have been friends with somebody or any friend group for years and years and years, right. It's easy to be like, well, this is just who my friend is, this is just what that group does. And when you feel like something is permanent, it really changes the risk associated with trying to be the person spearheading the shift, so you need to believe that nothing is permanent, as much as it feels that way, as much as it feels like it is like the lore of your friendship, and the only way you've been doing it for 20 years. I need you to believe nothing is permanent, because when you believe something is permanent, most people wait, and they wait, and they wait until they snap, and I just recently talked about this in Episode 176 with Colette. We talked about how, when you wait and wait and wait and wait, a lot of people have kind of this blow up volcano, right? They snap, and when you snap, it is really hard to handle the situation. It also normally leaves you in a place where you want, like, a really big change. You want to set a boundary. You do not want that thing to happen anymore. You need to see a difference if you're going to stay in this friendship. I think that's where a lot of people get. I also want to note that I think Episode 160 is worth a listen if you are in this situation where you genuinely feel like you need a faster, more direct change than what I'm about to talk about, because Episode 160 I talk about how so often we believe that friendship is meant to feel easy and simple, and you know you don't want to rock the boat, basically. But in Episode 160 I argue why we, we need to rock the boat more, and how that actually helps your friendships. So, if you are somebody who feels like you just need a shift now, go listen to Episode 176 and Episode 160 both of them are linked in the show notes. So, if you are okay with maybe a slower shift of your Friendship Culture, and I think that this can be true for most shifts, then there is a better way. Two of them, actually. The first one is kind of a slow shift. It is consistent small nudges over time, and often I think it's more behavioral than verbal. You want to model it, not just announce it, and I have a story here for you. So, I have never been a big drinker. Now I understand that that had to do with my health, and I'd have like one glass of wine and have the equivalent of drinking a bottle of tequila. So, even in college, I really didn't drink much at all, and one of the things back then, you know, was everybody was playing flip cup and rage cage and sharing cups and chugging beers, and people now could never, but drinking games were huge and. That was hard, like we didn't play with water in the cup, right? You played with beer in the cup, or seltzer, I guess. This was even honestly before seltzer was a thing, so I guess a mixed drink in the cup is probably what we did. I didn't drink, so drinking a couple beers worth while playing the game was just not really possible for me, and so I often opted out, but people would always be like, "Come on, come on, right? Like, they wanted me to partake, and so I kind of went on this journey, honestly, of shifting the Friendship Culture in our college friend group, because I was like, "Listen, I want to play, but we need to figure out a way that I can play and not drink. Does that mean somebody else will drink my beers for me? Can I just play with water cups, which I know feels the norm now, but that was not the norm back then. Can I dump the beer back into a pitcher or a cup or something, for like everybody to keep drinking. I don't want to waste it and dump it in the grass. We came up with all these ideas, and after a little while, it became normal for me to not drink. Nobody would question if I walked up to the table and played with water, but the tricky part was actually shifting this beyond myself, because I had been so consistent about myself. Right, every time people wanted me to partake, or I wanted to partake, it was like, I want to play, but I can't drink. So, how do we make this happen over time? I actually started to push back on how anybody should be able to play, even if they don't want to drink, whether that was somebody in the friend group, somebody who was just at the party, like if somebody didn't want to drink, but they wanted to play beer pong, and other people in our friend group would be like, no, you can't do that, got to drink, I'd be like, why, I don't have to drink, you have all made an exception for me. Let that person play. I would also just go up to people who seem like they didn't want to drink and bring them a cup of water and be like, you can just drink this and pour the beer back in this pitcher, and everybody will drink it. They'll use it for the next game. And over time, it was not a consistent change. There were definitely people who were slower to adopt the change, people who pushed back, right, peer pressured for drinking, but over a period of, I don't know, maybe six months, it made a really big shift in how people partied in college in our house. I was the squeaky wheel, and honestly, I was other people's squeaky wheel, because if I could not drink, why couldn't anybody who just didn't feel like drinking that night, somebody who was hungover from the night before, somebody who wasn't feeling good, somebody who just didn't feel like it today, somebody who had a big test tomorrow, but was out for a couple hours. Why couldn't they have the same rules that I did? And so I really pushed this, not just for myself, but for everybody. Sometimes it didn't work, sometimes people gave in and would be like, "It's fine, it's fine, I'll just drink. I like, you don't have to, you really don't have to. And so the point of this is that this slow shift, you have to think of it as a nudge, right? Me speaking up and be like, you don't have to do that. It is an invitation, it's not a verdict. I was leaving space for every person in our friend group to weigh in, and some people would offer solutions, of like, you know, don't waste the beer in the cup and pour it back in a pitcher, just play with water, let's all play with water. Other people will push back, like, no, no, you got a drink, and then people would get in on it, like it was an entire group dynamic for a while, where it was kind of a point of contention, where some people were hanging on and other people were all in, and some people thought we should handle the situation with water cups, and other people thought with a pitcher, and yada yada yada, the solution often gets better through the conversation, I'm going to give you one more example, and this one also has to do with drinking. They don't all have to do with drinking, but when I was trying to evaluate, I was trying to come up with stories for this episode. Drinking ones just really popped in my head. Years later, after college, another friend decided she wasn't going to drink anymore for her health, and that created another shift in Friendship Culture. At first, it was kind of this idea of, like, well, I don't really want to hang out and go to bars. Now she was not in recovery, she has no problem being around alcohol. It was more just like she didn't want every activity to. Center completely around alcohol. She didn't want to go to a bar where there was nothing for her to drink but water, and we could have just taken this as maybe a new boundary. And sometimes you do again, if somebody is in recovery, this is a different conversation. I want to make that very clear. She just was trying to shift the Friendship Culture, the actual solution wasn't necessarily no more bars. People started weighing in, right? She'd be like, I don't want to do everything at a bar. I don't always want our Sunday activities to center around drinking. I want to try new things. The actual solution became like, okay. What if we always, when we suggest a restaurant, make sure that we are suggesting somewhere that has food and some non-alcoholic options, or if we are going to, like, a winery or a bar where there aren't any really good NA options? What if one of the other friends, like, surprises our friend with a canned mocktail. What if sometimes our hangouts are activities, right? What if we go by play hacky sack? We don't play hacky sack, but I'm trying to think, like in the park. What if we go hang out in the park? What if we go paddle boarding? What if we try new museums in the area, and everybody kind of got to contribute, and overall this one's friends nudge towards,'Hey, I don't want all of our hangouts to center on alcohol anymore, completely shifted the Friendship Culture of the ways that we hang out, but it didn't happen overnight, and it wasn't a hard boundary. It was a process, a trial and error amongst all of us. It was new norms, it was people thinking differently and showing up with a mocktail for somebody to make them feel included, and that process happened honestly, probably over a couple years now, I'm telling you the story, so this one friend may realize that, like, she's responsible partially for this shift in Friendship Culture, but what I want to note is often you will not get credit. This is not something you do that you get, like a pat on the back for later. Normally, a successful slow shift is pretty invisible. Nobody is really saying, like,"Wow, you changed the way we hang out. The reward isn't acknowledgement; it's a friendship that never feels stuck in a certain norm that you can't stand. The reward is possibility. It's feeling like if something starts to feel stale in your friendships, you could shift it. One more thing, you don't have to nudge everything in your friendships at one time. I do think you can nudge a couple things simultaneously, but you really have to focus on being consistent on each one, and I would suggest knowing where you're trying to go, right. In the example of my friend, who doesn't drink anymore, she just didn't want every hangout to center around alcohol, and I'm sure she had some other ideas. I can't.. this is a while ago now, of different ways we could hang out, like I do remember her showing up and being like, I have a list of activities I want to try in Seattle, so she actively had thoughts of where she was trying to nudge our friendships towards. Now, I mentioned there were two methods, so the second method is consistent norms talk, this is talking about how things work in your other friendships, a way to surface what you want without making it a confrontation, and about the other person. A lot of people might call this gossip, and it is a form of gossip, to be honest. But gossip is not all bad, and you can go listen to Episode 173 where I talk about gossip in our friendships, and it's linked in the show notes if you want to go deeper. But norms talk is a way to be hopefully proactive, you can be both proactive and reactive, but I hope it becomes proactive reactive norms talk would look like this. You are frustrated about how the bill is always paid at the restaurant. It's such a point of contention every time, so you mention how another friend group of yours handles it. You're just naming it, you're offering a possibility, you're not accusing the friend you're sitting across from, that like this is so hard every single time, right? You're just being like, you know, if we just always agreed on items that we shared that I was expected to, like, contribute pain for before we ordered them, we just kind of like checked in with it. Everyone, that's what my other friend group does, and it kind of allows somebody to opt out if their budget doesn't allow for it, and it just made it really easy. You can also talk about something that's frustrating you with other friends. Again, we're not trying to throw that friend under the bus, but if you say something like, yeah, you know, my friends, every time I want to go out to a restaurant with them, they're always like,"Yeah, let's go, I'll go anywhere, and it just gets really frustrating to always be the one to have to pick, like, I want to know what they want to do, and it's just a lot of work to always be looking up the restaurants. If you are telling this to a friend sitting across from you, they're hearing you say, like, "Oh, I should maybe suggest a restaurant every once in a while. Do I do that? I'll just pay more attention to contributing an idea for a restaurant, right? Like, that would be the hope. I also think that norms talk can be proactive. You don't have to wait until you are sitting across from a friend, frustrated and wishing that something would shift in your Friendship Culture. You can do this at any time before there's any friction at all. You can just mention something, so like I could be telling a friend about how another friend has a key to my house, and I love it. I love that they can just like stop by anytime. I see them way more than I used to. It's really created this belief that they can just kind of like show up whenever, and they're always welcome, and it's just removed a lot of our planning, you know, but I am struggling because I feel like this friend keeps driving home from work kind of late at night, like at like 9o'clock and at that point I'm in my pajamas, like I might be in bed honestly at 9pm so I kind of feel like I need to tell her, you know, maybe not after 8pm don't use the key and show up at my house now. This friend, the one that I'm sitting across from, telling this story to, knows where my lines are without ever having to have tested them, and quite frankly, it might create space for them, like maybe they have held back on stopping by your house randomly because they didn't know how you'd react to that, but because you are telling them that you love that this other friend is doing that, and your only boundary is just like before 8pm they might actually use that to realize that you are more accessible than they assumed, and show up more often in your friendship. The goal of the norm stock is not to throw anybody under the bus, it's not to vent, it's not to whatever, it's to give your friends a window into what you actually want, what bothers you, what you love, without it having to be some big blow-up boundaries conversation, you know, I think about my own friendships, and how much the culture has shifted over, let's say, 15 plus years. If I think about some friendships, most of the shifts have happened so gradually that I never would have noticed if I wasn't producing this episode and thinking about my friendships. Here's what I want to leave you with today. Friendship Culture changes. It always has. The question is, whether you are an active participant in shaping it. Have you just allowed life changes, or maybe other people's boundaries to shift the Friendship Culture. Have you been waiting around, hoping for somebody else to shift it, only to maybe have that person shift it and find out that it didn't land somewhere you like, you didn't contribute to the conversation. So maybe this week just sit with it, think about a friendship where things feel really easy. What makes it easy? What makes it feel comfortable or normal? What are your standard operating procedures with that friend that you like? And then think about one where maybe things feel a little stuck. Is it actually stuck, or is it just unnamed and undiscussed? Has it ever been a conversation? Have you ever really considered that maybe you have totally different ways of operating across your different friendships, and that those friendships, the differences aren't normal, they are actually a culture you have built together with those people or that person, and that that culture can be renegotiated. You don't have to blow everything up, you just have to start nudging with that. I'll see you next week. Thank you for listening to this episode of Friendship IRL. I am so honored to have these conversations with you, but don't let the chat die here. Send me a voice message — I created a special website just to chat with you. You can find it at alexalex.chat. You can also find me on Instagram; my handle is @itsalexalexander. Or go ahead and leave a review wherever you prefer to listen to podcasts. Now, if you want to take this conversation a step further, send this episode to a friend. Tell them you found it interesting, and use what we just talked about as a conversation starter the next time you and your friend hang out. No need for a teary goodbye— I'll be back with a new episode next week.