The art of hanging out: how to create more positive friendship habits

When I lived in London in my twenties, my neighbour would briefly play her radio loud enough on a Saturday morning for the sound to vibrate through her ceiling (my floor) as a way of signalling she was awake and a cue for me to come down. I’d nip along the communal staircase of our converted Victorian rental in my pyjamas and we’d idle away at least half the day, eating Crunchy Nut Cornflakes, drinking mugs of tea and watching Ant and Dec on SMTV Live. She might put on a wash while I was there, reorganise her wardrobe or call her mum. I’d sometimes sleep off my hangover. In-between we’d pick apart the week that had gone before. With no social media and no online sharing, we were never short of anecdotes to exchange. But it never really mattered how we spent these hours, we just enjoyed sharing them.

Given the many big nights out, glamorous bars and cool clubs that London afforded, how is it that my most memorable moments are the ones that felt forgettable at the time? Looking back, I think it’s the elasticity of this friendship that I’m nostalgic for. During the week, we had different careers, colleagues and social lives, but on weekends we snapped back into our familial-like routine of catching up by simply passing the time together on a lopsidedly sunken two-seater Ikea sofa. We didn’t go out, we just hung out, spending a few hours in each other’s presence with no pressure, pretensions or particular plans.

Twenty years on, my friendships feel about as flexible as a plaster cast. Friends are allocated iCal entries alongside copy deadlines and dental appointments. Meet-ups invariably involve early reservations or expensive tickets, which straitjacket me and them into evenings we often can’t afford and don’t feel up to by the time they come round. Whatever happened to simply hanging out?

Journalist and author Marianne Power has been pondering the same question. In her new book Love Me!, which will be published next month, she explores whether it’s possible to have a life full of love without marriage and children and examines the role friendship plays within it.

“The way the world is set up these days, there’s a kind of scheduling of friendship that happens alongside work stuff and home stuff,” she says. “It’s dinner and drinks on the last Tuesday of the month; a three-hour window and two trains to get there and back; then a checklist of questions: ‘How are you?’, ‘How is so and so?’, ‘What’s happening with your holiday?’ ‘What’s happening with your house…?’ It can feel like a real effort.

“The reason we meet up with friends is for the promise of connection,” she says, “but often I return from a night out feeling like I haven’t shared my real self. I think a lot of us feel the pressure to entertain. We feel we have to have a story or a top line about our lives. The whole encounter can begin to seem like a performance and suddenly it’s feeding into those parts of ourselves that believe we’re not good enough and not interesting enough.”

Galway-based psychotherapist Mary Lynn says how we socialise has changed dramatically over the past couple of decades. “People are more time poor now than ever,” she says. “I hear it in my therapy room all of the time: people are working constantly and everyone is trying to get to ‘a place’ – literally or figuratively – which makes it really difficult to get out and socialise at all. When we do eventually meet up with friends, we feel we have to look our best and be our best and that puts extra pressure on the evening and on our relationships. Our mothers didn’t have this problem.”

It’s true. My mother’s friendships revolved around cuppas at the kitchen table and evening strolls twice around the block – unplanned and unharried half hours stolen back from the daily rigours of child-rearing. But lives were lived locally then. Today, so many factors are out of our control. The housing and cost-of-living crises are pushing people further away from each other, while online platforms promise to connect us and fulfil our social needs.

Power believes communities have become fragmented and individuals isolated, with friendships falling too far down the pecking order. “But human beings are meant to coexist,” says the 46-year-old. “We need low-key, low-stakes shared time.”

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Lynn agrees. “We all need to try to create this casual hanging out time whenever we can,” she says. “It’s during these easy-come-easy-go interactions that we feel seen and heard and this is essential to our wellbeing.”

She reveals that environment can have an enormous influence on how a meet-up with friends plays out. “We assume different personas in different environments. Where do you feel most like yourself? For many of us – though not all – it’s at home. We hold ourselves differently when we’re comfortable in a space, and we position ourselves differently in relation to others. There’s an intimacy that comes from simply sitting beside someone rather than opposite them. Generally, we behave more naturally when we’re at home and this can result in more authentic interactions.”

Power believes that the real beauty of hanging out is that it doesn’t even have to be “fun”. It can simply be a rest; a reprieve from the exhaustion of the work hard/play hard treadmill we’re all pounding. “Being with someone and not having to be funny or have any news is calming. It’s then that the sweet, true, gentle sides of us that are often tired, lonely, broke and worried emerge,” she says.

Power has found her friendship nirvana hanging out with two of her neighbours, Gary and Nellie, whom she got to know during Covid when she says there was no pressure to be “impressive” because everyone was at home all day. “If I’d met them at any other time, I would have been intimidated by their cool tattoos and cool outfits, but lockdown was this great leveller.”

The trio created their own support bubble. “We would just watch TV and make food together. Gary prefers my kitchen to his and I don’t like to cook, so he’d come over and make us dinner. I might read for a bit.” This sharing of the mundane and monotonous continued post-pandemic and cemented the friendship.

But perhaps this is part of our problem with hanging out; it requires we do little or nothing and as such has slovenly undertones. In a world that prizes productivity and over-achievement, hanging out sounds lazy and wasteful. The modern-day preference for “catching up” fits better with our super-busy, multi-hyphen personas. It has pace and energy. It implies you’re a doer rather than a do-nothing type.

If activity is in your bones, Lynn suggests that carrying out everyday activities or running errands with friends is another way of creating space for some real and honest interactions. This also allows us to spend time with friends without having to spend money.

“Shared hanging out time can be easier for parents,” says Lynn. “Friends of mine will often drop their kids to football training then walk and talk until practice is finished. Playground benches are also great places to sit and just be together, but dog walking and supermarket shopping are also great excuses to hang out.”

Fiona Brennan, founder of the website and Instagram account The Positive Habit, agrees that helping each other out in these practical ways can be nourishing for friendships, especially at a time when economics, geography and time pressures are affecting how we relate to one another.

The difficulty with the kind of structured friendship time we’ve become used to – particularly glamorous nights out – she believes, is not only the weight of expectation, but the fact that social media has become a pervasive third-party presence. It can make many of us feel uneasy because not everybody enjoys the obligatory group selfie moment. She also thinks that within these scenarios, we’re more guarded and vulnerable and less likely to share what’s really on our mind.

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Brennan says the first step to establishing positive friendship habits is to evaluate the difference between very good friends and acquaintances. “Who are the people in your front row?” she asks. “Consider how you feel before, during and after meeting up with a friend. Do you feel filled up or depleted? Hanging out only works when there’s a foundation of trust and respect between two people,” she says.

“Hanging out is never a waste of time,” she continues. “In fact it’s time we should value and prioritise.” It’s during these random and regular interactions, she explains, that we experience “micro moments of positive feelings”, which can act as a buffer against stress and depression and improve mood, happiness and health.

Now which one of us couldn’t do with a few more of those?