Active vs. Passive Friends

on friendship in its many seasons

Passive vs. Active Friends

I’ve always thought there are two kinds of friends in life: active and passive.

Active friends are the ones who are truly in your life — the people you see multiple times a week, who text you most days, who you can go out with on a Saturday night and meet again the next morning to debrief the questionable decisions from the night before. They’re the friends we keep group chats with (and keep those said group chats on silent because the demand for availability is… relentless). We go on trips together (hopefully!), they know our work schedules, and they’re the people you can call no matter the time of day. They’re the ones we send voice notes to, oversharing every detail of our mundane days. They’re the friends you make plans with, not just plans about.

Passive friends, on the other hand, are the ones you only see to catch up. They’re lovely, familiar, and reliable but somehow their presence in your life is more like a bookmark where it once was a chapter. You meet for coffee or drinks, and for a few hours at a time, you swap stories about the lives you’ve lived separately. You fill them in on your new job, your relationship, your family updates. We talk about making plans over the plans we’re already at. We talk about how we’d both love to go to the cinema more, or send each other links to restaurants we want to try. But weeks pass, and when we do finally meet — perhaps twice a month if we’re lucky — it’s for two or three hours of condensed connection. You laugh about old times, promise to meet again soon, and then do it all over again the next time.

The Ones Who Know You Now

Active friends are the chaos and colour of life. They’re the ones who drag you out when you don’t want to go, who convince you to “just come for one drink” (the biggest lie I have ever told myself), who text you random photos of the meal they just made. They’re the people who make ordinary weeks feel like stories.

With active friends, you don’t need to schedule intimacy — it just happens. You share the small stuff, the quiet things, the bad days. They see the unfiltered version of you: unshaven, slightly hungover, slightly lost. You live alongside each other almost by accident, and that closeness makes everything else a little easier to bear.

The Ones Who Knew You Then

And yet, there’s a tiny ache in passive friendships. These friendships tend to grow out of the people who were once woven into your daily circumstances — friends from uni, old colleagues; the people you used to bump into without trying. You scroll through old photos and remember laughter that felt infinite at the time, and you wonder why it doesn’t happen more. Maybe it’s geography. Maybe it’s time. Maybe it’s just life.

There’s comfort in these friendships, too — the scattered (but gentle) ryhthm of checking in, the familiarity of someone who has known you across multiple versions of yourself. They don’t need the daily play-by-play to understand the bigger picture. They still know who you are. But still, that little ache lingers. You wish you saw them more. You wish life wasn’t so crowded with logistics and good intentions.

photo from : A on Pinterest // vvngcl

The Missing and the Messy

Right now, in my life, I have more passive friends than active ones. Maybe that’s what happens as we get older. Or maybe it’s just what happens when everyone starts sharing their lives with someone else. In my own life, I suppose my partner is technically my most active friend. He’s the one I see every day, the one who knows the minutiae of my daily rituals. But I don’t think it’s fair on either of us for him to be my everything. I miss the web of other people; I miss the friends who made the stories I look back.

I miss having more of them. But maybe that’s just how life shifts — from constant togetherness to intentional connection. Geography, work, exhaustion, partners — all of it quietly rearranges your social life until, one day, you realize the people you love most are scattered across different schedules, different cities, and different lives.

Still, there’s a longing there for active friends. Not necessarily for more people, but for the ease of it all. For the spontaneity. For the feeling that someone is simply around — not planned, not pencilled in, just simply there.

We’re all busy, all exhausted, all promising to call. We send each other TikToks and memes and links to places we’ll never go. And that, somehow, counts as keeping in touch. There’s something bittersweet about that and this collective desire to stay close, even when closeness itself has become another item on a to-do list.

And yes, I’m a twenty-something writing this. I imagine people older than me have known this for years. But in the spirit of vulnerability, I’m writing it in real time. I don’t think there’s anything revolutionary in what I’m saying. I’m simply observing the stage of life I find myself in, and trying to make sense of it.

On the Seasons of Friendship

In my humble opinion both kinds of friendships are absolutely necessary. My best friend has three kids now. We are not teenagers anymore. We do not simply walk three streets over at 3pm on a Thursday to take Photobooth pictures on her Mac. I have also met so many incredible women in the past year that I can spend a Saturday night drinking and dancing with. Maybe active friends remind you who you are in the world at this exact moment, and passive friends remind you who you’ve been. Perhaps it’s not about one being better than the other, but about recognizing when you need which kind.

I am both kinds of friend, too. Sometimes I am the one texting constantly, making plans, showing up. Sometimes I am the one replying days later, grateful but distant. And perhaps that’s okay. Perhaps it’s less about frequency and more about the quiet assurance that, no matter how much time passes, the friendship still exists.

Passive or active, I am grateful for all of them. They are my witnesses; they are my reminders that life is better lived with someone to share it with. They are proof that I too am worthy enough of a friendship and to spend company with another. And maybe that’s enough — for now, at least — until we make another memory, however fleeting.

Deeply and dearly yours,

-kitty