Group Chats Don’t Replace Friendship—They Can Keep It Alive

As much as I like to claim the idea of “chosen family” as queer inheritance, it’s a stretch. It was my parents who first taught me that friends are the family you choose. I’m certain because “friends are the family you choose” is what it says in tawdry cursive on a picture frame that hangs in the front hallway of my childhood home. My parents’ friends from high school—my aunts and uncles—smile in matching Disney T-shirts and next to Christmas trees. When Keally came to visit, she spotted the frame and pinched my cheek. Then she sent a picture to the group chat. Pointed out that, in spite of the apple’s sour insistence, he hasn’t fallen far from the tree.

The group chat dates back to 2013, when Keally, our friends, and I graduated from college. After four snug years in Providence, we were all about to scatter, one of us all the way back to Nairobi. We needed a way to stay in touch. And so our group chat was born, called—in spite of the expensive degree we’d just earned—friends with a z, all caps.

I met my “FRIENDSZ” in the fall of 2009, but it took until the housing lottery that spring for me to engineer us together. We jaunted around campus, debating the merits of the industrial revolution. We wanted, sexually speaking, to at least bloom late. The following winter marked our first-annual secret Santa. On the bathroom mirror, I wrote the date of the gift exchange with a cautionary postscript: “Be thoughtful.” That night, Maya served marzipan and mulled wine. When she dusted off her flute, we all warbled a few hymns.

In college, we sometimes made plans by texting—first on flip phones, then smartphones—but any group chat that sprung up was temporary, strictly utilitarian. In fact, Keally didn’t have texting for years, and we often forgot, shooting messages into the void. It didn’t matter. We lived together and saw each other constantly. Over summer breaks, we traded long, rambling emails.

It came time to graduate. As if I were dying, I bequeathed one treasure to each friend: the license plate from my busted Honda; sweatshirts from the RI high schools where I’d coached debate; a curvy cardboard chair I’d built for an intro architecture class. We corralled our extended families under one roof for dinner and mini thesis presentations. The next morning, we pinned Divest Coal patches to our mortar boards and shouted over the college president.

Soon after, I compiled the inaugural issue of 40161, a zine named after our shared street addresses. Dan tells the story of “gettin’ stupid” as a high school wrestler. In “Votes and Loathing in Las Vegas,” Emily recounts the sweaty summer she spent registering voters at a bus depot. And in an untitled poem of mine, a “bluebird takes off her beak to fly,” maybe a loopy metaphor for my recent coming out.

My friends and I love an archive. So eager to remember the present, we often find ourselves preemptively nostalgic. As soon as she got her smartphone, Keally started to film home videos, getting us to narrate them the way our parents once did, their camcorders held up close to our faces. “What day is today?” Keally would ask whomever the camera was trained on, her voice sickly sweet. “And can you tell us where we are?”

It’s March of 2022. I’m alone in my apartment in Columbus, where I moved for graduate school. My boyfriend brought me this painting of nude cowboys back from Spain. That empty pot by the window housed a monstera I finally washed my hands of. And right here on the radiator is a framed photo of my chosen family. I’m farther from them now than I have been since we met.

At least I have the group chat. I can hardly imagine adulthood without it—an anchor, a sounding board, a rare constant in my twenties that accompanied me to every new apartment, new job, new relationship.

I know I’m not alone. In “Long Live the Group Chat,” Aaron Edwards highlights how the medium carves out necessary spaces of solace and solidarity, especially for friends of color navigating racism. And in her poem “Self-Portrait With No Flag,” which I taught for many years, Safia Elhillo pledges allegiance not to her friends, but “to the group text.” When I had my high school students write similarly styled poems, that was the only line—so specific and so universal—that anyone ever copied verbatim.

Most people I know are part of one, usually several. I asked around. Jonathan said he’s in “Gay YA Fancition,” “Thirsty Biddies of Color,” and “Anti-Social Social Club,” all made up of different friends from college. Roommate group chats help ensure the rent gets paid and the chores get done. There are whole-family and siblings-only group chats, classmate and coworker group chats. Others are niche: one friend’s “Cat Chat” convenes a few cat dads; and in another’s, “Dude Raunch,” straight ladies and their gay best friend dish about men. Many group chats are petty, but very few, thankfully, are subpoenaed and made public.

Maybe they are already passé. In a January episode of Food 4 Thot, Joseph Osmundson wonders, “Are we still into group chats?” Fran Tirado says no because a friend just ruined one. “How do you implode a group chat?” Joe asks. “I don’t know,” Fran says, “be a fucking sociopath?” Tommy Pico also says no. He complains some of his work chats have “devolved” because people keep exiting them dramatically. Only Denne Michele Norris leans yes. They’re entertaining, she says, as long as she can mute them.

Many group chats are petty, but very few, thankfully, are subpoenaed and made public.

Even the dowdy New York Times recently sounded their death knell, describing the group chat boom as a product of lockdown, now bust as pandemic fatigue sets in and we try in fits and starts to transition to life in 3D: “Group chats, like all chats, are not meant to go on forever.”

Oh well, my friends and I have never been that cool. We read, we camp, we send each other snail mail. Most of us work in the labor and climate movements, some as organizers or lawyers. We are, it’s true, queerer now than we were in the aughts—those dark days before the internet was normalizing everything. And the group chat holds us together.

Part diary, part community bulletin board, “FRIENDSZ” is a social network for nine. Egg sends photos of the plants native to North Carolina. Emily floats her latest theories about the end of the world, either how to avert it or how best to acclimate ourselves to its inevitability. “Looks like a bomb exploded,” Keally wrote this fall, captioning a photo of smoke from a nearby wildfire. We followed Becca’s pregnancy with an app that tracks fetus growth through millennial throwbacks: once the size of a Furby, then that of a crystal ball used on set for Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. Occasionally, we ask for favors. Luke may want extra eyes on profile photos or a tricky sentence. Dan once needed to finish reading a book on a tight deadline, so we divvied up and recorded the remaining chapters for him to listen to on a long drive.

When the pandemic hit and geography dissolved, the group chat piled into weekly Zoom calls. A PhD in public health, Gabe broke down the Covid science. We fretted. We set up a book club, and I cried alone on a beach reading Cantoras, a novel about queer friendship in fascist Uruguay. We chipped in for a digital mime class, and a Parisian asked us to hold long, quiet squats. We peeked out from behind walls and, bashfully, plucked a daisy for someone who caught our eye.

In retrospect, it’s silly we’d never thought of video calls; we’d been apart for years. But maybe it’s not surprising. Busy with our personal and professional lives, our political work and our partners, we were content to settle for the sporadic convenience of the group chat until we saw each other again. Covid rejiggered that calculus. Now, the Zoom calls have stuck. As the pandemic receded, we transitioned to every other week, and the book club persists.

If quarantine brought me even closer to long-distance friends, then my group chat determined which ones. It was a question of infrastructure, of momentum. A text thread existed on my phone, which translated to a grid of recurring boxes on my computer. “FRIENDSZ” often exerts itself this way, acting on us gravitationally. So much so that it can be hard to reach escape velocity, even if you want to.

Gabe is my ex-boyfriend, the only partner who snuck in since he and I had started dating senior year. When we broke up, I certainly wasn’t going to leave the chat. Neither was he, it turned out, not after more than five years. So, in part because we were connected by something larger than ourselves, the two of us figured out a new way to love each other.

I think when an individual relationship is relatively weak or temporarily strained, the group chat incentivizes both parties to work it out. More importantly, it gives them a low-stakes way to try—text an emoji, link to an inane or infuriating article—kind of like a middle school date to the movies with your crush, all your friends in tow.

The same goes for someone who steps back from the group chat. Maybe a new job is intrusively demanding or a liaison sours. Or maybe they start to feel alienated from the group itself, that it’s no longer the home it once was. Rather than turn the chat into a trap, forcing someone to pledge their rote allegiance, I think it should make room for them to pull away from the whole but stay committed to its parts. Even as they take space, the group chat endures—there for them if and when they want it.

It’s important to break the “we” apart. Otherwise I risk flattening the truth. The group chat may construct a group identity, but we each relate to it differently—especially Maya, the group chat’s only member of color, who has lived most of her life outside the US. This is just one story of “FRIENDSZ,” my story. Which, even here, I have rosily glossed, nostalgic and on my own in the midwest. In fact, while the group chat hasn’t imploded, it’s had some close calls. It means more to some than to others. And how could it not? A decade has passed; a lot has happened. Flung across the country, we have grown up and built lives with orbits of their own.

We’ve chosen new family too. I survived my first teaching job alongside Moira, who repeated as a mantra, “You’re doing everything right.” I weathered the pandemic with Violet, who invariably had a game up her sleeve and an ice cream sandwich in the freezer. Out in Columbus, I’m now part of “Bubbe, the Film,” a hyperactive group chat named for the queer Rosh Hashanah rom-com a few of my classmates and I joke about writing.

Still, that doesn’t mean my “FRIENDSZ” don’t miss each other, sometimes terribly. Hanging on the chalkboard in my parents’ kitchen is a magnet that swears “friends, like wine, are better old.” And that’s true too: sometimes you want to call up friends so old you taste the barrel. Sometimes you need to. In the wake of tragedies and losses, heartbreaks and depressions—some intensified by quarantine’s isolation—we have had to support each other from afar. The group chat helps us do that. We have disseminated GoFundMes and tracked down therapists. We have flooded each other with messages: We love you. We are thinking of you. You are not alone.

We have had to support each other from afar. The group chat helps us do that.

I think that’s what the Times misunderstands: The group chat is a means, not an end. Not what our friendship is, but what keeps it alive. An archive of the meanwhile. “FRIENDSZ” stitches us together from the last time we saw each other in the world—which Dan and Emily once referred to as “meatspace” but now bleakly call “charspace”—to the next, and all the way back to when we met as teenagers. For now, at least, we continue to choose each other.

After the group chat finally got vaccinated, we converged on central Jersey. We spent one day at an arboretum, another down the shore. Over bowls of cabbage salad, we recited a familiar grace: “Among other wonders of our lives, we are alive / with one another.” We got drunk and marveled at the persuasive likelihood of an advanced dino civilization, lost in the gaps of the fossil record.

On the last day of our trip, the August humidity broke. It rained most of the afternoon. We all crowded onto the front porch—our phones quiet in the kitchen, upstairs, or wherever else we’d forgotten them. We dipped pretzels in yogurt and read aloud from the latest issue of 40161. As Keally shared her essay, she started to cry. I squeezed her shoulder, we hugged her, she was not alone. The rain kept falling, and we chatted for what felt like forever.

• 0