Stop “Catching Up” With Your Friends And Bring Back The Casual Hang

Remember when you’d just turn up at your bestie’s place? Or tag along while someone ran errands, or better yet, time it so you could do them together? What the hell happened to that joy?! Now, it’s all structured hangouts, usually just for the sake of catching up. Occasionally, we mix it up with an event for maximum efficiency, but if you or your bestie are in a relationship, those events are reserved for partner time. We go out to dinner. We go out to brunch. What happened to the casual hangout?

Recently, Sabrina Brier went viral (yet again) for her delightfully depressing depiction of the Friend Who’s Desperate to Bring Back The Casual Hang. The comments were filled with people supporting her usually insufferable character and lamenting the slow death of casual hangs. One user expressed that hangouts now feel “so clinical,” and another blamed this loss for the loneliness epidemic — woah, big talk. It seems that I’m not the only one wondering why friends won’t accompany me to drop off returns or get my IUD inserted (rude). So, if this is how so many people feel, why is no one running errands together anymore?

I want to help my bestie debate the merits of different tampons in the drugstore. I want to stand behind them at the checkout and guess the final price of our haul. I want to spend an evening at home, cooking and watching our TV show. Yes, my good people, I want a casual hang.

The issue with friendships today (and yes, I know I sound like a total Boomer) is that they’re all about catch-ups. We meet up with people in structured formats to tell them how our lives are going, but what we don’t do is live together. What we don’t do is CASUALLY spend time together. We’re all busy with our careers, hobbies, self-care, and romantic partners, which makes our friends feel more like a place for diary entries than actual connections.

Casual hangs are the key to solving our isolation problem. They’re how we become a villager in this village of ours. They allow us to see our friends more but expend less energy. It’s about being a part of each other’s day instead of just giving a monologue about how we’ve been living. But how do we do this effectively? I spoke to some friendship experts to get to the bottom of fixing this social crisis.

What happened to running errands together?

Hope Kelaher, author of Here to Make Friends: How to Make Friends as an Adult, thinks the problem is two-fold. First off, we’re low-key antisocial now. “We have adapted to a degree of social isolation, which means that we have less contact with our ‘fringe’ friends or those casual acquaintances,” Kelaher explains. “For instance, if you have a work-from-home day, it may take extra effort and organization to arrange a ‘let’s grab lunch’ on a break versus if you were in an office sitting next to your colleague.”

Second, we’re all still recovering from the pandemic and the social skills blow it dealt us. “The rise of more organized social engagements where there is a goal stems from people’s limited time and their desire to have more experiences post-pandemic isolation,” she says. Also, social media isn’t helping. “People see new experiences on social media and then want to share that they, too, have had a similar experience with their friends.”

With all these “experiences” piling up on our calendar, we tell ourselves we don’t have time for friendship — and yeah, I’m guilty of this, too.

“People say, ‘I don’t have time for friendship,’ but I always tell them to rethink what a hangout looks like,” Danielle Bayard Jackson, relational health educator and author of Fighting For Our Friendships, says. “If your brain is still associating the image of hours-long brunches, you’re going to continue to say, ‘I don’t have time for that.’ But if you can accept that hangouts can be running errands together or squeezing in time to chat during your day, you’ll naturally end up with more hangout hours.”

How do we make time with friends less taxing and more enjoyable?

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If we only see our friends once every couple of weeks for a dinner where we each give a monologue, socializing is gonna feel exhausting. “We all have multiple personas that show up in different parts of our lives,” Kelaher says. “In a group setting, we often get cast into certain roles — like the jokester, the storyteller, or the quiet one — and trying to fit into those roles can feel stressful.” But if a friend comes over to cook dinner, binge-watch reality TV, and chat, life becomes less tiring and cheaper.

Highlight parts of your day that could double as a casual hang. Pilates class on Sunday morning? Invite a friend and grab coffee afterward. New Netflix show just dropped? Invite your bestie over for a binge and snacks. Got errands to run but want some alone time on the couch? Bring a friend along for those errands, then enjoy some me-time. Feeling overwhelmed by life? Go to the cinema with a friend so you can just be with them without the pressure of deep conversation — especially for my fellow depresso girlies (I see you).

Are some friendships not suitable for a casual hang?

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Admittedly, some friendships can feel ill-suited to casual hangs. “For some of us, we feel like we need that buffer or distraction,” Bayard Jackson says. “A lot of us know that we have a certain fragility in our friendships and that we can’t sustain anything without those distractions, without that extra polish and social, exciting social backdrop.” But she urges us to challenge that mindset and try it. If you do, casual hangs will become the norm, and any friend can be a “pasta on the couch” friend.

Kelaher dropped a gym metaphor that I’m obsessed with (even though I’m a Pilates princess who couldn’t do a pull-up if my life depended on it). “This may sound weird, but a casual hang is like a ‘dead hang’ at the gym. It’s a passive move where you hang from a secure bar, stretching and decompressing. A chill hang with a friend is the same — it’s not about performing; it’s about security, decompressing, and just being yourself without fear of judgment. You get that dopamine release, not the cortisol spike from more formal situations.” I’m officially a gym bro now, and I love it.

And before you come for me about long-distance friendships, yes, I know it’s not the same. But even then, casual hangs are possible. I regularly watch TV with my bestie, just texting our reactions back and forth. Or we make impromptu calls instead of scheduled ones or send long voice notes during our mental health girlie walks. Make it work for you — it’s all about feeling connected without feeling overwhelmed.