The People Who Save You a Seat
There are people who will let you stand idly. The best ones will pull up a chair for you.
Those who actually makes room for me, versus who just lets me hover at the edge of things and calls it friendship.
A few weeks ago I went to dinner with some friends I’d call fun, not close. We met up with some of their friends I didn’t really know. Meeting new people is one of my favorite hobbies, so I was excited to be there. Except nobody pulled me into the conversation. Nobody asked me a single question about my life. I sat there for two hours basically watching a movie I wasn’t cast in. (Genuinely impressive how a table of so many can make one person feel invisible.) I’ve also got a friend I’m slowly putting distance between myself and someone who keeps score without ever saying it out loud. She’ll show up if it’s convenient for her. She keeps a running tally of every favor, and cashes it in the moment you stop being convenient. Being around her feels like a transaction I never agreed to.
Neither of those moments are a big deal individually, but they started to become a pattern. This taught me something: you can tell exactly how much room you have in someone’s life by what they do when it costs them something.
The leads me to lean more into the people who do the opposite.
My roommate Madeleine does this constantly, in ways so small she’d probably be embarrassed I’m writing about them. She meal preps and saves me a plate so I have something real to eat when I land from a trip, exhausted, instead of inhaling whatever’s fastest from a drive thru. She knows I hate coming home to a mess after traveling, so she makes an effort to clean the common areas. When I tell her about something in my life (work, boyfriend, new hobby, etc.), she is just as excited as I am if not more. She’ll pick up the phone even when it’s a bad time for her. And she will let me talk through the exact same problem for the fourth time that week without once making me feel like I’m too much. That’s not a grand gesture. That’s just someone who decided, somewhere along the way, that I’m worth the inconvenience.
My friend Blair helped me put together furniture in my new apartment. All of it. On a weekend. For free, and not because she owed me anything. She made it fun. She didn’t perform helpfulness, she just showed up with good music and good vibes and turned a chore into one of my favorite memories from that whole move.
And then there’s Mary, who helped put together an entire birthday party for me this year. A real one, with a timeline. She made a virtual invites, reservations, and made it so Syd coded. She thought through how to make me feel celebrated in a way I genuinely didn’t expect anyone to put that much energy into, let alone someone who already has a full plate of her own.
Here’s the deal. None of these people are trying to win anything. There’s no scoreboard with Madeleine or Blair or Mary. They just decided, quietly, that I belong at their table, and they act like it whether or not I’m watching.
I used to think the goal was to be a good friend to everyone. Now I think the goal is to notice who’s already being one to you, and stop saving your good chairs for people who never bother to sit down.
Life’s too short to keep standing in rooms where nobody’s looking for you. Especially when you already know what it feels like to walk into one where someone saved you a seat.
♡ Syd