It’s practically “the job of childhood and adolescence,” Catherine Bagwell, a psychology professor at Davidson College, in North Carolina, told me. L ittle matters more in a child’s development than making and maintaining friendships. Continuing to embrace a childlike approach to friendship into adulthood can make for connections that are essentially ageless. Though friendships naturally evolve as we grow up, they don’t need to lose that vitality. Like Simmons, many adults do away with the unhurried hangouts and imaginative play that make youthful friendships so vibrant. “How creative can you get when the premise is two couples are meeting up for mini golf from 7 to 9 p.m.?” she wondered. And compared with the lush world of traditions they had growing up, the typical ways they now spend time with their other adult friends feel stale, Simmons told me. Their friendship still feels special, but they spend much less time together. Simmons, Darragh, and Lodge, who are all now 29 years old, still gather at least once a year, usually during the winter holidays, to play gift-exchange games, dance, and gorge on food. The three friends essentially created their own culture and, with it, a profound bond. Others included three-day sleepovers and a secret code language. These ceremonies were just one part of the elaborate set of practices that RMS developed during middle and high school. They’d chant, “Leaders of Star Clan, we come to these rocks, to drink, share tongues, and faithfully talk.” They’d divulge their feelings, meditate in silence, and drink a palmful of the creek water. The shared area in the middle, featuring a creek with large moss-covered rocks, became their ceremonial site. Inspired by Warriors, an adventure-book series, the girls divided the forest into four territories, and each girl ruled over one. When she was in middle school, she and two other kids, Margo Darragh and Sam Lodge, formed “RMS”-a name combining each of their first initials-that elevated their friend group to a sacred entity.Īs they approached high school, the girls would sneak out of their rural Pennsylvania homes at night and one would drive the rest on a four-wheeler into a forest on Lodge’s neighbor’s property. R achel Simmons was raised Catholic and later joined a Presbyterian church, but she told me the closest thing she’s ever had to true religion came from a childhood friendship.
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