The Dispatch

Continued from Page One.

If the recession is mechanical, though, the recovery can be too — which is the whole reason MOOD's platonic MOODs exist. They're an attempt to re-supply the missing inputs deliberately. Just Friends provides the declared, romance-free space to seek friendship openly (itself something adult culture made weirdly hard). Event Friends and Nerdy Times supply the repeated, activity-based shared context — the standing game night, the recurring event crew — that is precisely the mechanism the friendship recession destroyed, and precisely the one that (research and common sense agree) rebuilds male friendship especially well. You cannot will yourself out of a friendship recession. But you can re-engineer the conditions that produce friendship, and that is an entirely tractable problem.

This piece discusses loneliness and isolation. If it resonates personally, reaching out to someone you trust — or a support line — is a real and worthwhile step.

LOS ANGELES — Since the last column charted the friendship recession in alarming detail, this one offers the practical antidote: an actual, unsentimental field manual for making a friend as an adult, a task that is genuinely harder than it should be and that nobody teaches. Your correspondent has field-tested this. It works. It also requires doing the one thing everyone skips.

Step one: show up repeatedly to the same activity. Friendship needs repetition, so pick a recurring thing — a class, a league, a game night, a volunteer shift, a run club — and go, again and again. One appearance builds nothing; the magic is in becoming a regular, because familiarity is the soil friendship grows in. Consistency beats charisma every time.

Step two: have a shared activity carry the early interaction. Don't try to befriend a stranger through raw conversation; let the thing you're both doing do the social work, exactly as it did when you were kids. The activity gives you something to talk about and a reason to be together, which removes the terrifying blankness of "so... wanna be friends?"

Step three — the one everyone skips — explicitly initiate the hangout outside the activity. This is where adult friendship lives or dies, and where almost everyone fails, because it's awkward. You have to actually say: "hey, a few of us are getting food after, want to come?" or "we should grab a coffee sometime — what's your number?" Adults treat this small directness as strange, and so they stay in the pleasant-acquaintance limbo forever, waiting for a friendship that never spontaneously ignites because nobody ever takes the initiating step. The friendship recession is, in large part, a recession of people willing to be the one who asks. Be the one who asks. It's mildly awkward for four seconds and then it's just a plan.

MOOD's platonic MOODs are built to make all three steps easier, especially the hard one. Event Friends and Nerdy Times supply steps one and two — the recurring shared activity, the built-in reason to interact — while removing the weirdness of showing up alone. And Just Friends is, in essence, step three made normal: a declared, romance-free space where "I want to make a friend" is the whole stated point, so the initiating ask isn't awkward, it's simply the function of the room. The structure lowers the barrier. But you still have to be the one who asks. That part, no app can do for you — and honestly, you wouldn't want it to. The asking is where the friendship starts.

LAFAYETTE — Nearly every adult now maintains at least one, and it is one of the quiet tragedies of modern friendship: the group chat that never meets. You know the one. Six or eight friends who genuinely love each other, a chat that periodically flickers to life with "we NEED to get together soon," a flurry of enthusiastic agreement, a couple of "yes let's do it!!", and then... nothing. The plan dissolves back into the ether. The chat goes quiet. Three weeks later someone posts "miss you guys, we should really hang out," and the cycle begins again, and is again completed by no one. It is a group chat as a monument to intentions, a shrine to the hangout that never happens.

This bureau finds the phenomenon genuinely poignant, because the affection is real — these aren't people who've drifted apart in feeling, they're people who've drifted apart in logistics. They want to see each other. They just can't seem to convert the wanting into an actual event, and so a warm friendship slowly starves inside a chat that only ever discusses the meal it never serves. The love is intact. The mechanism for acting on it has failed.

Why does the conversion fail so reliably? Because "we should hang out" is a vague intention with no owner, no date, no structure — and vague intentions with no owner are exactly the things adult life never gets around to. Everyone assumes someone else will make it concrete. No one does, because making it concrete requires someone to pick a date, propose a place, and herd the others, and that's work nobody's assigned to do. The gap between "we should" and "we are" is a specific, unglamorous piece of coordination labor, and the group chat has no one to perform it.

This is precisely the gap Event Friends is designed to close, and it does it by changing the fundamental unit from a conversation to an event. Instead of a chat endlessly discussing a hypothetical hangout, someone creates or joins an actual event — a real thing, at a real time, that people join and show up to, with its own group chat attached to the plan rather than floating free of it. The vague "we should get together" becomes "this event, Saturday at 3, join if you're in." The structure supplies the owner, the date, and the place that the group chat never could. Event Friends is, in a sense, the anti-group-chat: it exists specifically to convert the intention the group chat only ever talks about into a plan that actually happens. The affection was never the problem. The missing structure was. So build the structure, and let the group chat finally, mercifully, meet.

LOS ANGELES — Today is Bisexual Visibility Day (September 23), and your correspondent wants to use it to talk about a specific, oddly persistent problem: the way mainstream dating apps have long struggled to actually see bisexual and other non-binary-orientation people, forcing a beautifully varied reality into rigid either/or boxes that fit almost no one who lives in the middle. Visibility is the theme of the day, and dating tech has a genuine visibility problem worth naming.

The erasure is both social and structural. Socially, bi+ people face a well-documented double dismissal — treated as "actually straight" or "actually gay," their orientation waved off as a phase, a stopover, or an indecision — which is exhausting and invalidating in equal measure. And dating apps have historically encoded that erasure into their architecture: rigid orientation categories, binary gender-interest toggles, matching logic that assumes everyone sorts cleanly into one box or its opposite. When the software itself can't represent who you are, it delivers a small, daily message that you don't quite fit — that your reality is an edge case the system didn't bother to model. That's erasure by data structure, and it's its own quiet harm.

The fix is not a marketing gesture; it's a data-model decision. To actually see people across the spectrum, a platform has to represent orientation and attraction as they actually are — a spectrum, self-positioned, not a pair of mutually exclusive boxes.

Which is precisely how MOOD's LGBTQ+ Community MOOD is built. Rather than forcing rigid categories, it uses an interest-scale self-positioning model — you place yourself where you actually are, along a spectrum, on your own terms — paired with a reciprocal-visibility rule that governs who sees whom on mutual terms. The point of that design is exactly the point of today: to let people be seen as they actually are, in their own words, rather than flattened into a box that was never built with them in mind. Visibility, in the end, is an architecture question as much as a social one. You cannot be seen by a system that has no way to represent you — so you build the system to represent the full spectrum, and then, at last, people can show up as themselves. Happy Bi Visibility Day. This paper sees you, and thinks the software should too.