Why It's Good to Be Friends With People You Have Nothing in Common With

Oscar and Felix, Laverne and Shirley, Grace and Frankie, Walter White and Jesse Pinkman. What do any of them have in common?

They are all “odd couples”, examples of polar opposites attracting in a fictional friendship.

Some of my good friends in life have ended up being people that I would not necessarily have chosen as friends based on first or even second impressions (saying that if someone gives you a bad vibe, trust that instinct).

I’m talking about lifestyle and/or personality type differences. This was something I learned when I made my first “opposite” type of friend in college.

Some of my best friends and I have lots in common, especially my friends from high school. I was a bookish theatre dork, some of my other friends were different kinds of “outsiders”, but we all had a lot in common culturally when it came to movies and music and how we dressed.

But when I got to college in the autumn of 1993 I struggled to make friends at first. A lot of the girls in my dorm were aspiring cool girl types. It felt like they judged everyone on first impressions quickly, and if you weren’t instantly approved in some invisible way you were out of their clique.

I reverted back to my naturally introverted ways for a while. In my first semester of freshman year, my roommate was a year older and understandably had zero interest in me, so I was in an awkward boat socially.

There was one girl on my floor who didn’t come into my orbit until our second semester. Annie* was not someone I would have necessarily looked at and thought “we should be friends” on first impression.

We were very different, and I couldn’t see how we fit together at first.

She reminded me of one of my best friends as a child. She was a tomboy, and so was Annie. Except tomboy-type girls sometimes have a rougher time of it in high school and college. Annie had gravitated towards guy friends in her teens.

Annie was a person completely without guile. She was exactly who she presented herself as, she didn’t have a fake bone in her body.

If she wanted to be your friend, she pursued you unabashedly. She didn’t possess a lot of the qualities that many girls expect each other to have.

She was short on patience, and often tact. She said what she meant, without sugar-coating it, and initially, that rubbed me the wrong way or sometimes hurt my feelings. I was used to the softer, less direct communication style of my other female friends.

I found myself avoiding her slightly. She was just so full-on. If she wanted to hang out she would pester me to do things I wasn’t particularly interested in until I relented (“take a hint” was not in her vocabulary!). She liked the outdoors and being active generally, whereas I was more of a homebody (still am!).

Annie also only listened to country or disco, which was weird in the 90s (admittedly I had a lot of secret shame/uncool music too, my music snobbery was largely a front). Eventually, she won me over to some country and yes disco (I now think a lot of disco music is awesome, we just forgot about that for a while!).

I wanted us to braid each other’s hair and talk about boys, but Annie didn’t see the point in wasting time mooning over guys. She would tell me to stop overthinking things and just go for it, with whoever it was, and I would look at her like she was a crazy person. There was no possible way I could go for it, I wouldn’t know where to begin! I needed to have several unrequited crushes I had no intention of acting on at all times just to live in the world, obviously!

By the time summer rolled around I was mostly looking forward to seeing old friends and my life feeling “normal” again.

It hadn’t occurred to me that that was unlikely to happen. Many of my friends were scattered around the country, some of them were off in Europe or on other adventures. The ones who had stayed local had jobs and boyfriends or whatever else going on. We did see each other, but it wasn’t the high school reunion vibe I had pictured.

Meanwhile, Annie was bugging me to come visit her. I am lazy by nature and rightly sensed this would not be a relaxing girl’s trip watching movies and eating ice cream.

Sure enough, on the first day, she got me to ride a horse, something I had never done before. Her family kept horses boarded and she had grown up riding.

It was comically terrible, the old nag she put me on suddenly had a new lease of life and started bucking and galloping and doing all of the scary horse stuff she swore this demon beast was no longer capable of. Annie found it all hilarious; I was a little grumpy afterward needless to say!

But it’s hard to stay mad at someone who doesn’t indulge your self-pity and is weirdly energetically immune to drama. She had more fun and games in store for the weekend, like climbing a mountain, and other stuff I can’t remember (I couldn’t walk by the end of my visit!).

By the end of the trip, we ended up having a couple of heart-to-hearts, and I realized Annie did have a more sensitive side that she probably only showed me once she trusted me.

We became roommates, and later housemates and best friends.

She became more chilled and willing to watch cheesy rom coms and eat ice cream with me, and I would begrudgingly do exhausting things like play racquetball and bike or run or climb hills (when forced!).

We worked as cater waiters at weddings at a hotel the next town over. I stunk at this: while she effortlessly carried trays of ten dinner plates, my manager followed me around waiting for plates to fly off the back (this also happened at my previous waitress gig, I really was terrible). I wanted to quit a bunch of times but the money was good, and she kept me going with her annoyingly effective pep talks.

She didn’t abide quitting on anything unless it was really merited. She always kept me motivated whenever I was low, she was never one of these “yeah just do what you want” friends.

We also played pool, a lot. When we went to bars, she was kind of a shark from growing up playing with her guy friends. She taught me the basics and a few tricks, and it was insanely fun to play guys and often beat them, usually much to their shock and annoyance! (This was entirely down to how good she was, I was functional at best!)

It was good for me to have someone push me out of my comfort zone on a regular basis, left to my own devices I would not have done most of the things that we did together.

My desire to click with like-minded people in college was still there, though. I made one friend for a while who was aesthetically my cup of tea, called Elle.

Elle was a cool girl, seemingly worldly-wise, great at eyeliner, and full of exotic stories. But in reality, she was mostly intensely self-absorbed. For a while, I fooled myself that it didn’t matter.

Being her friend made me feel like the bohemian, arty college girl I craved as some sort of identity for myself. We borrowed each other's long bell-adorned hippy skirts, she indulged my romantic obsessions, and I hers. But the friendship, while briefly intense, evaporated before long.

Annie didn’t hold it against me, maybe since she had other friends of her own. But she never liked my flaky friend who ditched me when I was no longer a shiny penny, she could judge people a bit better than me I guess.

She and I rarely borrowed each other’s clothes, once in a while she would borrow something of mine when she wanted to look “slutty” for the club (lol! I didn’t dress particularly slutty I just wore clothes that weren’t hideous! 😉). “Give me a tight shirt!” she would demand, and it was one of the few times we matched. We had completely different tastes in men, the aforementioned music, and a million little things that didn’t really matter.

She thought my hippy tendencies and yoga were goofy, and she delighted in teasing me. But never in an overly mean way, it was more like were sisters.

Annie dragged me to an actual country and western bar — in western Massachusetts. It was a Deliverance meets Rhinestone Cowboy-esque experience, but we always had fun no matter what.

When she came to visit me in NYC, she was far outside her comfort zone, and it was my turn to be the tour guide to a world she wasn’t crazy about.

We didn’t exactly match on the outside, but we grew to be as close as friends can be in the ways that matter.

When we are younger it’s pretty easy to make friends: we meet a new kid, decide to play and take it from there. First impressions don’t matter much. I lost that for a while, maybe having found a niche in high school I became close-minded in ways I didn’t realize.

I think having such a reliable and true (if challenging at times!) friend in my life at that age was a blessing. It makes me sad to think I held her at arm’s length when we first met, because if she wasn’t so tenacious I would have missed out on one of the great friendships of my life.

Because she was different from me, because our communication styles and tastes were different, things that I thought were much more important to a friendship than they were.

As I moved on to young adulthood and met new people in the workplace, I became friends with people from all walks of life. I know this happens to many people, but I think making a friend like Annie in college was a good primer for me on how to adapt to the world.

I have friends on the complete opposite end of the political spectrum from me. I have friends who are ten or twenty years older (and when I started blogging, one of my closest friends was someone over a decade younger (which was weird, to now be the “old” friend!).

I think people who limit themselves when finding friends are missing out on a lot of possibly great friendships they could make if they stepped outside their comfort zones a bit.

All that really matters is does a person want to hang out with you without needing a reason, can they have fun doing whatever, be flexible on your differences, and occasionally listen to your sob stories and share their own.

It’s life-enhancing to hang out with people who introduce you to new experiences and ideas. I think human nature sometimes encourages us to clump together with other like-minded people, and it’s easy to miss out on people who could be just as important if not more so in our lives if we gave them a chance.

Someone who won’t judge but who will also call you on your shit when necessary. And who cares enough to give you a motivational kick up the ass when you need it. I think anyone who can find a friend like that in life is lucky. Just pray they don’t make you ride a horse first!

*This piece was originally published on Medium