The Fragility of Type-2 Fun
Can friendships forged through movement survive when we stop moving?
I am a collector of parallel friendships.
By this I mean my friendships tend to be defined by side-by-side interaction—relationships formed through common activity, practices, rehearsals, or collaboration.
I’ve met most of my friends through sports, jobs, or some sort of physical exertion. Our friendships were cultivated over casual chats on group runs or banter riding bikes along a country road. Our conversations were defined by the rhythm between swings chopping wood in the backyard or by work projects approached shoulder-to-shoulder (or virtual square-to-square) as we reviewed a Figma file or slide deck.
Less comfortable for me are perpendicular friendships, those fostered from conversation across a table or bar. Think: casual chatter at a house party, socializing over dinner, or the bonhomie of a happy hour. I enjoy events like these, but have never quite mastered their intensity, in which conversation itself becomes the activity, passed back and forth like players swatting at a tennis ball to keep it in play. On a hike or run, the conversation is more fluid, moving with the direction of travel, meandering with the interlocutors as they move.
Two forms of friendship: parallel and perpendicular. Neither is better than the other, but they are different.
Hard fun
Parallel friendships emerge from “type-2 fun”, what academics sometimes refer to as “hard fun,” or activities that are not enjoyable in the moment but create a sense of deep reward or pleasure in the aftermath of having completed them.1
Type-2 fun is cycling 50 miles, running a marathon, or hiking up Half Dome. It’s bouldering a tricky problem, kayaking a difficult rapid, or shipping a successful product launch.
Type-2 activities not only create a sense of personal pleasure, but also foster cooperation and strong social bonds. A 2015 study of Brazilian high school students found that the combination of strenuous dancing and synchronized movement increased not only social bonding, but also raised pain thresholds. A study in Psychological Science found that even modestly painful shared experiences like leg squats or submerging a hand in ice water improved group bonding and cooperation.
As yet another study put it, negative experiences can create identity fusion, “a visceral feeling of oneness with the group, such that the borders between one’s personal and social selves are porous.”
I think the best recent representation of parallel friendship is depicted in the opening scene of the A24 movie Warfare. The film opens with a squad of young SEALs in Ramadi in 2006, crowded around a laptop, watching a YouTube video of Eric Prydz’s banger club hit “Call On Me.”
It’s an effective opener. Without a single line of dialogue, the scene captures the intimacy of military relationships: despite their youth and differing backgrounds, the men’s camaraderie is obvious.2
I was stunned when I stumbled upon this clip. Because in the fall of 2006, the year Warfare takes place, I was competing in my final season of collegiate cross country. And my team once did the exact same thing: we watch Prydz’s horny music video together, whooping and nodding our heads, getting pumped up for a workout.
This is not to compare sports with the sacrifice of military service, but only to say those friendships look familiar to anyone who’s been on a team or part of a group with common purpose.
Relationships that emerge from parallel friendships can be intense indeed. One might assume that such friendships would prove equally durable.
Type-2 fragility
Lately, however, I’ve begun to wonder if type-2 fun might create friendships that are less resilient than I once thought.
Partly this is because I’m currently experiencing personal frailty. I’ve struggled with a knee injury that’s hobbled my ability to compete and exercise socially. This culminated in surgery a couple weeks ago. I’m going to be fine, but hobbling around the house has left me feeling curmudgeonly and unfit, and that, in turn, has me reflecting on how my many relationships based around type-2 fun have been effectively paused while I’ve been injured.
Except now I’m reaching a period of life when pauses in friendships tend to be indefinite.
Over the last decade, many of our close friends have moved away for work or family. Of those who remain, my wife and I see far less of them because both our careers have reached an intense phase. Oh, and we’re parents now. On evenings and weekends, our free time is spent chasing our daughter, squeezing exercise and side hustles in between chores and meal prep.
The friendship dip
My wife and I have entered what culture writer Anne Helen Petersen has labeled “the friendship dip,” the period in early-to-mid adulthood where one’s number of close friends and casual social ties dramatically drops.
Several forces cause the friendship dip: the loss of ambient socialization after high school or college, relocations for jobs or relationships, time constraints from work, and caring for children or aging parents.
In practice, the friendship dip is profoundly lonely. Friendships erode in a haze of diaper changes, chores, and grocery runs. Days pass in a blur of endless work meetings and Zoom calls. Vacations are replaced by trips to visit grandparents. Late nights at bars are replaced by the sleep deprivation of infancy and toddlerhood.
Over time, relationships are slowly replaced by group chats and text threads. Sociability is increasingly reduced to lying in bed alone, illuminated in the soft glow of a phone, swiping through a feed filled with images of distant strangers.3
All this makes me wonder: is there something inherent to the community created by type-2 fun that makes parallel friendships more vulnerable to the friendship dip? Is it less likely to survive the natural social ebbs that come with the middle stages of life?
It could be friendships squeezed entirely into the hours reserved for exercise or sports become harder to sustain in middle age. If those relationships exist partly in service of individual goals around competition or physical self-optimization, other obligations can easily displace them.
Moreover, to paraphrase a quote from Fight Club, “on a long enough timeline, everyone’s physical-activity rate drops to zero.” As we age, recovery becomes slower, muscle mass becomes harder to maintain, and injuries become more disruptive.
This isn’t to say that people can’t still do amazing feats of physical prowess after forty. They certainly can and do. But we need to acknowledge the fact that all flesh is grass. As we grow older, type-2 fun becomes harder to pursue.
What happens if most of your friendships are built atop exercise? What if the intensity of parallel friendships disguises their lack of durability?
The transient ties of training
This might be an issue for more than just me. Americans have never spent more time exercising than we do now.
In a 2025 Substack post, writer Derek Thompson reviewed data showing exercise in America reaching a historical peak. “Americans are working out and playing sports more than any period for which we have good data,” he writes.
The good news is that the fitness boom is part of a broader health wave that includes recent declines in obesity, overdose deaths, traffic fatalities, and homicides.
The bad news is that all this exercise may not be helping us make friends:
We’re socializing far less. Beyond exercise, more perpendicular organizations and forms of sociability—supper clubs, coffee klatches, bowling leagues, Rotary, scouts—are still shrinking in participation. Check out this depressing chart on Boy Scout membership:
The decline in sociability appears to impact men more acutely. Although men and women report loneliness at similar rates, a Pew study found U.S. men significantly less likely to turn to friends, family, or mental health professionals for support. According to analysis from the American Institute for Boys and Men, when men do connect, it tends to be through group activities like clubs and organizations rather than one-on-one relationships.4
One possibility, then, is that male perceptions of acute loneliness—as well as men’s increased likeliness to report feeling disconnected from others, their country, and themselves—is because many men’s close relationships, like mine, tend toward parallel friendships and type-2 fun. That may leave them with fewer avenues to find meaning, support, and a sense of value.
There are glimmers of hope. Thompson notes in his piece that group exercise—like Pilates, yoga, and Barre—is surging. Running and cycling clubs, as many, many, many people have observed, have exploded in popularity. These groups are largely organic, neighborhood-oriented, and cater to a range of abilities, interests, ages, and genders—although they are concentrated among folks in cities who are younger and more affluent.
How might we strengthen the shoots of sociability emerging with these new forms of parallel friendships?
My experience has been that blending exercise with more perpendicular forms of social activity helps strengthen type-2 ties. A few years ago, my weekly run club formalized a post-run coffee and a nibble at a coffee shop. This has been a positive addition to the weekly ritual; it lets folks who are hurt (like me) or running a different pace still spend time with friends.
Formalizing group exercise also helps. Training for the same competition, sharing kit, or collectively volunteering for charitable work goes a long way in knitting together a shared identity that folks are keen to preserve.
All that said, I’d love to hear more ideas on how to strengthen parallel friendships. So here is where you come in!
How are you cultivating friendship these days?
Do you tend to have parallel or perpendicular friendships?
Have you managed to turn a training buddy into a friend? How did that happen?
What friendships do you most value? What do you do to keep that friendship strong?
I’d love to hear from you: leave a comment or reply to this email. It doesn’t need to be long; a sentence or two is plenty! If I get enough responses, I’ll send a follow-up post about friendship and community shaped by your answers.
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The organizational psychologist Mike Rucker describes hard fun as “pleasure is derived from overcoming adversity, reflecting on the experience, and the sense of achievement it brings.”
In a 2025 GQ article, Jack King notes the opening scene of Warfare “reinforces to the audience that these were all but kids, a familiar wartime tragedy. It also gestures towards the camaraderie the men had, absent the opportunity for further character development you'd expect from a more conventional war film. As of writing this piece, the “Call On Me” music video has been viewed 129M times with nearly 900 thousand likes.
The good news is that the evidence suggestions that the friendship dip is temporary. Many people begin to rebuild friendships as children get older and intentionally re-prioritize social connection. Petersen worries, however, optimization culture and work’s domination of millennial life might make climbing out of the friendship dip insurmountable.
Interestingly, millennial men have radically changed the amount of time spent with children relative to previous generations. As Derek Thompson has written, millennial dads spend nearly twice as much time caring for their kids as their fathers spent. Compared with their grandfathers, millennial dads have nearly quadrupled time spent on childcare.
Thompson theorizes that the increase in dad care time is related to a decrease in male socialization within a broader shift of adult leisure from public life to home life. With men are now physically present in the home more often, increased childcare may be partly as a byproduct.
Great piece, Sam. I think like the rest of life, friendships evolve as our circumstances, responsibilities, and/or locations change. My best friends in life and the people I'm closest to in general (even if the form and frequency of that closeness has changed) are the folks I've been in the trenches with. I think 1. It's harder to form new friendships as we get older; 2. Maintaining the old ones often takes a LOT more work than it did in earlier years.
Hi Sam, thanks for highlighting the fragility of friendships, especially for men. Outside of runner buddies—a couple of whom I'd classify as true friends whom I could call when in need—my friendships form and revolve around community involvement, which tends to be more female focused. For example, I've gotten to know a couple of women through our library-organized book club. Book clubs are a great source of connection. Thankfully, our library started a "dudes who read" male-only book club, and I persuaded my husband to go. I worry about my son feeling lonely, but for him, golf provides a group of golf buddies, and his work colleagues have become friends. When I was your age, raising babies then toddlers, I found friends through a postpartum moms' group—but again, that was for the moms. I wish you could find fellow dads for playdates with your kid. Guys need to reach out—as you did with this post. Take care.