Caught in the middle
The plight with medium friendships
Things have been absolutely bonkers around here. May summer is so real between teacher’s appreciation, graduation, classes, my birthday, and Mother’s Day. We have three kids birthdays in all Sundays for close friends. The to-do list is never ending and I have to intentionally choose where to spend my small bursts of energy for the day. Lately that means that I’ve been having to postpone my “medium friends”.
This is a concept that actually came a book that I’m reading. I read the book Finish by Jon Acuff which he talks about the need to “choose what you let go of” in a season when you have less time and concrete goals. Since I’m partial to nurturing friendships, this was hard for me to swallow.
How can I grow medium friendships, if I don’t give them the time to flourish? (more below)
In this column you’ll find:
🌀 The chaos of Maycember
🏋️ Imperfect but consistent strength training progress
🫱🏼🫲🏾 How to navigate medium friendships
💛 Take a quiz: Score your medium friendship
⬆️ This week’s highs:
This time of year quite literally feels like the end of the year. It’s called “Maycember” for a reason. It’s full of events and getting to see family and friends, which is so lovely.
Mother’s Day is hard because I obviously want to celebrate the moms in my life, but I just feel so overwhelmed with the mental load and kinda feel like this holiday I should be off the hook from planning gifts, since I’m the deepest in the trenches of motherhood.
⬇️ This week’s lows:
Between the birthday parties, gradations, teacher appreciation week and Mother’s Day…. I’m so tired of thinking of great gifts for people. I try to be really thoughtful and intentional about gifts, so it’s takes a mental tax.
I’m honestly so terrible at taking my postnatals and am also pretty bad at taking pills in general, so when Needed launched their prenatal (also works as a postnatal) powder I was SOLD. It tastes like a vanilla milkshake. I just use my frother and mix it in with some milk and drink it every morning. Revolutionary. I got a code if you want to try it for yourself, it’s SABRINAM for 20% off. #neededpartner
I started to show up imperfectly into strength training. I bought Stakt weight last December which basically can go up to six pounds. I like that they’re small weights so I can easily add into my routine. (You can also use this code SABRINAM15)
This is my favorite concealer right now (and I try a LOT of them). Never had something work so well that’s this lightweight. Truly a “serum” concealer.
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The plight of a medium friend
The Times wrote an article back in June of 2024 about the vexing situation around Medium Friendships and this circulated a lot online especially in my circles because well, I like to talk about friendship. The article was so popular that they did a second article on a similar topic at the end of August. So clearly it gained a lot of traction for them.
One line in particular stood out to me, it said, “Unlike closest friends, medium friends test the limits of your time, love, and energy.” They're kind of onto something.
It's really hard to be a medium friend because you never really know where you stand. Medium friendships are tricky: there is a level of unclear expectations. You're not sure how much effort to put in or what they expect from you. There is the level of guilt complex because you feel like you should be making more of an effort even if that isn’t reciprocated or the connection doesn’t feel natural. Of course there’s social media pressure, right? You see people building these big friend groups and you wonder should I be doing more?
Ultimately, we live in a period where the majority of my readers are in transitional periods of their lives. Even best friendships are hard to make time for when you are in a stage of life where you're graduating, getting engaged, have career changes, getting married, or starting a family. There's so many things happening in our lives that investing in friendships, even the ones you know are great and reciprocal, are hard.
But adult friendships are really important. Women need other women, and I'm not just making up. UCLA did a study talking about stress response in 2000 and it’s more than just flight or flight for humans — for women it’s “tend and befriend”
It says “the human stress response has been characterized both physiologically and behaviorally as fight or flight. Although fight or flight may characterize the primary physiological response to stress in both males and females, we propose behaviorally female responses are marked by a pattern of tend and befriend. Tending involves nutrient activities designed to protect the self and offspring that promote safety and reduce stress. Befriending is the creation and maintenance of social networks that may aid in this process.”
Women literally flock to other women to talk about things that are happening in their lives and it's a stress response. We actually need each other.
But it's hard.
It's hard to build friendships.
It's even harder to build adult friendships.
And compared to a relationship or even a close friendship where those rules are really defined, medium friends are complicated. But the truth is, how can a medium friend become more if we don’t make time for it?
What if we don’t need to make medium friendship into a best friendships? There is value in medium friendships. We need casual, we need easy. We don’t always need to answer the phone on the first ring. Maybe they're filling a gap for a specific need, like a workout buddy or a work confidant. There's a level of emotional buffering in a medium friend. They can provide a sense of connection, but if they don't know everyone in your circle, that outside opinion is incomparable.
Making friends as an adult is hard as it is, but if we start to take it personally, we truly aren't going to get anywhere in building the communities that we need.
So here's how I recommend navigating medium friendships.
We need to shift our perspective and value friendships for what they are, not what they aren’t. At the end of the day, decide where your energy is best spent. Prioritize the friendships that feel balanced and reciprocal.
If you’re always the one texting first or making plans, and they’re always the one bailing, maybe hit pause. Let them take the lead and see what happens.
And here’s the thing: it’s okay to let go of the guilt about not chasing every friendship. If a so-so connection starts to feel stale or stuck, it’s perfectly fine to let it fade naturally. Not every friendship is meant to last forever—and that’s okay. 💛
Medium friendships are not glamorized, but they're an important part of where we are and truly in the society that we live in that is just so busy. Normalize not feeling guilty about having different levels of friendship and not trying to move people from tier to tier. Sometimes it's okay for people to stay exactly where they are.
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