Treating friendship as effortless keeps it shallow
The common view: family is hard, work is hard, romance is hard, at least friendship should be easy. So people don't fight with friends, don't have hard conversations, don't sustain effort. "Isn't the whole point of friendship that you don't have to think about it?"
The problem is structural: anything you treat as an afterthought stays an afterthought. Friends picked up as casual social proof, evidence that you're a normal person who can hang out, don't develop into relationships that can carry real weight. Friendships that survive only on "drifting together" drift apart just as easily.
The counter-evidence is the friendships that actually run deep. Those aren't the result of being lucky enough to meet the right people, as if they fell from the sky. They're the result of time, patience, repetition, and yearning. The people weren't special; the investment was.
Friendship can't be the bedrock of your life if you treat it as something that should require no effort.
Source claim: The cultural expectation that friendship should be effortless is exactly what prevents it from becoming foundational.