The One Part of Friends That Was Actually Totally True

Downtime My social life in the 1990s was dependent on serendipity in a way that feels utterly alien now. By Enter your email to receive alerts for this author. Sign in or create an account to better manage your email preferences. Unsubscribe from email alerts Are you sure you want to unsubscribe from email alerts for Dan Kois? Aug 11, 202611:00 AM Illustration by Tolga Akdoğan Welcome to Party Like It's 1996, a six-week time-travel challenge to help you rediscover the lost art of hanging out. Sign up here to get this series in your inbox. Hey buuuuu-ddy, Since the last time we talked (yesterday), you’ve received 300 Instagram notifications, 40 texts, and eight phone calls from Potential Spam. So it’s possible you’ve forgotten what Party Like It’s 1996 is all about. We’re here with a six-week challenge to help you (and your friends!) bring the spirit of 1990s socializing—low-tech communication, low-stakes hangouts, low-rise jeans—to your 2020s life. (And if you sign up for the challenge as a Slate Plus member, you’ll get some extra perks). Here’s a question: Have you been flaked on recently? That is, did you invite someone to do something, and they were noncommittal, and then at the last minute they texted “oops sorry can’t make it” and you felt bad? This is a hazard, I think, of a culture that is dependent on plan-making, socials-checking, and Partiful updates: Everyone has plenty of opportunities to find out what’s going on and who’s going to be there, and then they have plenty of opportunities to find out what’s going on somewhere else and who’s going to be there. Not to mention all the stuff on Netflix! It all can become somewhat paralyzing. And so they flake on you, for some other night out or for no night out at all—and because flaking abounds in 2026, you, the flakee, are expected to suck it up and text back “oh np totally understand.” Where going out in the 2020s feels like choosing from an overwhelming number of paths, going out in the 1990s meant following a single path—but you had no idea where it might lead. One thing I definitely remember about my social life in the 1990s was that it was dependent on serendipity in a way that feels utterly alien now. We’d head out to a café, assuming that someone we knew would already be there or would arrive shortly. Think of all those scenes of the various Friends showing up at Central Perk, secure in the knowledge that eventually another Friend would join them. For all those Gen Zers who have become inordinately fond of this sitcom due to the ritualized bonhomie its characters display: This is the truest part about Friends! (The size of their apartments, not so true.) This is how it was. Even if we didn’t really feel like going out, we trekked to our various haunts to see who was there. We’d bring a newspaper along so we’d have something to read while we waited. And sometimes no one showed up, and the night was a bust—but not often, because generally your friends really were there for you. If you stood people up too many times, then you wouldn’t have any Friends. We didn’t know that another group of people was doing something totally different across town. We had no idea which bars were “busier than usual” or which restaurants might be able to seat us. Because American cellphone ownership didn’t even reach 50 percent until 2000, we often had difficulty alerting not-yet-present companions that we were changing locations. We developed all kinds of tricks to allow late-arriving friends to track us through the evening: You might tell the bartender where you were going next, or use a payphone to call someone’s landline and leave them a message. (They, in turn, could use another payphone to check their answering machine remotely—the pinnacle of connectivity.) Serendipity might fail us. The movie might suck. It might start pouring just when the café closes. Many was the night I arrived just 15 minutes too late at every location, haplessly making my way through the evening like a character in one of those One Crazy Night comedies. Each time something went wrong, we improvised, and if we couldn’t make things better, at least we had a story to tell when we finally, finally, found our friends. But it wasn’t just Friends—we counted on serendipitous Strangers, too. In an era before dating apps, meeting someone interesting required leaving your home and talking to people you didn’t know. Even those not on the make would regularly strike up a conversation with the person on the next barstool. You had to have something to do, after all, when you finished your newspaper, and they hadn’t invented doomscrolling yet. Usually the person on the barstool was a mechanism to pass the time and no more; sometimes they were bizarre or funny enough to make for a story later. If you saw each other again and again, you might discover that they’d evolved into a weird kind of site-specific friend. And then, sometimes, you’d be in a totally different place—a softball field, the grocery store, the dermatologist’s office—and you’d see your barstool pal, and maybe you’d make the crucial step over the actual-friend threshold. Then you were friends with a dermatologist! Take a little of that questing spirit into this week’s challenge. CHALLENGE NO. 1: GOING OUT Alert some friends that you will be at a certain bar or coffee shop or park at some specific time, and ask them to join you when they can.Bring a print newspaper or magazine or book to the bar, to read until your friends show up. This will occupy your hands without sending you, through the portal of your phone, to a hundred other places. It will also make you look smart.Make a point to strike up a conversation with at least one person you don’t know. If this makes you nervous, try the bartender or the barista—it’s their job.If you go somewhere else, tell the bartender where you’ve gone—late-arriving friends can track you down.Sing some karaoke! Sing at the bar, not in a private room. You are absolutely allowed to use your phone to take video of a friend singing “No Scrubs.”See a movie! Walk into a theater and, whatever is playing next, buy some tickets for that.If anyone starts a debate, do not under any circumstances solve the debate by searching up the answer on your phone. Let the speculation and bullshitting continue for as long as possible. Allow serendipity to be your guide, and don’t worry when things go wrong. For one night only, approach every stranger as—in the words of that other ’90s TV touchstone, The Simpsons—just a friend you haven’t met. I’ve already loved hearing from readers, many of whom sent amazing memories of the 1990s. Josie C. recalled Saturday mornings recording take after take of a new answering-machine message. Miranda B. wrote an ode to being unavailable, out of touch, which was totally fine “unless you were a surgeon, a stock trader, or a first responder.” Nick P. recalled the pleasure of seeing a new movie “without reading 10362937201616 reviews online.” Kevin S. recalled the days pre–Google Maps—hell, pre-MapQuest—when he would write the directions to places he drove frequently on a series of index cards he stored in his glove compartment. And Christina B. remembered that in the ’90s, because we didn’t have the internet, “we were unaware of just how truly fucked we were.” Party Like It’s 1996 is going to try to bring all those feelings back into your life—although we’re all still fucked, sorry about that. As you pursue Challenge No. 1, I’d love to hear bulletins from your massive nights, your boring nights, your weird nights. How did things feel different from a typical evening out? Who did you meet? What went wrong? Send a scene report to 1996@slate.com, and I might feature your story in the next email. See you out there, Dan Party Like It’s 1996 Six challenges to help you bring back the lost art of hanging out. Relationships Friendship Party Like It’s 1996