The best friendship trends to do with your best friend are the ones built on shared fun, similarity, and a little openness — the three ingredients researchers keep circling back to. Not every shareable activity earns its place on the feed. Some deepen a bond. Some just fill an evening. This list ranks the popular ones by how well they actually work.
Friendship, at its simplest, is a relationship of mutual affection — a stronger bond than the ones we have with classmates or coworkers, marked by choosing each other, enjoying the time, and supporting one another. According to Wikipedia's overview of friendship research, the bond has been studied across sociology, psychology, and communication, and certain features show up again and again: shared activities, proximity, and a positive, supportive role. The activities below are ranked against that yardstick.
How we ranked these friendship trends
Our analysis uses three plain questions. Does the activity create something to talk about afterward? Does it require showing up as yourself, quirks included? Does it produce a shared thing — a meal, a playlist, an inside joke — that belongs to the two of you?
Activities that score well on all three sit at the top. Activities that are fun but parallel — two people in the same room, each doing their own thing — sit lower. Nothing here is a test of your friendship. It is a guide to spending the time you already give each other a little better.
1. Cooking a meal together
This one tops the list because it does everything at once. You plan, you divide tasks, you improvise when the sauce goes wrong, and you sit down to eat the result. The shared product is real and edible. The small negotiations — who chops, who stirs, whose recipe wins — are exactly the kind of low-stakes friction that teaches you how your friend handles a problem.
The research angle backs the instinct. Children tend to describe friendship in terms of sharing, and studies find children are more likely to share with someone they consider a friend, per Wikipedia's summary of developmental psychology findings. Sharing food is one of the earliest cues people use to signal closeness. Cooking together is that cue, grown up.
2. A two-person watchlist and debrief
Pick a show neither of you has seen. Watch it on your own schedules, then meet to argue about it. The debrief is the activity; the show is just the excuse. This is bonding through shared interpretation — you learn how your friend reads a character, what they forgive, what they cannot.
It also scales to any budget and any distance. A long-distance pair can run the same ritual over a call. What this means practically: choose something with episodes long enough to chew on, and agree to no spoilers between meetings. The waiting is part of the fun. This connects to our earlier piece, Celebrity nail art: how manicures became part of the red carpet look.
3. The swap skill
One of you teaches the other something you are good at. A recipe, a card game, how to hem trousers, how to parallel park without sweating. Then switch roles. The structure is simple, but it hits two of the three ranking questions hard: it requires openness, and it produces a shared skill neither of you had before.
Teaching is also a quietly generous act. You hand over something you cared enough to learn. That signal tends to land, even when the lesson itself is a comedy of errors.
4. The walk with no destination
A regular walk — around the block, a park loop, the same route every week — is the oldest friendship technology there is. Side-by-side conversation is easier than face-to-face for hard topics. There is no screen, no bill, and no performance. You just talk until the loop ends or the talk does.
It ranks below the top three only because it depends more on the talking than the doing. If the conversation is good, this is number one. If you are both tired and silent, it is still pleasant, but it builds less.
5. The themed night in
Assign a theme — a decade, a country, a director — and build the evening around it. Snacks, music, a film, maybe a costume nobody will admit to planning. This is the trend most built for sharing online, and the feed version is fine. But the bonding work happens in the planning texts, the week of buildup, and the joke you will still be making months later.
Themed nights pair well with the swap skill. One month your friend picks the theme; the next, you do. The alternation keeps it from becoming one person's project.
6. The parallel hobby
Two people, same café, different books. Two canvases, one table, no shared plan. Parallel hobbies are genuinely pleasant and worth keeping. They rank here because the bonding is in the proximity, not the activity — closer to the way children first form friendships through physical nearness than the way adults deepen them.
That is not a criticism. Some friendships run on comfortable silence, and a standing parallel hour protects it. Just do not expect it to carry the whole relationship.
7. The group chat challenge
Step counts, photo scavenger hunts, daily trivia prompts. These trends are engineered for sharing, and they do create a reason to message every day. They rank last because the bond they build is thin: the app is the conversation, and the friend is the audience. It works best as a garnish on a friendship that already has substance, not as the meal.
There is also a caution worth naming. Research summarized by Wikipedia on adolescent friendship notes that the influence of a friend depends heavily on how much time you spend with them and how well you fit in together. A challenge that turns into pressure — to perform, to compete, to keep a streak — is working against the affection it is supposed to serve.
What this means for choosing your next activity
Look at the trend, then look at the mechanism. The activities that bond best share three traits: they require a small act of openness, they produce something shared, and they give you something to talk about afterward. Cooking, a watchlist debrief, and teaching each other a skill do all three. A walk does two. A group chat streak does one.
It is also worth remembering what the research on adult friendship makes plain: friendship in adulthood provides companionship, affection, and emotional support, and it contributes to well-being — but it competes with work, distance, and sheer logistics for time. The winning trend is rarely the most photogenic one. It is the one you will actually repeat.
So pick one from the top of this list, put it in the calendar, and let it become a ritual. Trends to do with your best friend come and go. The habit of showing up is the part that stays.
Why friendship trends spread at all
Friendship activities behave like any other trend: something works, it gets shared, and the sharing becomes part of the appeal. The same mechanics that move a silhouette from a red carpet into shops move a date idea from one group chat to a thousand. If that process interests you, our piece on how trends spread follows the full path — and our look at what it takes to start a movement explains why a few early adopters matter more than the size of the crowd. Readers following this should also see Red carpet sustainability: how rewear and archives changed the step-and-repeat.
For more on the aesthetics moving through feeds and shops right now, the trends hub collects the ongoing coverage.
