You should be having more slumber parties with your friends

It had been a long week, and Tonna Obaze really wanted to hang out with her friend Bria. But she also didn’t want to get off the couch. A logical solution emerged: a sleepover.

They both worked late that Friday night — Obaze, 28, is the founder of a consulting firm — and Bria arrived in sweats once she finished up. They raided Obaze’s fridge, ordered takeout, and queued up a movie, but they barely made it past the opening credits before launching into a freewheeling conversation covering everything from family to therapy to dating. Eventually, they fell asleep on the couch, side by side. Though the friends both live in New York City, they yearned for more distraction-free time together than a 90-minute dinner reservation afforded. 

“There were even a couple tears shed where we, as people in our late 20s, our early 30s, have just been yearning to get back to this friendship where you can sit on the couch and eat whatever’s in the fridge, watch a movie, and just catch up with each other with no ending or timing in sight,” Obaze says.

The humble sleepover is a youthful rite of passage that gradually becomes less thrilling as you age. Once a place for snacks, movies, and staying up way past bedtime, the allure begins to fade as teens gain more independence. Who needs to hole up in a friend’s basement when more exciting activities await? For many who partake in the traditional American college experience, those four years can be seen as one giant sleepover, consisting of romantic and platonic sojourns alike. Then, where, and with whom, you sleep becomes more about function than fun: Shacking up with roommates, romantic partners, and family is a matter of convenience and obligation.

But as the constraints and responsibilities of adulthood mount, and spending time with friends falls lower on the priority list, there’s a case to be made for the sleepover — a purely platonic hangout among friends who simply want to see more of each other. Not to be confused with those of the sexual kind, the platonic adult sleepover ones are particularly attractive to young-ish women without children who crave deeper connection with their friends (and have the time and resources to do so). Men, on the other hand, who tend to bond over activities rather than emotions, may find purposefully inviting a friend to spend the night awkward and juvenile. But they could stand to benefit from something as seemingly silly as a sleepover. And they sometimes do, in the case of camping, multiday conventions, and other activity-based overnight excursions. 

Dedicating several hours to a pal in as intimate a location as possible sets the scene for more vulnerable conversations. Even if the itinerary for the evening falls on the banal side — eating, watching TV, sleeping — simply living alongside another person can bring you closer.

Feeling like a kid again

A common refrain among many adults is the relative difficulty in making and maintaining friends in adulthood — how the whole ordeal was easier, more straightforward in childhood. A lot of that ease boils down to the amount of time children spend with their peers in school and extracurricular activities. See someone frequently enough and you move through the strangers-to-friend pipeline fairly quickly.

Baked into this adolescent friend-making process is hanging out beyond school walls. Playdates, sports, and, yes, sleepovers, become the canvas for which kids and adolescents forge deeper connections, to goof around in relative privacy, to see how other families live. Adult sleepovers serve many of these same functions in an open-ended format.

And if time is what adults lack in their friendships (which research says they do), sleepovers provide plenty of it. For obvious reasons, a parent’s schedule might not be very amenable to overnight hangouts with friends, but the ritual doesn’t need to be exclusive to single women in their 20s. If you’re looking to get the most out of what limited time you have, an extended, concentrated hangout is a far better use of your free time than the occasional happy hour you need to schedule four months in advance.

Sleepovers are also great opportunities to get the whole family involved, too: What’s stopping you from hosting a backyard campout with a few families in the summertime? Aside from departure in the morning, there are few time constraints, few distractions, few obligations beyond prioritizing your friends — and perhaps acting like a kid again.

At the sleepovers she hosts at her Lakeland, Florida, home, Maegan Thompson, 31, often plays games, sits by the bonfire, and watches TV cuddled up next to ten or so friends (some of whom do have kids at home), much like she did as a child.

“The things that you used to be able to bond with other people over when you were younger,” she says, “are the same things you get to bond over when you become an adult.”

Intimacy and banality

These laid-back activities eliminate the need for pretense, to constantly perform or entertain one another. In a culture where the pressure exists to curate and broadcast life’s every moment, letting your guard down and simply coexisting with a friend can unlock new levels of intimacy. “We’re just there to be with one another, rather than to be more impression-management concerned,” says Jeffrey Hall, a professor of communication studies at the University of Kansas, “or trying to make a good public appearance when you go out to drinks or to go out to dinner.”

In other words, sleepovers are, in essence, purposeless. They allow friends to be boring together, a much-needed antidote to the pressure to be always-on. And research shows that doing even the most basic of daily activities — like eating, reading, or cleaning — in the presence of another person makes the task more enjoyable. Why not watching TV and sleeping, too? “A sleepover also includes things like hours and hours and hours of time spent late into the night,” Hall says, “really relaxed and embracing all of that enjoyment of friendship without having to have an end [time].”

During her most recent sleepover, Los Angeles-based Deandra Kanu and her long-distance best friend binge-watched TV, lay in bed, and not much else. “I think that it’s the ability to just be yourself without entertainment,” the 29-year-old says. “That’s what a sleepover is. You guys are the entertainment.”

Nowhere else is this lack of impression management more apparent than in the act of getting ready for bed. You might get a chance to perform your nightly skincare routines in tandem, comment on someone’s choice of pajamas, observe how many pillows they need to fall asleep. “You’ve seen how I do my hair at night,” says Jaimie Arona Krems, an associate professor of psychology and the director of the UCLA Center for Friendship Research, “or you’ve seen my big, stupid sleep shirt, and we’re still friends, and you didn’t tell anyone else.”

Feeling safe and comfortable enough to tangibly bare all, sleepover attendees might be more willing to be more emotionally vulnerable, too, according to Krems. Cocooned and protected in your home (or the home of someone you love), you might let your guard down, be more disclosing. To just be.

“The home is an environment where people feel more comfortable. You’re allowed to let down your guard a little bit more,” says Obaze, who recently hosted Bria for a sleepover. “When you give people that ability to make themselves at home, and you’re open, they’re also open, and you can just do so much more.”

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