About Longtable

Why it exists

The wish for good company doesn’t fade with age. What fades are the things that used to supply it — the workplace, the school run, the street where you raised your children. Those structures did the introducing for you, quietly, for decades. And then, one by one, they end.

Longtable rebuilds the structure. Not a feed, not a calendar of events — a small group of people, near you, doing something you actually enjoy, on a rhythm you can count on.

How friendships actually form

When we do things we enjoy together, regularly, with the same set of people, we start to build friendships, a feeling of belonging, and a sense of trust.

That is the whole idea, and it is worth saying plainly because so little of what is on offer is built for it. A class puts you in a room. An event fills an afternoon. Neither one puts the same few faces in front of you often enough for anything to grow, and no amount of goodwill makes up the difference. Friendship is not luck. It is hours, with the same people, doing something worth doing.

Everything Longtable does follows from that one sentence. Here is the research behind it.

What we believe

Small on purpose. Four to eight people. Big enough to be a real group, small enough that your absence is noticed.

On a rhythm. The same people, meeting again and again. Not a commitment we ask of you — the reason the whole thing works, and the difference between people you have met and people you know.

Led by members, not staff. The people in a circle decide what it does and when it meets. Everything else — the arranging, the reminding, the keeping track — Longtable carries, so leading a circle never turns into a second job.

In person. Screens are how you arrange it. They are not the point.

Experience, put to work. Later life brings skill, judgment and time. Those belong in use — teaching, organizing, helping a neighbor — not in storage.

Who’s behind it

Longtable is built in Bothell, Washington, by Front Porch OS LLC.

I moved to the Seattle area close to retirement, to be near my sons, and found out how hard it is to build real friendships at this stage of life. I joined the senior center and took up pickleball — good fun and good exercise, but I never knew who would show up, whether the people I had clicked with would come back, or how to stay in touch and keep getting better together. The more I read about how friendship actually grows, the clearer it became what was missing: not more things to do, but the same people, doing one of them, again and again. Longtable is what I built to fix that, starting with the problem I was living myself.

— Murali, founder

Get in touch

We’d love to hear from you — hello@longtablecircles.com