Every Sunday morningssbet77, I walk to my local diner and order a stack of three pancakes, a bowl of fruit, two scrambled eggs and a black coffee. Two friends almost always meet me there. Ty — whom I first got to know in San Francisco, where we both volunteered at a music-events company — gets the corned-beef hash with melted cheese on top. David, whom I met through Ty, drifts from eggs benedict to a breakfast burrito to the occasional chopped cheese. What’s for breakfast doesn’t really matter much, though. That we meet — at the same time and place — does. Recently, we marked almost 40 Sundays running.

I got the idea to create a “standing appointment” last year. Sitting on a balcony on my final night in Berlin before I moved to New York, I was having a farewell conversation with my roommate — recounting good memories and prophesying when our paths might cross next — which I’d had many times before. I’d spent 12 years bouncing between various jobs and living in six different cities. I’d been lucky to make friends in places like Shanghai, Chicago and San Francisco, but the more people I met and said goodbye to, the more trivial many of those connections began to feel. I also had a tendency to cast my net too wide, gathering so many acquaintances that I rarely gave myself a chance to explore the deeper waters of friendship, which can be discovered only with time.

That’s not to say that I didn’t enjoy a night with good friends. We would watch European soccer at a bar or eat falafel by the river, a collection of €1.50 beer bottles at our feet. But I often felt compelled to seek out the excitement of new friends rather than develop the relationships I already had.

As time went on, I noticed that my friends had small, tight circles made up of people from important periods of their lives — those they grew up with, attended college with or lived alongside in the same city or neighborhood. They seemed so much better than I was about keeping up with the people they cared about. Perhaps I’d mistaken my feeling of familiarity and comfort with existing friends for apathy or boredom. While I appreciated my friendships, I was often distracted by and attracted to the connections I didn’t have and the high that each new acquaintance seemed to always bring.

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I’d gotten so good at setting up a social life from scratch in each new city, but I’d forgotten how to nourish it. Now, I was older, more settled. In New York, I longed for depth. The precursor to that, I knew, was consistency.

While in Berlin, I learned about the German tradition of a stammtisch, which translates to “regulars table,” where bars reserve a table for everyday goers to sit together and socialize. In a way, this idea of community reminded me of the one I enjoyed when going to church every week as a kid.

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