When asked about which song on Lover hits her heart the most at the Tokyo Q&A/M&G event on November 6, 2019, Taylor responded with:

There’s a song on Lover about flashback and childhood, it compares childhood friendships to when you find someone to fall in love with when you’re older, called “It’s Nice To Have A Friend.” It’s very nostalgic.

She also told Billboard:

It was fun to write a song that was just verses, because my whole body and soul wants to make a chorus — every time I sit down to write a song, I’m like, ‘Okay, chorus time, let’s get the chorus done.’ But with that song, it was more of like a poem, and a story and a vibe and a feeling of… I love metaphors that kind of have more than one meaning, and I think I loved the idea that, on an album called Lover, we all want love, we all want to find somebody to see our sights with and hear things with and experience things with. But at the end of the day we’ve been searching for that since we were kids! When you had a friend when you were nine years old, and that friend was all you talked about, and you wanted to have sleepovers and you wanted to walk down the street together and sit there drawing pictures together or be silent together, or be talking all night. We’re just looking for that, but endless sparks, as adults.