What’s Your Friend Status?
This is the third article in a series on friendship. In the first, I described how friendships are the most overlooked relationships in our lives even though we choose them. As individuals and as society writ large we don’t give friends the same importance we do romantic or family ones. For the second, I described how I use the upper limit of 150 relationships (based on Dunbar’s number) as a forced constraint to help me list out who’s important in my life. Which is especially important in today’s environment where we have tools for infinite breadth but not for depth.
For this one, I delve deeper into understanding the status of friendships. Each relationship isn’t created equal and more often than not, they change over time. How do we understand the different types of friends and how best to match our intention to how we spend our effort (energy and time)? As I continue exploring the topic of friendship, I’d love to hear from you–whether it’s articles, books and podcasts or practices, rituals and tools that have informed your view on or better yet helped you with friendship. In gratitude (and friendship)–thank you!
Summary
When we think about our friends, we don’t really think about our status so I’d like to propose four friendship categories–intimate, close, casual and acquaintances. And what surprised me when I first started looking at the different types was that I was spending more time with casual ones and acquaintances than I was intimate and close. We need to give more thought to matching intention to effort (energy and time) so that you’re not taking your intimate and close friends for granted. In the same vein, it’s also important to leave some room for friends to move up the ladder–from casual to close and close to intimate.
Reason, Season or Lifetime
When I first started exploring the topic of friendship, I noted that most of the content out there on relationships focused on either your romantic partner or family. But there is content out there on friendship–it just wasn’t helpful to me. There were countless articles on the ups and downs of two celebrities who happened to be friends and were no longer or it was on how to get toxic people–friends in this case–out of your life. I had no interest in the first topic and while the second is useful, it’s the most obvious. I wanted help to go one step further.
I’ve always loved this often-quoted anonymous line that states that people come into your life for a reason, season or a lifetime. It’s come up for me more often than not when a romantic relationship no matter has ended but I didn’t start using this framework with friends until recently. It’s helped me come to terms with the ebbs and flows on friendships–which are true for all relationships. The difference is that I never really thought about the status of my friendships in the same way I would spend countless hours wondering about the status of someone I’m dating.
From my own experience and talking with friends, the extremes of friendship are for the most part–the easiest. What I mean is that it’s arguably easier to identify who your closest friends are on one end of the spectrum and on the other end are those friends that you probably want to get rid of. Think about this for yourself right now–I would bet that you can easily name your closest friends as well as those to whom you’re still wondering why you give the time of day. But it’s those in the middle that we don’t really give much thought to.
Stuck in the Middle With You
And it’s precisely these ‘middle’ friendships that suffer the most from changes to one’s life situation–a move, marriage, kids, etc. When I moved back ‘home’ to Los Angeles earlier this year, several of these ‘middle’ friendships seemed to fade–and likely would have maintained had I stayed in the San Francisco Bay Area. And I’ve experienced the same with friends that have gotten married and later on down the line had kids. This is obviously not a knock on getting married or having kids but the usual response is that that friendship wasn’t meant to be.
But is that true? Again, I’ll contrast this to the way I hear myself or others I’ve heard think about romantic relationships. It’s all too common to hear that it takes work, nothing comes easy and any number of countless maxims about romance. I’ve rarely if ever heard anyone use the same language when referring to friends. Take the example above. What if a bit of effort to reach out to the ‘middle’ friend in SF would sustain if not grow the friendship? What if all that was needed was some effort on my part to ensure that this was not just a friend for a season, but for a lifetime?
Intimate, Close and Casual
The thinking here is that yes, friendships do ebb and flow–like any relationship–but why are we so willing to let life circumstances change the status of friendships that are good for both sides? There’s obviously got to be the same level of intention on both sides and so assuming that is the case, curation is required so that life circumstances don’t decide for you. I’d like to put forth a framework that I hope is more helpful in that it’s arguably more active than passive. It basically buckets friendships into four categories:
- Intimate–a close friend you routinely connect with over time that can challenge and help you grow
- Close–a casual friend you routinely connect with whom you can share personal details about your life
- Casual–someone you sporadically connect with whom you do not share personal details
- Acquaintance–someone you do not make plans to see intentionally
I’ve chosen to focus the framework on the intention related to sharing and vulnerability. Even if you don’t agree with my definitions for each of the four categories (feel free to insert your own), I’m hoping that at a minimum the categories themselves help you think about the status of the various friendships in your life. Specifically, my hope is that you think more deeply about how you view each friendship category. In my own experience, prior to really putting intention into my friendships I didn’t think about how my effort was allocated across these different groups.
Moving On Up
When I first started looking at my friendships, I found that I spent more than half my time on casual and acquaintance friendships rather than intimate and close. That didn’t match my intention at all. Ask yourself–how does this break out for you? Over time I would think back over the past month or week using my Dunbar tool and consciously make an effort to schedule the majority of my time (up to 75–80%) with or at a minimum reach out to intimate and close friends. And I would also make it a point to leave about 20% of my time flexible for spontaneity–new people I’ve met that could become friends.
As is true with romantic relationships, it’s also true that while you might view a friendship as close, your friend views it as casual. It fascinates me that we don’t even think to have status conversations with friends–if anything, these conversations are more common when a friendship turns romantic or vice versa. But since I’ve moved to a new city recently, I’ve tried to be more conscious about putting more effort into seeing if a friendship can move from acquaintance to casual or casual to close. Not easy and you don’t want to rush but who knows unless you try.
