Defining Friendship
Friendship is a hot topic at the moment, popping up in newspaper articles and Substacks. Anne Helen Petersen wrote last week about the friendship dip, asking people:
Ask yourself: apart from family, how many close friends do you have? You can define “close” however seems appropriate to you … Now that you have an approximate number, think about how that number has changed as you’ve aged. How many close friends did you have in high school? In your 20s? In your 30s or 40s?
Simple question. Think through your friend list. Grab the number. Compare it to other stages in life. She talks about the friendship dip that occurs sometime in your late twenties or early thirties and how we spend middle age reckoning with the damage and building or rekindling friendships.
The problem I always have with these studies is that friendship is defined as people outside the family. But it ignores that in many cultures, your closest friendships come from peers within your family. And those friendships are valued more than friendships with people outside the family because you have more ties to one another. Siblings, cousins, aunts, parents — they may be who you count on for companionship and… well… friendship.
If I could count family, my number would be much higher. If I can’t, it will be lower because I’ve prioritized those relationships. My friendships outside of my family are precious to me, and with some, I know their family as well as I know my own and chat with their parents and siblings. But my friendships inside my family are equally precious to me, especially because these people have known me my whole life.
3 comments
I think a lot depends on your age and your contemporaries and what happened to them.
In my case, many of my friends in my 30s were gay men who passed away from AIDS. By my late 30s, they were almost all gone, and I’ve never replaced them. There was no replacing them. Combine that with the homophobia of the early ’80s which meant losing all school friends, almost all family, and now here, at 65, I have exactly 1 close friend: my brother. And 1 friend, not a best friend, but a dear person all the same.
It’s not surprising. Someone gets to be the last surviving person in their friend group, the holder of memory, the person who a certain date means something only to them and no one else they know. And in my case, that person is me.
I have the same close friends today that I had in 1991. There are 2 of them. I have added and subtracted some over the years, but those two are constant. My 3rd close friend is a more recent addition.
But, yeah, family should definitely count…except for me, it’s for the opposite reason. I actively choose to spend more time with some of my family while actively avoiding other family members. And friends are the people I choose to spend time with.
I was really missing two out of state friends and I made a point of getting together with one friend’s mom and another friend’s brother and his family over the summer. I loved the shared history and the memories.
And this is totally a tangent, but in 2019, when we had a mother’s helper, two hours a week or two visits a week were great for connecting and becoming close. Our 10-year-old neighbor became dear to our family. And one hour a day carpooling was amazing to build a friendship with a 12-year-old neighbor. I know it doesn’t take that many hours a week, but I’m a little wistful that I only see some friends and their kids every few months or years. Cards will be my first step towards more frequent updates and stronger connections. Happy Thanksgiving!