Best Friends Forever - Irene S. Levine [8]
Some experts have tried to characterize friendships and describe them based on their complexity, depth, and intimacy. For example, simple friendships have one main basis for connection; more complex ones tend to be multidimensional. Say you have a close friendship with a colleague who has children (about the same age as yours) and whom you see at and outside of work. That friendship has more bonds than your friendship with a neighbor whom you only see once in a while. In the case of two friends you like equally, you probably feel closer to the one with whom you have greater shared history, values, experiences, and trust.
People you call friends can range from a distant acquaintance you recognize by sight to a confidante and soul mate (a best friend), and friendships of all different shades of gray in between. Friendships also vary in terms of their frequency of contact and sense of permanence.
While there is no commonly agreed upon lexicon, one simple way to categorize the broad distinctions between different types of friendships can be illustrated in a Friendship Pyramid, an equilateral triangle divided horizontally into three slices.
The Friendship Pyramid
Casual friends make up the base of the triangle, the largest slice, since they tend to be the greatest in number. These might include people whom you know from your neighborhood or from your office or school. They are people in your personal universe to whom you feel connected, but only casually; people you know but don’t really know well. These relationships are superficial, loosely tied, and linked to situational circumstances—for example, the happenstance or serendipity that you live near each other, or that you have the same lunch hour or belong to the same soroity, house of worship, or civic organization—but you still consider these people friends. Such relationships are highly vulnerable to fading away if the situation or circumstances that brought you together change (e.g., one or both of you move or change jobs).
Good friends occupy the middle slice of the pyramid. These are friends with whom you feel close, and with whom you choose to hang out and spend more time. A good friend may be one you meet for lunch or coffee regularly; someone you do homework with; a parent of your child’s friend with whom you discuss child-rearing problems or meet at the park so the kids can play; or someone you know from high school or college whom you still talk to and/or e-mail fairly often. It may be a single or divorced friend whom you enjoy spending time with on long weekends or vacations. Although closer than a casual friendship, a good friend relationship lacks the sense of intimacy and closeness that typifies a best friendship.
Best friends are at the apex of the pyramid. While fewer in number, these relationships are solid in terms of intimacy and trust, and tend to be characterized by more frequent contact than typically occurs between either good friends or casual ones. These relationships feel like they will be long-term, even if they ultimately wind up not being permanent, and cause the most pain when lost or fractured.
Characteristics of Strong Friendships
Complexity
Depth
Intimacy
Closeness
Trust
Shared history, values, and experiences
Frequency of contact
Feeling of permanence
FRIENDSHIP COUNTS
One question that invariably arises when people talk about friendships is How many are enough? Most of what is known is anecdotal. While there are census counts of households and individuals, there are no official friendship counts. Surveys use different definitions and look at different groups (in terms of their sex, age, nationality, and socioeconomic status), making them hard to compare, so quantifying how many friends a woman typically has or needs is an inexact science. Nonetheless, every woman is interested in getting a general sense of how her friendships compare to others.