By Pierce Ng (with contributions from Phil Ossefie and Todd Ler)
TLDR: to see and understand us (enough) for what we are, again and again.
Intro
For normal people, this is a platitude, not a question. However, this is for everyone who doesn’t feel normal,
“Really, what are friends for?”
“What’s the point of having friends? What is having friends supposed to do for human beings?”
I’m actually looking for proper answers.
The point
Friends are supposed to be people we like spending time with, it should feel good, right? We’re interested in their lives and want to pay attention to them, that’s what it means to care about someone. There doesn’t have to be a reason to care, “Friendship is simple, don’t overthink it.”
Yeah right, as if we haven’t heard all that before. Two complications:
- Even if there doesn’t have to be a “reason to care,” there are at least conditions that lead to caring.
- Some are out of our control, e.g. schedules, location etc.
- Others are within our control, e.g. behaviours and characteristics in people that make it more likely for others to want them as friends.
- What if they don’t care back?
- Why does that keep happening?
- What could we be missing about friendship that causes us to feel lonely and friendless repeatedly?
Logically, if this keeps happening, it means we don’t know how to maintain friendships. If we knew, we wouldn’t have this problem now. If we don’t feel like making new ones, it feels like those will probably also fade into nothing, again, like everything has before.
How does friendship work?
It’s a personal belief that we shouldn’t give up just because “we don’t know how”—anything can be learnt. We can know, it might need a nudge in a helpful direction is all.
Even across billions of different friendships, there have to be patterns and consistencies.
Identifying the most common traits can point us to truths about friendships at large.
To digest and make more sense of so much information, we can organize it with a system, be it a list of principles or some other framework. This level of knowledge can better inform our actions than disorganized bits and pieces.
But of course, friendship is organic and natural, not mechanical. That’s why we don’t provide any actual advice. It shouldn’t be approached like a checklist we have to complete.
All our knowledge-driven behaviours and actions aren’t just skills to facilitate friendship, they are in service of fulfilling the point of friendship—feeling good around and caring about each other.
Hopefully the result is we become better quality friends who have more better quality friends.
So let’s overthink how friendship could work.
Conditions for friendship
Human relationships can be thought of in probabilities. What are the odds of two strangers becoming good friends for 70 years? What if it was a group of four, how hard or easy would that be?
As human beings, we generally like the state of friendship, which roughly refers to “caring about each other” or “mutual interest in each other’s lives.” So if we wanted to increase the probabilities of friendship, it would be reasonable to create favourable conditions to build it and keep going strong.
This also could mean that
friendship is conditional.
Instead of feeling jaded, perhaps this makes us more accountable in determining our relationships throughout life. However our situation turns out, we have to answer to ourselves. And we’ll probably be better off the less we blame others.
So here are the conditions that might create a conducive environment for friendship to bloom, grow and hopefully thrive. In this order:
- D: Recurring interactions
- C: Common interest (personality)
- B: Openness (fun, “we just click,” “the right vibes”)
- A: Vulnerability (trust, bonus)
The above order doesn’t just function as steps, it also works as tiers in ascending levels of closeness. However, even at the final stage, if any ingredient goes missing then it becomes less of a friendship.
Tier D: Recurring interactions (First step)
This doesn’t only have to be face to face, it can be over text too, because there’s attention or energy as long as people engage with each other. This is the most definitive factor in my opinion.
Personally, people who don’t don’t spend time on and pay attention to each other, people who don’t interact consistently enough aren’t friends.
“Costs”
“Spend” and “pay” sound like we incur costs in a friendship, because we do. Friendship has value and simply isn’t free, it’s only worth something because it “costs” something. These include our more measurable resources—time, money—as well as our less quantifiable resources—energy, attention, effort.
It takes time and attention to learn about someone, be there for them, and even just text back. It takes money to do anything with them in the beginning—food, tickets, alcohol, etc. It takes energy to arrange meet-ups, and even more to resolve conflicts because we’re probably gonna disagree on something. However, even though all of these can technically be considered costs, we often won’t see most of it as such.
We will naturally enjoy giving our resources to build a friendship, because
the journey is the point of friendship. It’s what feels good. Giving is part of that journey.
Counting all the hours and dollars we’ve put into the relationship would never capture the experience of friendship, with all its emotions and memories. To make it transactional is counterintuitive to our humanity.
Most definitive factor
Sure, people can interact often with each other and may still never become friends, let alone close, e.g. co-workers, classmates. That’s why even those who graduate into friends are still only at “Tier D,” it’s not exactly the best quality result. That said,
we can guarantee that people who don’t interact with each other definitely won’t become friends.
By extension, those who barely interact would probably end up being barely friends, or some other in between like that.
As for people who have already built an existing friendship, maintaining it is easier, but so is taking it for granted. In this scenario, we’ve probably already put in a lot of attention and time into the relationship cumulatively over a lifetime, and that strengthens the bond and makes it harder to break. But do nothing and see how long it takes to fade.
No doubt, the stronger the friendship, the longer it takes, but it’s still nothing if you never interact again. Perhaps most of us aren’t so extreme and just end up interacting less than enough, in that case it’ll at least deteriorate. We wouldn’t be as close as we once were. And maybe that’s ok.
So what’s enough? Depending on the friendship’s foundation or lack thereof, it could be anywhere from once every week to every few years.
Beyond that? People could just be meeting for novelty, which is also ok. Lot’s of things are ok, the bar is low, more on that later. The takeaway here is that everything fades, and that’s ok.
Tier C: Common interest (Second step)
Since we’re clear that consistent interactions don’t guarantee closeness or even friendship, common interest is the next favourable condition that could increase those odds. While we can’t force it if our interests don’t align with their interests, it helps if we do our part by being
interested in life at large.
“Interested in life” can be interpreted as a philosophical outlook, but more importantly, it’s practical. That means having hobbies or knowledge and skill in something that genuinely brings us joy, something that no one forced us to pursue.
Our interests are components of our personality, so it’ll definitely add substance to it. With any luck, it gives people more to be interested in about us and maybe makes us more pleasant to be around. Knowing about each other’s interests also reaches a greater level of understanding between friends.
While it’s entirely possible that we could have nothing in common and may not reach the C Tier of connection with some friends, the bright side is that there are so many things to be interested about that finding at least one thing in common with someone else isn’t the hardest thing either.
Tier B: Openness (Third step)
The thing about common interest is that it has to be shared. This is where
being open helps people grow close,
because it’s exactly about sharing. Having substance but barely conveying it simply makes it harder for people to understand us and what we’re about. It’s difficult to connect with others without understanding them, let alone connect in a meaningful way.
This is the point in the friendship where we find out whether we “click” or not. If we can loosen up and let down our guard so they can see us in the way we’re most comfortable. This is also the part where trust is first built and established.
Sometimes it can be tricky or difficult to share ourselves with people, but common recommendations to do this well sound like,
“just be chill,” “have fun,” “it’s not that deep,” “why so serious?” or any combination of these. Basically, don’t take it so seriously.
We have to acknowledge that there are ways of opening up which can lead to worsening the relationship than if we did nothing. So yes, venturing into new territory always has risks, but if we don’t do it, we definitely won’t make close friends.
Closeness is one of those counterintuitive things where the less we force and chase it, the better our results, so the “don’t take it so seriously” type of advice works in this context.
Tier A: Vulnerability (Fourth step)
The final essential element of closeness is trust which is best, or at least most commonly, expressed by being vulnerable. Vulnerability refers to what makes us feel weak, and weakness should usually feel difficult to share (probably because doing so is counterintuitive to survival instinct).
When we open up about it we should feel exposed, that’s what gives significance to trust.
If we don’t feel uncomfortable about it and can just share it nonchalantly and casually, then it’s not really that important to us and won’t mean much to others. “If we don’t take ourselves seriously, who else is going to?”
Didn’t I just say to not take it so seriously in the part about Openness, why am I encouraging being seriousness now? Because
serious is fine, too serious isn’t.
Of course, how much serious is too much is subjective, but people generally like people “who can do both,” in this case have fun, make jokes, relax while also capable of being sincere and real.
Being vulnerable with someone too soon, sharing our weakness so easily and carelessly, is often going to feel like too much information and make them feel weird (unless they asked for it). It would also seem like we don’t have much self-control and we’d just give that up for anyone. It comes back to what we’re sharing not being important or valuable to ourselves and therefore others shouldn’t care about it either… even if it may actually be important.
So what are friends for?
Call it reliable connection or understanding, friends help us feel good beyond our own company. We want to meet them again and again, share interests and more personal things with them, know more and more about them, and be seen by them for what we truly are, weaknesses and all.
— continued in Are we really friends? #6 —
Best before dead,
Pierce