Six things I’ve learnt about friendship

from a lifelong over-thinker

Hands up if you’re worried about friendship. (Not literally, obviously! No one wins friends that way…). Articles about a ‘friendship recession’. Laments about how social media and hustle culture leaves us too busy and tired to connect. Creeping fears about AI, with its silken words, sliding in to fill the void. It can leave even the sanest person looking sideways at their own friendships, wondering if perhaps they aren’t quite what they used to be. What they ought to be…

I’ve been there. About twenty years ago, in my late twenties, I had a huge existential crisis about making and keeping friends. One by one, the friendships I had once assumed were forever seemed to be falling apart or fizzling out. People moved away, had kids, got busy with impressive careers. We had once moved like shoals of fish, bumping into each other at parties. Now meeting up began to feel fraught, complicated by cancellations and postponements that stung. I developed, as I think many people can, a real loss of confidence around friendship. I worried I was being needy when I wanted to meet, or worse, that I was imposing myself when they were quietly trying to drop me. I had also just changed careers, going from the hyper-social world of theatre, to the very solitary life of a PhD student. I was certainly lonely, but it was more than that. I feared I lacked something essential that friendship took. Was it courage? Likeability? Some insider knowledge that everyone else but me had been taught?

Gorleston-on-Sea, Norfolk: young men on the beach at Gorleston Swimming Club. Photographic postcard by Jackson’s Faces, 193-.Source: Wellcome Collection.

That was nearly twenty years ago. In my experience, it takes a long time to metabolise these kinds of crises, and I’ve finally come out the other side. Partly that’s because I’ve spent much of the last five years trying to understand what makes friendships work (hint: it doesn’t have to involve going on holiday together; nor is being picked as a bridesmaid evidence of one’s essential ‘friendability’). I’ve interviewed nearly a hundred women about their friendships, to understand struggles, doubts, and insecurities, that sit alongside the more popular cultural stories about endlessly supportive, life-long besties. All that research became my latest book Bad Friend, whose central idea is that if we let go of all the fantasies we are taught about friendship, we can embrace becoming the kinds of friends we need to be for each other.

Today I want to share six things that came out of that research. I wouldn’t call them rules, but these principles guide how I think about friendship these days. (Happily, it’s all far less fraught and far more enjoyable than it was back then).

1. Don’t let your expectations hurt your feelings: The world is saturated with idealised images of besties and bromances, from social media to films and novels (this has been going on for centuries). And when our own friendships don’t quite measure up to the hype, it can be easy to fall into the trap of dismissing them as less valuable, or more dangerously, ‘toxic’. Real friendships come in many shapes and sizes. Some are more pragmatic, based on the ways we can help each other; some are based in intense emotional affinities yet utterly flaky. And though we rightly celebrate life-long friendships, transient friendships can also be profoundly meaningful and transformative - and in any case, are by far the most common kind, since research shows we tend to replace about half of our friendship group every seven years. And the intensity and tempo of a friendship can change across its life-course too. I certainly have friends who once I saw every day, who now I am happy if I manage to see more than five times a year. It wasn’t an easy transition, and I used to regret not knowing every dramatic twist and turn of their lives. But those friendships are still extremely significant to me. Don’t let the friendship you feel you ought to have ruin the one you do have, is what I’m trying to say.

2. Reciprocity matters more than you’d think: It seems kind of petty - or at least, that’s what I used to think - paying too close attention to who is initiating contact, who books the restaurant, who remembers whose birthday. Surely friendship should be bigger and purer than that. Well yes, and no. Almost everyone I’ve spoken to about their friendship difficulties has brought up the experience of a friendship becoming lopsided or strained when they sensed one person was more invested than the other person. Those little things – being the first one to check in after a while, for example – really do seem to count. In reality, friendships can’t always be perfectly balanced: people get busy, life happens, and people do have different friendship styles and expectations around intimacy and frequency of meeting. Each friendship is singular and has to be negotiated on its own terms. But if you want to keep a friend, pay attention to reciprocity. Even acknowledging that you’re aware the other person has been putting more into the friendship than you have recently can help diffuse any simmering fears that you no longer really care.

3. Give assurances: This one’s easy, though a Google calendar might help. Checking in occasionally, remembering a birthday, or just sending a text to say they were on your mind, assures someone their friendship still matters to you, and might leave the door open for deeper connections over time.

4. Engage in rituals: Having a favourite meeting spot, activity you share, or thing you always talk about can anchor a friendship and create continuity, even as your lives go in very different directions. Our friends are memory boxes, they hold the earlier versions of us, and we do the same for them. And even if many of us have learnt to imagine reminiscing is less important than strategising in the here and now, nostalgia is very important for human bonding. Scientists have even found that when we reminisce, our body temperatures rise. Nostalgia: it’s literally heartwarming.

5. Accessibility matters: Once I heard a woman wonder if the other mums she chit-chatted with every day at the school gate were ‘real’ friends or were merely ‘friendships of convenience’. It’s sadly very common to put friendships in a hierarchy like this, but I personally think those so-called ‘friendships of convenience’ are extremely important. Not all friends can be hugely available to us. When we are friends with people in different countries, or who have intense caring responsibilities, are ill or have otherwise extremely busy lives, we have to adjust to a different level of accessibility. But we all need people we can access for a quick laugh or banal chat. Though I’ve since moved away, the friends I made at a weekly boxing class for women over-40 were transformative. We saw each other most weeks, we gossiped and laughed on our way home, we thrilled when we bumped into each other in the supermarket. It was heaven. These friendships don’t have to be super-intense, and you don’t have to be soul-mates, or plan holidays together. But they make a person feel like they belong, and that is hugely significant.

6. Be open: One of the most important things in a friendship is trust – that is, feeling confident that the other person will not deliberately or maliciously harm you. And one of the ways we build trust, is by showing that we ourselves are willing to trust the other person. We show we trust someone by making ourselves vulnerable, even in very small ways - from inviting them into our home to telling them a secret. Sharing intimacies has, in fact, been one of the hardest lessons for me to learn, because I worry about going on too much about myself to friends (not in my writing – ha!),or being a bore or a burden. In Korean, there is a word ‘Woori’, which roughly translates as ‘we-ness’ and conjures a feeling of togetherness and mutual care. You build ‘Woori’ through an exchange of gifts, but these don’t have to be physical items. They can be gifts of time, of attention, of noticing something, of care. I’ve come to see a willingness to be vulnerable and share something of my inner world with friends as a kind of gift, to help establish that we-ness, and that trust. Not all friendships need high levels of self-disclosure (see: no. 6), or for you to share your deepest vulnerabilities. But some honesty is essential if you want to build meaning and trust in a friendship. See it as a gift to you both.

Thanks for reading my thoughts about what I’ve learnt about friendship over the past five years. These principles have been revolutionary for me, and I’m so grateful I had the chance to understand them more deeply.

Bad Friend is out in paperback in the UK today! Thank you so much to all the other authors, critics, booksellers and readers who have supported it and given it so much love.