Friends: why they deserve more

From traditional cards and novelty gifts to all those WhatsApp messages with pictures of flowers and bottles of wine, it seems we love telling our friends how much they mean to us.

I am deeply underwhelmed by this pre-packaged friend-appreciation. It’s easy to identify my friends: they are the only people not sending me such greetings.

If you look online for a message or quote to send to any of your friends – the best friend, the crisis friend, the sentimental friend, the new friend, the childhood friend – you will find one. Or a hundred. You will also find many, many articles on how to be a good friend and how to end toxic friendships.

At the core, very little has changed from the days when we (or our older relatives) got that inspiration from Reader’s Digest or Cosmopolitan.

What you will be deprived of is much by way of well-thought-out essays or research on either the science or philosophy of friendships.

And why would you want that anyway? Here you are, in the (sort of) words of Dr Machel Montano, “with your friend and them, your partners straight to the end,” et al. Why do you need to interrogate it?

Friends are the easy part of our lives. They do not come with the sense of responsibility we have to our jobs; not beholden, as with family; not (insert choice of adjective meaning “complicated”) we have with our romantic partner.

This is the precise point at which everything unravels for me. If friends are the only people in our lives who bring good without much angst, why are they the ones who get the least of our efforts?

My friends are not like architectural columns that hold me up. Rather, they’re like my spinal column; they are part of me and I’d be incapacitated without them.

A long time ago I liberated myself from the term “best friend,” because true friends only come in best. And I have more than one.

In my pursuit of someone to back me up on the importance of friendship, I found Lydia Denworth, author of Friendship: The Evolution, Biology, and Extraordinary Power of Life’s Fundamental Bond. In an interview with Greater Good magazine (out of UC Berkeley) she says: “I think it’s useful to remember that science has clarified the definition of a quality relationship. It has to have these minimum three things: It’s a stable, longstanding bond; it’s positive; and it’s co-operative – it’s helpful, reciprocal, I’m there for you, you’re there for me.”

Aristotle was big on friendship too, but I think that conversation will lead to a loss rather than increase in friends.

Why do we short-change our friends? The most likely reason is the most obvious: because they let us. We treat time with our friends as a luxury at best and a frivolity at worst.

But we drop everything for just about all other relationships, even the bad ones.

In this, romantic entanglements are the most egregious offenders. It starts when we’re young and we never learn. Girl meets boy. Boy looks girl’s way. Girl forgets friends, exams and trips to the beach.

When that is over, she goes back to the warm nest of her friends. They patch her up, they say he is a swine and not good enough for her, they get her ready to go back out into the world. (I believe boys and men have something similar, but I’m still finding out.)

And then through university, early career and ever after until she weds. And even after that.

I lost most of my male friends in the great college culling when serious girlfriends were encountered.

In so many ways, these are the most stable relationships of our lives and yet we are so careless with them.

The link between mental wellbeing and friendships is not a tenuous one. Friends can be lifesavers in ways few other sorts of people can be. Because we chose them. Or we chose each other.

When diagnosing patients, the presence or absence of friends, the nature of these friendships and their stability is often an important indicator for clinicians. There’s an old adage that says the only way to have friends is to be one. In an absurdly simplistic way, I see the doctor’s questions about the state of your friend-life dovetailing neatly with this.

Can you care for your friends? Do you? If not, is it that you can’t? If so, why? Do they care for you? Will they be there in times of distress and bad hair? If not, why? If not, why are they in your life?

If I have no friends, who will remember me as I really am?