How to think about friendship

Friendships are integral to our happiness and one of those things that makes life worth living. Great friendships can provide comfort, joy, prevent loneliness and even improve one’s physical health. This is supported by the longest ever running Harvard study that tracked a group of men through their entire lives (US president John F. Kennedy was one of them) and showed that the single best predictor of participants’ health in their 80s was not their wealth or lifestyle. It was the quality of their friendships in their 50s.

This post is about how friendships change, the types of friends we have, and how to invest in the friendships that matter. There can be anxiety around friendships but with some perspective, we all can sail into the sunset of our golden years, happy and healthy.

The different types of friends

Making friends is much easier when we’re young, surrounded by others in school and university, with everyone free to hang out and have a good time. But as adulthood hits, responsibilities pile up, and people’s priorities pivot to their family or career, it can be challenging to make new friends, and even keep in touch with old ones.

In life, there are three types of friends. To borrow an analogy from Mel Robbins, you’re friendships are like a tree. You have the leaves, the branches and the roots.

Leaves

A tree has many leaves which give it energy and strength. But they change with every season. The leaves in your life are your friends for a season, those you had during a job or when you lived in a particular neighbourhood. But as your circumstances change and your life moves on, these friendships fade away.

There’s nothing wrong with having friendships like these. In fact, it’s healthy as they support your current circumstances and, when those circumstance change, make room for new friendships. Be thankful for the leaves but don’t feel bad that they drift away. It’s a natural process. It’s just life.

Branches

Next, come the branches. These are stronger than leaves but, just like branches on a tree, can break when too weighted down. As we grow, we may change as people, changing our priorities and what we focus on. Our new interests may not align with those of once close friends. As your common interests fade, so might your reasons for hanging out, and you simply drift apart.

This doesn’t mean that you don’t care about these friends. You just might not want to spend your time doing what they like doing. If your interests really diverge and they drift away, that’s okay. Again, it’s not personal. You’ve both changed, and it just isn’t a match like it used to be.

Roots

Finally, we have the roots, the relationships that run deep. They are what Aristotle called the ‘friendships of virtue’ and are based on a mutual appreciation for the virtues the other person holds dear. These relationships take time and intention and are forged by mutual struggle or by being there with someone as they grow. You may not see these friends all the time but you know they’ll be there when you need them. These are your friends for life.

If someone is currently a leaf or a branch and you’d like them to be a root, invest in that friendship. Don’t fret about people that have drifted away. After all, it’s happened for a reason. Identify the things that are important to you and the people that share those interests. These are the relationships to work on.

In the past, I’ve been gutted to drift from friends I made in my early years, old jobs, and time living abroad, wishing that I’d done more to keep the relationships alive. On occasion, I’ve even reached but the conversation never quite flourished as I romanticised.

Social media has made letting go of friends harder as we can keep up with their lives from a distance. But I’ve come to realise that the people I see in my feed aren’t the same people I remember. They’ve grown and changed and moved on. We share common experiences but I don’t know them as they are today. Accepting they were leaves and branches that have fallen off helps me to move on and concentrate on my current and future relationships.

Going one step further and doing a social media cleanse ensures that the people I follow are those that I truly care about. It removes the stimulus of the leaves and branches that were once important. Nostalgia has its place but shouldn’t be a centrepiece. And I remind myself – it’s not personal.

It’s said that the average person can keep up with at most 150 people. Holding on to all past friendships will clearly make this unmanageable.

Investing in your friendships

Research shows that you lose and replace half of your close network of friends every 7 years. While friends change with the seasons, it doesn’t mean you should make no effort and let them drift away. It only takes reaching out once in a while to keep relationships alive. This can be anything from liking their comments online to dropping in and saying hello. Even the deepest friendships, the roots, require attention. If you don’t invest in them, they too can fade.

Friendships are a two-way street. I’ve come to realise that I’m quite bad at making plans and staying in touch and need to be more proactive with investing in my friendships. If you’re like me, be proactive in suggesting plans (and actually see them through), message people and catch up with them. Realise that people are busy with their lives and they’ll appreciate you taking the lead. I’ll certainly be pushing myself to improve on this. Figure out where you fall short and work on it.

So what does all this mean?

While we all know friendships are important, having a framework to think about friends can be useful. Friendships can be difficult, especially when you or the people around you change. Gain some clarity of your relationships by thinking about the following:

• Take some time to recognise which of your friends are leaves, branches and roots. If you want to move people from one category to the other adapt your involvement in that relationship accordingly.
• As life changes, so do friends. Recognise that it’s not personal if people drift away and that changing friendships happen to everyone.
• Consider doing a social media cleanse where you remove all the people who are no longer important to you. Cal Newport suggests this in his book Digital Minimalism.
• Become the type of person that people want to be friends with. Learn to have meaningful conversations and take an interest in others. You will naturally build relationships and find it easy to make deep-rooted friendships.
• Prioritise your relationships. As the TED talk below shows, having great relationships is the biggest factor in leading a happy life.