As Donkey reminds us in that cinematic masterpiece, Shrek, “You gotta have friends” to thrive in this world. And most of us do have friends. A OnePoll/Evite recent survey of 2000 people came up with the number 16. As in, the average number of friends we adults have here in USofA is 16. Though their number is a little odd... It breaks down into about 3 lifelong friends, 5 friends we like and want to spend 1-1 time with, and eight people we like but don’t hang out with. Note that the samplees tended to peak young—with people around 23-ish reporting the largest number of friends. From then on, it was said to be harder to find friends. It’s so hard that the average person surveyed hadn’t made a friend in the last five years. (COVID hasn’t helped…)
Sure, being in school makes finding friends easier than in our post-education lives, when we aren’t surrounded by thousands of people roughly our age doing roughly the same things with roughly the same schedules and a full staff of people dedicated to helping us find fun things to do together on various fields, courts, and hallways. I've done more school than most people, and I agree that post-school, whenever I’ve moved somewhere new it’s been hard to start a new social life.
I raise this issue because I’ve thought a lot about friendship this summer. For one thing, I’ve been working on a research project that looks at friendship in foster care. Foster kids can move multiple times in a single year during times of great stress and trauma, and that can make finding friends especially tough. I mean, it’s hard enough for those of us who aren’t moving around and who have stable home lives to find people we consider friends. How are kids living such transitional lives supposed to find them? And what kinds of friends might they find?
Aristotle talked about there being three types of friends: Utility friends (the friends who pick you up when you’re down or fix your toilet when it leaks or help you get things done at work); pleasure friends (the friends who make you laugh or share your hobby or your love of movies); and “perfect” friends (these are the best friends—the ones who share your values and wish for your good, who’ll show up when you need a kidney transplant or $1000 because your car is having an emotional breakdown, or who just plain rock your world with how close they are and how much they care about you…).
You can kind of see those three categories in the survey data: 3 friends we’ve had/hope to have forever are probably our Perfect Friends; 5 friends we like being around are probably our fun friends (with maybe a utilitarian friend or two in there somewhere); and 8 friends who might be in any of the three categories but we never really spend time with them. I was tempted to say the people in that last group aren’t really friends, but then…I have a bunch of them. At least 8 people I love and wish I was seeing more often. I’ve moved several times over the years and have made a good friend or two in each place I’ve lived. They're now far away so I don’t get to see them much. And here at home, there are some great people I like a lot but we can never seem to work out getting together. Life moves at such a clip that it’s hard to see everyone as much as we’d like to.
So what’s the point of this tour de friendship? Excellent question. I don’t really have one, except to say—you gotta have friends. Where are you with friends? Would you say you have 3 close friends or fewer? (I’ve seen other data that say we have fewer close friends now than we did a few decades ago, with the real number around 2, or even slightly less, for most of us…) Also, what kind of friend are you? As I work with students, I hear countless complaints about roommates who somehow suck. Yet under cross-examination, it very often turns out the complainer isn’t being much of a roommate either. (“Okay, but she deserved it!” Hmm...) It's easy to forget that getting along with a roommate starts with being a good roommate. Same with friends. To have friends who want to spend time with us, we have to BE people our friends want to spend time with. To have people we can rely on, we need to BE reliable people ourselves. It’s easy for friendship to become a one-way street. Utilitarian. And sometimes that’s okay. We need those friends at times—and at times we can be those friends for others. But mostly we want those close friendships, those few people who are our friends-for-life. We miss them deeply when we don’t have them. Our lives are the lesser for it.
If that’s you, feeling like you don’t have close friends, maybe it’s time to start working on it. Yes, there are hindrances. Some of us are less outgoing than others. We all feel busy. And sometimes it seems like everyone but us already has friends. But those are all excuses more than real reasons. It's just hard. Friendships take risk, time, and effort. You have to go places where you’re likely to find people like you (our closest friends tend to share our values, views, even our musical tastes) and…TALK TO PEOPLE. I say this a lot to my students who spend upwards of 7 hours per day on their phones. You have to TALK TO PEOPLE to meet them, get to know them, give them a chance to become friends as we work on being friends to them. As I said, everywhere I’ve moved I’ve found it hard to meet new people. But somehow I've still found friends. I've found them through acquaintances, sports, music lessons, religious settings, and just plain proximity (as in, we met our closest friends by living next door to them). Think about your life and look for places you might reach out. Or, if you already have a good group of close friends, let them know you appreciate them and do your best to be a good friend. And maybe even consider opening the edges of your group to someone new who might be looking for good friends. We've all...gotta have friends.
A couple of friendly videos...
Lady Gaga covers a Carol King classic
Toy Story and Randy Newman say—you’ve got a friend in me
And we have to have at least a little Shrek...