Issue #51: What's your definition of a friend?

Plus, platonic love languages and the joy of Errand Friendship.

I had lunch with my dad last Sunday. He’d spent the morning helping my brother and sister-in-law move house, and mentioned that my brother’s friend had turned up to help with the heavy-lifting. See, that’s what I was talking about – my definition of a friend. A person who helps you out with the practical things, who would drop everything to come to help you in your time of need.

‘My definition of a friend’. It was a reference to a conversation we’d had a fortnight ago, about Elizabeth Day’s book, Friendaholic, in which the author reflects on her personal definition of friendship.

‘I have learned that we have different metrics of friendship, and sometimes these will be complementary to another person and sometimes they will not…My metric is reciprocal generosity of spirit: the idea that our starting point is always to think the best of each other. My metric is not physical togetherness or shared hobbies or phone calls or quantity of time.’

She invites insights from her own pals, including writer Sathnam Sanghera (who defines a friend as a ‘person [who] would help if he needed it or would ask Sathnam for help if they needed it’) and psychotherapist Emma Reed Turrell (‘a sense of unconditional love and a space where I feel completely welcome and known in ways that I don’t yet know myself’).

In a previous essay, I explored friendship as an act of rebellion – a place of freedom from external rules or expectations. But that doesn’t mean you can’t define your own ‘metric’ for friendship. Is it useful to do so? It certainly was for Day, a self-professed ‘friendaholic’ and ‘people-pleaser’ who ‘spread herself too thinly’ across her friendships (at the risk of neglecting her nearest and dearest). Defining her values for these platonic relationships helped her prioritise her attention, and to focus on nurturing the connections she cared most about. She writes in the book’s final chapter that she has ‘fewer [friends] than before, which is as it should be’.

I am, thankfully, nowhere near popular enough to feel the need to cull a few mates. But I still found this philosophy helpful. It made me understand, freshly, what I value about my closest friends – and what to look for in new ones. If I reflect on my ‘capital F friendships’ (as And Just Like That screenwriter Samantha Irby puts it), a handful of qualities stand out. Honesty. The ability to have emotionally-vulnerable conversations. A regular cadence of seeing one another, whether that’s weekly, fortnightly or – in the case of some long-distance friendships – annually. Being able to curl up comfortably on a sofa together in tracksuit bottoms and no make-up. Someone who genuinely wants the best for you (and you them). Someone you can laugh easily with – including at each other (in a way that’s kind and makes you feel known).

Finally, a definition from my recent San Sebastián travelling buddy Katie:

‘A friend is someone I’d be able to have a fun time in a Wetherspoons pub with. Not because we’d necessarily choose to have gone there. Just, if it was the only option, we’d still have a great time.’

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Friendship love languages

While we’re on the subject, what about friendship ‘love languages’? It was a university friend, in fact, who introduced me to the love languages theory. I still remember my initial scepticism, as we sat in Leeds University Union’s Old Bar, circa 2012. One, or both, of us was drinking something called a ‘Snakebite’: a lager-cider hybrid with a shot of blackcurrant cordial, the commercially-viable face of a Dirty Pint.

Love languages, as she explained, is a relationships theory outlined by Dr. Gary Chapman, in his 1992 book The Five Love Languages. There are five dominant ‘languages’ for conveying love and affection, writes Chapman: words of affirmation; quality time; receiving gifts; acts of service; or physical touch. Each of us has a ‘primary love language’ with which we express love and affection for someone, and a primary one to receive it (and yes, sometimes they might be the same).