Best friend?

[asakiyume]

I started to post this as a tweet and then thought, This is ridiculous; there are too many aspects to the question and too many long potential answers. So I'm putting it here!

When you were little, did you have best friends? Did you have several at the same time, or only one at a time? Or did you not use that term?

If you did use it, do you continue to now? If not, what changed, do you think? If you're someone with one or more life partners, how does having that person or people figure into the equation, if at all?

This question arose for me because I'm taking another online language class (Indonesian this time), and the teacher had us practice descriptions by asking us to describe our best friend, and I realized I had very dear friends but no one person I'd identify as a best friend.

Comments

[noachoc]

When I was very small (say, 3-5) I had a best friend, but I also had a very strict sort of definition for what a best friend was, so one day when I asked her who her first best friend was, and she named some other kid, I basically never spoke to her again (which was dumb, but I was six at the time).

I don't really have a best friend now (and never really did after that, though I always wanted one). I have quite a few great friends, but there's nobody I call whenever something happens or just to chat, and "who do I want to do X with" varies on the situation. I suppose I could claim that my mom is my best friend, since she IS the one I call to chat with or to vent to.

Chris and I get along fine, but he's not my best friend. We're too different and he's not emotionally available enough for me to put too many friend-eggs in that basket

[asakiyume]

*Nodding* I had one person who I thought of as my best friend from the end of middle school through college and even afterward, but gradually she became instead someone who I referred to as "my childhood best friend" and not someone I thought of as my current best friend.

I think it took me a long time to get the knack of "doing" friendship. I would make one friend, and that was good enough for me. My mother would urge me to make more, and I just didn't understand. But then again, there were all the kids in the neighborhood--I'd happily play with any of them, but that wasn't quite the same thing as "friend." That was: it's evening and we're going to play Red Rover or tag, and the more people we have, the better. That was different from someone I'd invite over to draw pictures with or try to get to Oz with.

[raven]

I really like this question! When I was little and also up to when I left school I think, I had at various times a "best friend" which in practice usually meant "this is my go-to person when the teacher asks us to pair up". As an adult I have lots of dear friends, and I do have a "best friend" in a kind of knowing, tongue-in-cheek way (we both have lots of other dear friends and by no means have a social life limited to each other). I call them my best friend though because I think, ultimately, they would be my "it's 2am and I need a lift home from A&E and also by the way I'm in Paris" friend, the one the emergency services should call.

[asakiyume]

Wow, it's very good to have this person! Have you had occasion to call on them ever for those purposes? Or conversely, have they (or someone else) ever called you in that situation?

I have sometimes needed to call someone and *not* had a person like that. Once when we first moved here, when we had only one car and it broke down on me, I couldn't call my husband, and I desperately needed to get home to meet the school bus. I had met a woman a few days earlier on a walk in the neighborhood, and I knew she worked from home. So I called her! Even though I did not know her from more than one conversation! ... It was fine, but having a friend to call in that situation would have been nice.

Does your friend know they're your best friend? Is it mutual? How did you decide? (Don't answer what's not comfortable to answer!)

[raven]

Yes, unfortunately. I once rang them because I had banged a rental car on a pillar in the middle of the night in a foreign country and I didn't know what to do. And I remember texting with them from my father's funeral, too. I think they know they're my best friend! If they don't, that's ok, but they do. I don't know if they think about the concept in the same way I do, but I know they know I too would come and get them from A&E if that was needed. It's one of the things I like about really long-standing adult friendships as opposed to kiddy ones. :)

Although, on your language point, perhaps you'd find this bit interesting? In my native language there are two words for "friend" - one is generic, and the other specific to close, long-standing female friendship. Whether "best friend" or not, it's the second word for me, and I love that that distinction exists.

[asakiyume]

Aahhhh! I do love that!!

[asakiyume]

... follow-up question, since you mention native language: do you write fiction in multiple languages?

[raven]

Oh, no, I wish I did! I can only write in English unfortunately--Hindi is my native language but I'm only basically literate, and the others I don't speak well enough to be able to express myself well.

[asakiyume]

*nodding*

I think there are a lot of people out there in some permutation of that situation, and I'm always interested in what people are doing--which isn't static! A guy I know on twitter started out writing fiction in Esperanto: there's always an audience for stuff written in Esperanto (apparently--I didn't know this) because although there are devoted Esperanto speakers and readers, there aren't so many creators, so it was a very rewarding, affirming community to write for--and now he's writing in English for a broader audience.

... Okay, that's not a typical case because Esperanto is a created language and obviously not his mother tongue, but there are other cases!

[raven]

That is so interesting! I am always delighted by people who can speak Esperanto, it seems such a delightful, idealistic thing to do.

[troisoiseaux]

As a child, I would have said that I had 1-3 best friends at any given, but in retrospect, I like.... only had 1-3 friends at any given times.

I actually do have someone I consider my "best friend," now: my best friend from college who I exchange texts with on, usually, a daily basis, even though we live in different cities now so I only see her a few times a year. As a quick mental survey of my grad school friends, I know a few of them have referenced "best friends," but that might be a context-specific category of "my closest friend outside of our mutual grad school group of friends."

[asakiyume]

Re: 1-3 best friends v. 1–3 only friends, I'm wondering now if, when people say "She's one of my best friends," how many they have, and whether there's a kind of title inflation going on. You know how people outside America can roll their eyes about how Americans call anyone they've ever had a conversation with a friend? Like we jump from stranger to friend with no intermediate stage. Well I wonder if what some people call "best friend" would be what other people--say these hypothetical people outside America--would call just "friend."

And now I'm also thinking about what qualities people want in a best friend: noachoc mentioned someone you call whenever something happens or to vent to, and raven mentioned someone who you feel you could call in an emergency. And I'm thinking other things people might mean by that are "person who I've known for a long time so we have a lot of shared history" or "person who I can let see me in sweat pants and won't be fussed if all I have to offer them when they come over is stale potato chips"--and then there are meanings that could involve shared passions for things, although maybe that's something that figures into them just being friends in the first place.

[sovay]

When you were little, did you have best friends? Did you have several at the same time, or only one at a time? Or did you not use that term?

As a child, I definitely had multiple friends to whom I was close in significant ways as opposed to more social or casual friends. I did not necessarily refer to them as my best friends because it was such a socially loaded term and usually asked as a kind of challenge and also I suspect that I don't really organize the world ordinally, but they fit the definition.

One was a male friend whom I had technically known since before we were born because our mothers were in the same childbirth class; we were born a month apart (I was a week early and he was slightly late), belonged to the same play group as small children, and lived not too far apart from one another. We stayed close up into high school despite never attending the same schools and occasionally saw one another in person even on the other side of grad school. He came intermittently to my family's Halloween parties. We are connected on Facebook and I ran into his wife in the library once a few years ago. I no longer think of him as a close friend simply because we have not been in one another's lives for so long, but I definitely think of him as part of my extended people.

Another was a male friend from elementary school; we carpooled in the mornings and spent a lot of time at one another's houses after school, although the relationship was complicated by him having a second best friend at school who was male and who did not like me at all—he punched me once; it bewildered me at the time; in hindsight I assume it was territorial and I still think it was silly—with the result that we hardly ever interacted during the school day outside of musical activities, at which we were both prominent. We lost track of one another almost immediately after graduation, reconnected with corresponding immediacy as adults, hung out for a while mostly in a context of musical theater, lost track of one another again; would no longer define as a best friend because of the lapse in contact and emotional involvement, but see no reason to assume we would not reconnect with similar ease if we ever run into one another again.

Slightly later in elementary school, I acquired a female friend with whom I also spent a lot of afterschool time as well as a lot of interstitial school time; she was a year behind me and I missed her birthday party our first year in different schools and I more or less literally never heard from her again. I didn't get a forwarding address when she moved. I still think that was weird.

I had the same best friend from seventh grade until the beginning of my senior year of high school; we were very much closer to one another than to anyone else in our respective and overlapping friend groups; it was complicated; she is functionally family and we still e-mail one another (we have not lived in the same state or sometimes the same country for more than twenty years), although I need to respond to a letter of hers that has been in abeyance since the early summer because of the move and the disruption and exhaustion etc. Most recently I heart-iconed several photos of her and her son on FB because he's lovely.

It stopped being a particularly relevant question in college and grad school, which was fine by me; I had many more close friends—college was a sort of Cambrian radiation in that sense—and I continued the pattern of having a couple of people who were especially close. Some were partners and some were not.

These days I would say that both of my partners are people who would qualify as best friends of mine, otherwise I would not be partnered with them; ditto the mother of my godchild. I think the term is not part of my native vocabulary, but I don't think that means the strength of relationship doesn't exist in my life, if that makes sense.

[asakiyume]

Re: your last sentence, yes; that absolutely makes sense. And I laughed at "I suspect that I don't really organize the world ordinally"--it's a great line and a great way to be.

I know what you mean about that second friend and thinking that although they're not someone who's important in your life right now, there's no reason why they couldn't become so again if circumstances aligned right.

She is functionally family is interesting to me: I think I very much consider members of my family friends, but I have only one person who isn't related to me who I think of as family (it's the tall one's first girlfriend--she and I stayed friends, and Wakanomori and I went to her wedding, as did the tall one, for that matter). But on the other hand, I have had at various times different people who I feel responsible toward as if they were family.

[sovay]

I have only one person who isn't related to me who I think of as family (it's the tall one's first girlfriend--she and I stayed friends, and Wakanomori and I went to her wedding, as did the tall one, for that matter).

That's really neat!

But on the other hand, I have had at various times different people who I feel responsible toward as if they were family.

I grew up with a model of family which both excluded people related by blood and incorporated people unrelated by it. I don't think of all of my close friends as family or all of my family as close friends, but it is a kind of permeable set of categories for me.

Unrelated, except that I thought of you when I read about this film, even though the review is equivocal: Ancient Soul (Mbah Jhiwo, 2021).

[asakiyume]

Wow, beautiful! Kawah Ijen is such a tantalizing, magnetic setting for a film. My teacher for this Indonesian class is from Java, and he sometimes has to stop and think, when someone asks him how to say something, if he'd giving us the word in Javanese or Indonesian. I wondered how different the languages were, and listening to the trailer, I'm thinking they're easily as different as Tetun and Indonesian. (All three are Austronesian languages, and there are lots of words in Tetun that are similar to or the same as words in Indonesian, but lots more that are different, and grammar structures that are different.) ... I think sometimes when a setting is very dramatic like this, and if you're dealing with a whole other culture, it can be easy to lose yourself (my way of saying, I'm not surprised that the reviewer finds that the film lurches a bit). It still seems like it might be beautiful just to look at.

[sovay]

It still seems like it might be beautiful just to look at.

I hope you can see it! I'm not sure if it's streaming anywhere or just making the rounds of festivals.

[asakiyume]

I'll keep my eyes open for it.

[mrissa]

For me, culturally, "mother of my godchild" is such a relationship--when the mother of my godchild asked if I would be her children's godmother, I had to confirm that we were talking about the same relationship, because there are people for whom godparent means roughly "person my parents had seen at least twice in the year I was born" or "person I want to gesture nicely toward," and it is so much more intense than that for my culture. Luckily for her culture as well, and that was what she was asking me to be.

(And this year I was talking about willingness to assist the godkids with certain categories of thing, and I said, "You're not our kids but--" and Younger Godchild interrupted me and said, "Actually we kind of are." And I did not break down weeping in that moment, out of gratitude and joy that what we have tried to give them has worked for their side too. But it was a near thing.)

The mother of my godchild is the person I am most likely to refer to as "my best friend" for the sake of other people understanding the relationship, and even then it is a pale shadow of what there actually is. When my dad was dying, it was my hand on Dad's hand and her hand on mine. I would say the equivalent things in her life but they're not mine to share. So ironically, just when "best friend" is closest to explaining things to the outside world, it's not nearly enough.

[asakiyume]

This is such a tremendous tribute, I wish somehow she could see it, though I expect she already knows how much she means to you, and moreover, not just her as a free-floating person, but her and her child and presumably her spouse by virtue of the fact that you care about the spouse of your dear friend, and your partner/spouse--because that person will be important to her for the same reason. Yeah: that is weaving friendship and family together.

Younger Godchild saying "Actually we kind of are" really moved me. I'm never formed a deep relationship like that with another person's child--well except maybe with the tall one's girlfriend, but she's the one-and-only, and she was already a teen when we met. What you guys have is beautiful.

[lizbennefeld]

There were kids I played ball with, or walked with on the way to our next class. I would guess I just had acquaintances and distant siblings and their families. Friends, but not one in particular over the decades. Al and I are best friends, both age 76 this year and married for 30 years, now. I think that we both are activities oriented rather than social folks.

[asakiyume]

I totally understand being activities oriented. It took me a long time to understand being with a person without having a thing that I was going to *do* with the person. "I will meet so-and-so and we will go for a walk. I will meet so-and-so, and we'll make cards together. I will meet so-and-so and we will practice ballet." It's partly what made a book group an amenable social activity for me: it wasn't just hanging out and catching up with people; it had an ostensible purpose--"we will all meet and talk about a book" ... even if that often only accounted for a small part of the meeting.

I'm really glad you and Al are best friends ♥

[skygiants]

I absolutely had a Best Friend as a child -- our younger brothers (3-4 years younger than us) were Best Friends also and the four of us would frequently do things as a unit after school or on weekends, which made life very convenient for our parents. Unfortunately we went to different schools and I do remember as a child frequently musing sadly on the woes of having a Best Friend who could not be in class with me! But I had a Second Best Friend who was, and her First Best Friend also went to a different school, so that worked out all right. (I am no longer particularly close with my childhood Best Friend, but Second Best Friend and her First Best Friend remain some of my oldest and most important friendships; I was one of the ketubah signers at her wedding.)

[asakiyume]

Aww, that's great about you and Second Best Friend and her First Best Friend!

When you were describing School Best Friend and Home Best Friend, though, I couldn't help thinking of the sailor with a wife in each port ;-)

[cmcmck]

I grew up as neighbour to a guy called Les and we were (still are) friends almost from birth.

He stood by me through the whole of what I went through and that is such a thing.

[asakiyume]

That really is a best friend! That's wonderful &hearts

[mrissa]

I use the term "best friend" to mean "friend who fulfills the social role the person I am talking to will understand of a 'best friend,'" not "better friend than any other friend definitely and for sure." This means that the person I lived with in college, who was my maid of honor, is my "best friend from college," even though there were things we did not share at the time, and there are a couple other people from college I talk to more now/have grown with more now.

It's a term with external, not internal, meaning for me. And the more distant my relationship with someone, the more likely I am to use that kind of shorthand. My grocery clerk, my dental hygienist, the cousin I talk to once every 18-24 months? They're going to get "my best friend is coming over for supper." They're not going to learn the names and traits of my various friends anyway, so "my friend Mehitabel, the one I know from yak-herding" is not something I'm trying to get them to register over time the way I am with fellow friends who have not yet met Mehitabel but a) very well might and b) will want to know the texture of my life better.

Incidentally, this kind of generic tagging is something I find fascinating to watch with another relationship: "my sister/brother/sibling." Early on in conversation, a lot of people default to that relationship tag rather than including the person's name, very much on the "she doesn't know my sister anyway, the relationship is enough information." But as you get to know a person better it shifts from "my sister" to "my sister Hepzibah" to "Hepzibah." And this happens even when the person has multiple siblings, and the timing of the shift is usually both subconscious and meaningful.

[asakiyume]

I love what you say about transitioning from an identifying relationship term to just a name, and it's making me think about how I attribute to other people my own laziness/lack of paying-attention-ness and therefore continue to use the identifying tag for a long time. Sometimes other people have learned my husband's name, and I still am not sure of theirs, or they've learned my kids' names, but I don't remember theirs. Since this is a thing that sometimes happens, I try to make myself notes, but even that doesn't guarantee that I'll remember.

[heleninwales]

I finally learned to just make stuff up in Welsh classes. Or more accurately, I learned not worry too much about things being the literal truth. I did have best friends in school. Two in primary school and two different ones in secondary school. Then I suppose I also had two best friends at university (plus a bunch of people I was friendly with, but not quite in the "friend" category). Though we only see one another once or twice a year, I'd probably describe my university friend for the purposes of the class. I do have lots of local friends, but they're people I do particular activities with rather than people I hang out with just because they're them and trying to designate one of them "best friend" feels odd.

[asakiyume]

I was telling myself that! And when I've been a teacher asking questions for the sake of getting people to practice something, I've told them that too: it doesn't have to be true; it can be made up! But it was really hard--I think because anything you say in the context of a class is one of the few things the other people in the class have to associate with you, and I didn't want them to mistakenly assume something I said was true if it wasn't ... which in itself is maybe being more concerned than I need to be, really.

Yeah, I think having people you are friends with for a particular activity are kind of like workmates. They can transition into closer friends, but you have to get more personal than just the activity.

[amaebi]

When I was little, aside from younger sister who was always dearest, I had two best friends and didn't think once about both of them being best: one of my school best friend Laura and the other my best friend from church and the SIU economics department families, Karen. Karen continued to be my best friend for a year after she and her family moved to Tucson. Meanwhile there was churn in school space. I changed school midyear*, and had two best friends *in the same class* at the new school. They were very different and didn't like each other at all, so it wasn't a threesome.

Then in fourth grade the whole school district was reorganized in late compliance with Brown v Board of Ed, and I was back at school again with Laura, and Laura and I and Julia were best friends for roughly five years, with way too much ins and outs. Three is a very unstable number.

And then there was the neighborhood gang of mixed gender and an age spread of three years or so, that dominated my summer social life.

Meanwhile I became part of another friend group that, for me, was centered around Sinjin. I also deliberately tracked and landed a best friend, Emily, to make sure I would always have a partner in PE class.

I went to boarding school my senior year of high school and there hung out with a group of fellow writers: my beloved friend Lisa was one, though I didn't know her as well then, as she was two years younger and in another dorm.

I was friendless at university.

I had a best friend at Albion College, then a best friend at seminary, both of whom I think of with those locational phrases.

Now apart from Sheeyun and Chun Woo I would say that my best friends are Lisa and Carol, whom I get to chat with desultorily through the days, on Trillian.


* Because I'd been put in the slow class in second grade, because our first grade teacher recommended that Laura and I be separated and she daughter of the assistant superintendent of the school district. and while I was stunningly popular in the slow class, I went how silent and worried that the things I said made no sense.

[asakiyume]

Wow, how very disorienting to be put in the slow class--I can see how you'd worry about the things you said making no sense.

A neighborhood gang can be a relaxing things--I have pleasant memory of a similar situation in my elementary school years.

I had to look up Trillian: on the one hand, it makes complete sense that there are multiple messaging systems; on the other, having grown up in the pre-cell phone era with the phone being a universal system (even when it got to the point where you were paying different companies for your land line service, it was still the same system) it's bewildering to me how many messaging systems there are.

The best friend from Albion College and seminary, do you keep in touch with them?

Your circle of best friends sounds great: two you get to share physical space with, and two you chat with. Conversation through the days is a great way (in my experience) to maintain that connection.

[amaebi]

I receive the emails of my Albion College best friend, which are insect observation. She is a mathematician: she was also very into languages, gave first instruction to one of my students in Mandarin before he went to China on some academic program, and was instrumental in getting an Ojibwa-teaching online site and tool up and running. She also had a fabulously interesting organic garden. We watched Star Trek: Deep Space Nine together weekly.

I have not seen nor heard from my seminary best friend for years. It didn't help that my first appointment was in Wyoming. I saw her only once after I was appointed in Colorado. I would love to see her again/more, but I am also scawed of maybe having been monstrous in some way I'm not sure of.

[asakiyume]

Oooh, relationship with Albion College friend sounds great! I like that level of friendship very much.

Re: the other friend, unless she's someone who takes slights easily, my guess is that she got absorbed in life and just failed to stay in touch.

[gale_storm]

“Best” friends? What really made one friend better than another?

I can only recall being on “best” friend terms with another girl when we were about 11, and it was her declaration of the term, not mine. It was a fleeting term, too, as it lasted for all of a couple of weeks. Yes, that age took things away as quickly as it brought them on!!

[asakiyume]

Yeah, it's a term that means more to some people than others! And some people bestow it and withdraw it in an attempt to manage (one could say manipulate) a friendship.

There are lots of other terms people use that don't have that whiff of hierarchy. You can say "old friend" for a friend you've had for years, or "dear friend"--that one shows the person is special to you but doesn't imply that all others are lesser--or, like several people have mentioned,"friend from XX," which explains what time or place you know the person from and doesn't say anything at all about the intensity of the friendship.

Some people seem to want or need best friends, others less so, and it seems like whether you need or want them can change over time.

[gale_storm]

/nod/ Absolutely so and well-written, besides that!!

[amaebi]

When my son was four one of his preschool colleagues announced that she was going to marry him in five days, on her birthday, and she did so.

He considered himself married to her for years, even after having moved to another preschool for Kindergarten. "Ummah," he told me, "we just can't be together now. Sometimes that's how it is."

I was quite relieved when, a few years later, I dared to ask him if he was still married to Jolie, and he said "No," and was also relieved by that. I reassured him that their marriage had never been legal.

He had never wanted to marry Jolie.

[gale_storm]

I understand your reaction, but what had he wanted to achieve through that, then!?

[amaebi]

I'm not sure if this answers what you intend, but: He didn't think he had a choice. Jolie was evidently something of a Force of Nature in his pre-school class. Or maybe the situation interested him. It was a little hard to tell whether they might underlie his stated position.

[gale_storm]

That does indeed answer what I couldn’t find terms to ask!!

[rimturse]

I've had a few childhood best friends, usually 1-2 at a time. From I was 16 I went many years with "just" very close friends, but where I called the one I was closest to my best friend, although it wasn't exactly the same, and I wasn't hers either. Then I met wayfaringwordhack online, and the rest is history.

My husband calls me his best friend, but obviously it's a different kind of love. He is, hands down, the most important person in my life. In regards to spouses and best friends, Husband was admittedly slightly uneasy about one of my once best friends (from 14-18) being a guy, but that only lasted until they were finally able to meet each other*. Husband immediately liked him, and the two have become friends in their own right, which makes me very happy.

* It's pretty obvious to anyone who spends any time together with us that there's no attraction. Our parents, including my overbearing Asian mother, had no problems with teenage us being alone together for hours on end, and the same with our significant others over the years.

[asakiyume]

Yes, I'm sure it's possible to have both a spouse and a best friend at the same time--and also possible to have a spouse who fills both roles. In people's comments here, I've seen people talk about both cases.

I think even when there's been attraction between people, it's still possible for the spouse to be friends with that person so long as the attraction's really a thing of the past. One of my husband's ex-girlfriends became a godmother to one of our children. (... Though, for us, the godparent relationship isn't as rich and meaningful as it is for mrissa who commented above).

I love that you and wayfaringwordhack found each other as best friends. I really love how the internet can bring people together.

[rimturse]

I don't believe in the best friend scenario being possible as long as there's unrequited attraction/love because it creates an imbalance and isn't fair to either, but I wholeheartedly agree that it's possible if the attraction is a thing of the past. Some people just work better as friends. :)

[http://lotuslandfineart.com/velvetrope/]

I had best friends at different stages of my life. Before college I used the term for only one person at a time, but once I hit college and had more freedom to branch out in my social life I realized that term can apply to more than one person at a time. Now I use the word besties, because it's generally understood that one can have more than one "bestie" at a time.

My partner is one of my besties, but surprisingly I am still learning to include him in aspects of my life as one. I think it is because I am used to not being emotionally supported by family living with me, so deep down I expect him to not support me if I open all the way up to him. I've been unlearning that for the 14 years we've been together.

[asakiyume]

"Bestie" is a great word.

And unlearning deep childhood hurt takes a long, long time. Maybe a lifetime. But he loves you, and you love him, so you're there for each other for the journey.

[http://lotuslandfineart.com/velvetrope/]

I had entirely glossed over this is deep childhood hurt that takes a long time to heal. Thank you for reminding me of that. Yes, the love and respect we have for each other makes a difference.