The 7 levels of friendship

Six of them come from William Rawlins, a communication scholar who mapped friendship in a book published in 1992. Role-limited interaction. Friendly relations. Moving towards friendship. Nascent friendship. Stabilised friendship. Waning friendship. The seventh is not one of his. It is what happens after, which most of us have lived and almost nobody writes down.

The usual version stops at the good part, as though a friendship only ever deepens. This one keeps going, through the stretch where it goes quiet and out the other side.

That version also draws a staircase, which is the other thing worth correcting before you read on. These are not steps to climb. Friendships reach them out of order, sit in one of them for years, and fall back into an earlier one after a house move or a new baby or a bad season, and the model is taught with that caveat attached: you will not pass through all six in order, and the order was never the point. What the levels give you is a vocabulary for where a friendship actually is. They are not a report card on how far it has come.

1 · You have a reason to talk: role-limited interaction

The person at the next desk. The woman who takes your dog's temperature once a year. The other parent standing at the same gate at the same hour, because your children finish at the same time.

Here you are not being yourself, exactly. You are being a colleague, a client, a neighbour, and so is the other person, and the conversation stays inside those lines: the weather, the traffic, the thing you are both there for. This level is taught as role-limited interaction, and the useful word is limited, not cold. A relationship can stay at this level for as long as you know someone, and nothing about that is a failure.

What makes it a level at all, rather than a non-event, is that in this model it is where friendships begin.

2 · You start talking anyway: friendly relations

Someone says something the role did not require. A sister's operation, mentioned while the kettle boils. A film neither of you can defend liking. Nothing has been proposed and either of you could let it go by Monday without any awkwardness at all.

Friendly relations is the level where two people find out whether there is anything there. It is deliberately cheap. Nobody has asked for anything, so nobody has to refuse, and the whole exchange can be forgotten by either party at no cost.

A relationship can stay here for good and be none the worse for it. The gym one. The work one who has never been to your house. Somebody you like enormously and have never once seen in the evening.

3 · Someone makes a move: moving towards friendship

A coffee is suggested that has nothing to do with the reason you know each other. Or a message arrives on a Saturday, with no work in it.

This is the level with the risk in it. It is taught as moving towards friendship, and the moving is doing the work: somebody has to go first, out of the safety of the role, without knowing whether the other person wants the same thing. That is precisely why the invitation means something when it lands. It cost something to send.

It is also where friendship stops being symmetrical. Across six datasets, only a third to a half of named friendships turned out to be mutual (Almaatouq et al., 2016). A move that is not returned is not, on its own, a verdict on the person who made it.

4 · It's new and it's careful: nascent friendship

You have done it twice now. There is a small unspoken negotiation going on about whether this is a monthly thing or a whenever thing, and neither of you is going to raise it out loud.

Nascent friendship is the level where a friendship has left the role behind but has not yet built any habits of its own. There is no precedent to fall back on, so everything is a live decision: how quickly to reply, whether the joke lands, whether you can say the true thing about your job or the polite one.

This negotiating does not stop here. Alongside the levels, the model sets out tensions that never resolve so much as get handled: the freedom to be independent set against the freedom to lean on someone, affection set against usefulness, honesty set against acceptance, saying the difficult thing set against protecting someone from it. A new friendship is where you feel all of them at once, because none of them have been settled yet.

5 · It just is: stabilised friendship

Nobody arranges it any more. There is a Tuesday, or a table, or a thread that has been running for years and has no subject.

Stabilised friendship is the level where both people take the friendship's continuation for granted, and that assumption is the entire achievement. It is what lets a month pass without either of you filing it as a slight. It is why you can arrive in a bad mood and not perform.

Stability is not the same as safety. The same trust that makes a friendship comfortable is the mechanism by which it can be quietly neglected for a decade, and both of those are true at once. Nothing in this level protects it from the next one.

6 · It's going quiet: waning friendship

A message sits unanswered for a week and neither of you minds, and the not minding is the part worth noticing.

The model does not stop at the good part. Waning friendship is one of its six levels, named and described rather than left as an afterthought, and that is the thing worth borrowing from it. As the model is taught, a friendship can wane by three quite different routes: the feeling cools on its own; one or both people decide, with something specific in mind, to let it go; or something happens that ends it outright.

The first route is the one nobody has language for. There was no argument. Nobody was wronged. You moved, or changed jobs, or had a child, and the friendship had been living on a shared context that stopped existing. Contact fell away, and closeness followed it down, which is the ordinary finding for friends and notably not for family: family tends to survive long silences in a way friendships often do not (Roberts & Dunbar, 2011).

A friendship going quiet is not a judgement on either of the two people in it.

7 · It's over, and you still know them

Their birthday still arrives on your phone. You know how they take their tea and the name of the road they grew up on, and you have not spoken in years.

A friendship can end without an ending.

This is the seventh level, the one Rawlins's stage model does not name, and it survives without him because the experience is real. Nothing was said, there is nothing to forgive, and what remains is not nothing: you are still carrying everything you knew about them, and they are still carrying everything they knew about you, and neither of you has any use for it now.

Losing touch is mostly not a defect of character. It is what happens when two lives stop overlapping, and friendship networks shrink and reshuffle across adulthood as people's circumstances change (Wrzus et al., 2013). It happens to everyone who lives long enough to have had several lives.

What the stages cannot tell you

Rawlins describes how a friendship got where it is. He does not describe what it is.

Two friendships can both be stabilised and have almost nothing else in common. One you chose deliberately and keep going on purpose. One life handed you, and it survives years of silence without any effort from either of you. Same level, entirely different things.

Levels are the path. Kinds are the shape.

The shape is the part that shows up across all of someone's friendships at once, starting with whether they are usually the one who suggests the meeting. Kinu has a vocabulary for that, four friendship styles, and it is a separate question from which level any one friendship has reached. The four friendship styles →

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