The types of friends

You have a friend you could ring at three in the morning. You have another you have laughed with every week for six years and never told anything true. Both are friends. Every list of friend types is somebody's list, and most of them never say whose. This one says where each cut comes from.

Some of the divisions below come out of research. Some are the words people already use at kitchen tables, which are often the better ones. None of them is a test, and none of them puts anybody below anybody else.

Friends you chose, and friends life handed you

The man who married your sister. The woman who had the room next to yours in your first flat, who you would not have picked out of a crowd of forty, and whose voice you would now know anywhere.

One of those you chose. The other arrived with the furniture.

This is the cut most people make first, and the research complicates it in a useful way. Friendships form inside the settings people already share: a street, an office, a school gate, a Sunday league. Those settings go on shaping what the friendship is able to become (Allan, 1989; Adams & Allan, 1998). Chosen and given is our compression of that, not their phrase. What their work actually says is narrower and more interesting. The context is not just where you met. It stays part of the friendship for as long as the friendship lasts.

Which is why the chosen ones are less chosen than they feel. You picked your closest friend freely, out of the dozen or so people your first job put in a room with you. Change the job and you would have picked somebody else, and loved them just as much, and told yourself the same story about it afterwards.

The given ones are not passive either. Your sister's husband is in your life whatever you do. Whether he is a friend gets decided by a hundred small things nobody writes down. The lift home you offer. The second pint.

Nobody picks from the whole world. You pick from the room you were standing in.

Friends you do things with, and friends you tell things to

Eleven years of Thursday five-a-side. You know his knees, his terrible left foot and the year he stopped smoking. You do not know whether his marriage is happy.

Then there is the one you ring from a car park because you cannot go back inside yet.

The distinction has a name in the research: side-by-side friendship and face-to-face friendship (Wright, 1982). Around the same time, others were separating friendships organised around a shared activity from friendships organised around what the two people tell each other (Caldwell & Peplau, 1982). One seam, two sets of words for it.

The mistake is to read that as a league table with the talking kind on top.

Doing is its own currency. Eleven years of Thursdays is eleven years of a man going out in the rain when he could have stayed in. That is loyalty with mud on it. Nobody has had to say a word about it in eleven years.

It is also, for a great many people, the only door that opens. Some things can only be said while the hands are busy and nobody has to hold eye contact. In a kitchen, or halfway up a hill in bad weather. Ask the same question directly across a table and you get the tidy answer.

Some things only get said sideways.

The ones you see weekly, and the ones you see twice a year

Two friends. One you see every week without arranging it. One flies back at Christmas, and forty minutes into the first drink you are exactly where you left off, and it is faintly uncanny every time.

It is tempting to file those as two different kinds of friend. Mostly they are the same kind of friend with different postcodes.

Friendship networks shrink and reshuffle across adulthood as people's circumstances change (Wrzus et al., 2013). A move, or a parent who suddenly needs looking after. The weekly friend becomes the twice-a-year friend without anybody deciding anything, and the twice-a-year friend becomes the weekly one because a lease happened to end.

So how often you see someone is telling you something true. It is telling you about the year, not about the friendship.

Some friendships really do run on regular contact and go quiet without it. Others can sit untouched for two years and start mid-sentence. You usually know which of yours is which. You cannot work it out from the calendar.

How often is a fact about your week. It is not a fact about the two of you.

The work friend, the old friend, the friend of a friend, the family friend

These four are not categories anybody set out to study. They are what people say out loud, and they are worth drawing properly, because each of them names a situation rather than a person.

The work friend. You know her manager's name and the exact state of her kitchen extension. You have never met her partner. The whole thing runs on a shared eight hours, and the test comes at the leaving do, when one of you has to send a message into a silence that nothing is holding open any more. Some send it. Plenty never do, and the friendship was real for every one of those shared hours.

The old friend. He knew you at nineteen, and he is one of the last people who can put that person back in the room. That is the gift. The complication is that he may still be arguing with someone you stopped being a long time ago. Old friends hold the whole archive, including the parts you have quietly retired.

The friend of a friend. You met through a mutual friend, you like him enormously, and every plan the two of you have ever made has had her in it. If she moved to Lisbon tomorrow, would this survive? Sometimes it does, and the moment it does, something has changed without being announced. Somebody had to send a message that did not mention her.

The family friend. She was at every christening. She has opinions about your career, and a right to them that nobody ever granted her in writing. You did not choose her and you cannot resign, and one day you will be the one ringing her, because she is among the last people who can still describe your mother's kitchen.

Not one of those four names a person. Each of them names where you met, and how much of the friendship is still being carried by the place.

What the types cannot tell you

A type is a photograph. People keep moving after it is taken.

The Thursday football friend rang from a hospital corridor at eleven at night, and after that he was not the football friend. The work friend turned into the old friend, six years and two jobs later, and the office you both complained about is now just the story you tell about how you met.

The same person can be two or three of these across one life, and no category can see it happening, because a category is built to describe an arrangement at a moment. It is a good tool for a question about one friendship right now. It is a poor tool for a question about a person over time.

There is a second thing the types cannot see. A type describes the friendship. It does not describe either of the people inside it. Whether you are usually the one who suggests the date, and whether you have one person you tell everything or four you tell a quarter each: that pattern runs through everybody you know at once, and no list of friend types will ever find it. It shows up whoever you happen to be sitting with.

And where a friendship has got to, as distinct from what kind it is, is a third question, with a vocabulary of its own in the levels of friendship.

Kinu keeps a different vocabulary from all of this, and it is deliberately one for people rather than for friendships: who tends to reach first, and what you keep of what people tell you. We call it the four friendship styles, and which one is yours is a separate question from what kind any single friendship is.

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