The types of friendships

You have known someone for fifteen years, and the friendship has been three different things in that time. Friendships get sorted in a few ways: close or casual, chosen or inherited, carried by a standing arrangement or by nothing at all, and named after where they began, at work or at school or online. Each label is naming an arrangement between two people.

That is the whole difference between a kind of friendship and a kind of friend. One person can be in two quite different friendships with you twenty years apart, and be the same person at both ends of it. What changed was the arrangement.

Close, casual, and the ones life gave you

The neighbour on the other side of a thin wall, who holds a key to your flat and has never once used it. The person your partner has known since school, who is at every table you sit at now.

Close and casual is the cut people reach for first, and it usually gets made on warmth. What separates them is closer to range: how much of your life the friendship is allowed into, and how much can be said inside it without a preamble.

A casual friendship keeps to the ground it was built on. It is genuine there, and there is nothing thin about it. What makes it casual is that nobody has taken it anywhere else, and often nobody has needed to.

A third group was never picked at all. In-laws. The other parents at a birthday party you are all stuck at until four o'clock. Sociologists of friendship have made the chosen-and-inherited split harder to hold: friendships come out of the situations two lives are sitting in, and those situations keep setting the terms long afterwards (Allan, 1989; Adams & Allan, 1998). The phrase life gave you is ours and the kitchen table's, not theirs. Their own point is smaller and more awkward. The setting does not retire once the introductions are over. It carries on deciding what the two of you do, how often, and what there is to talk about.

An inherited friendship has an advantage the chosen ones do not. It does not have to be kept up in order to keep existing. The street or the family Sunday produces the next occasion whether either of you arranges it or not, and plenty of those friendships become the real thing on repetition alone. What decides that is never how the two of you met. It is what gets said once the occasion is over and neither of you has left yet.

Close and casual are not fixed properties of a friendship. Change what the two of you share and the friendship changes kind, and neither person has to feel any differently for that to happen. A casual friendship becomes close in a single bad week. A close one turns casual across ten years in which nothing at all went wrong.

The friendship that lives on the appointment, and the one that survives silence

A walk every second Sunday, four years of them, and neither of you has had to propose it since the first one.

And the one where eight months go past, and then a phone call starts in the middle of a sentence, because nothing was being kept for later.

Those look like two depths. They are two mechanisms.

The research here is about networks rather than about any single friendship. Across adulthood the set of people around someone shrinks and rearranges itself as circumstances shift (Wrzus et al., 2013). The step from that finding to your own week is ours, not theirs: how often two people meet mostly follows their circumstances, and a quiet stretch is a rhythm rather than a verdict.

A standing arrangement is not a lesser thing. It is infrastructure. It does the work that otherwise falls to whichever of the two of you is willing to be the one who asks, and it will hold a friendship up through years when neither person has much to give it.

Its risk is that it can be the only thing holding it up. The class ends, or one of you moves. The friendship stops, and nobody chose that.

The other kind carries the opposite risk. Nothing announces when it has finished. A friendship that survives eight months of silence will survive nine, and eleven, and there is no point at which either person is told.

Friendships at work, at school, and online

Forty hours a week, arranged by somebody neither of you has met, in a room neither of you picked.

The work friendship is made out of time that was never allocated to it. That is its advantage, because nobody has to find the hours. It is also why the person you speak to most in a given week can be somebody you have never once arranged to see.

You meet one version of a person there. You know how they are in a meeting and how they are at half past five, and the rest of them arrives later, if it arrives at all. The friendship sits inside a structure with pay and rank in it, which both people can usually feel and neither tends to mention.

The school friendship is the opposite arrangement. Nobody chose the hours there either, but there were thousands of them, at an age when you had no say in who was in the room. That gives those friendships an enormous amount of shared time and almost no chosen time, which is why the ones that outlive the timetable are the ones that got rebuilt on preference alone.

The online friendship has none of that. No corridor, no timetable, nobody walking past your desk. Every exchange happens because one of you decided to make it happen, which is what makes these friendships more deliberate than most and more fragile than they look. It is also the kind most often asked to prove that it counts.

What those three have in common is a setting doing part of the work for them. The question each of them leaves open is what the friendship does on the day the setting stops.

The friendship that ends without an ending

Somewhere in your phone is a thread that stops in the middle of an ordinary week. Nobody was wronged. There was no last time that either of you knew was the last time.

This one appears on almost no list of friendship types, and it is among the commonest kinds there are. It is not a live friendship and it is not a finished one. You still know things about that person that nobody else in your life knows, and there is nothing to be done with any of it.

Usually none of it is anybody's fault. Two lives stopped overlapping, and the overlap was what the friendship had been running on.

This kind is worth having a name for, because without one people file it under something they did wrong. A friendship that stopped being convenient for both of you in the same season is not an argument nobody had the courage to have.

What happens while a friendship goes quiet, and what is left of it once it has, is a different question with its own set of words in the levels of friendship. That is the other way of asking this question. Not what kind a friendship is, but how far along it is.

What a kind of friendship cannot tell you

Two people are in the same friendship. One of them has suggested nearly every meeting of the last five years, and the other has almost never been the one to ask.

Whatever label goes on that friendship goes on both of them at once, and the difference between the two is exactly what it cannot hold.

There is a pattern that runs under all of yours at once, and the plainest part of it is which of you tends to reach first. Whether you take the news to one person or to the whole group is the other part. The pattern is there in the close ones and the casual ones and the ones you would not have chosen, and no sorting of friendships will turn it up, because every kind above is a description of a pair.

Kinu wrote a vocabulary for it, the four friendship styles. It names an overall lean and nothing more than that. You can be one thing in a friendship that is fifteen years old and something else entirely in one that started in March.

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