Thanks to Elizabeth Day I’ve Just Found Out I’m a Friendaholic

What role do you play in your friendships?

Apr 19, 2023

I don’t like WhatsApp groups. Sometimes I have a fleeting notion that for every group I’m included in, there is a corresponding one with all the same people, minus me! Damn my deep-rooted sense of irrelevance!

Of course, my real friends bring me a feeling of safety and a sense of belonging. We share a nourishing reciprocal love and understanding. They know my quirks and insecurities, and they are still here. That must count for something.

We are all different and approach our friendships in different ways. I view my close friends as my family. As a child, my dysfunctional family setup and boarding school directed me to find my emotional safety in the comfort of my friends.

There are ups and downs to my friendship habits. I make friends easily. But I have contorted myself for too long to ensure I am liked and accepted. During this process, I have shrunk myself to fit in! For the first three decades of my life, I believed my role was to serve my friends. I was responsible for their happiness, and my presence was sacrificial. You can imagine how that turned out!

As I unravel the complex knots I’ve twisted myself up in, I find myself shedding friends like a reptile sheds its skin. And honestly, it’s both cathartic and scary.

Friendships have been central to my conscious thoughts over the past few years. I’ve gained connections I never dreamed of and lost companions I thought were for life. Some friendships slip away with the tide, with no drama or ordeal, just a gentle fading of connected energies. And some friendships require more closure, and with this comes disenfranchised grief.

I try my best to honor my friendships relegated to the past. I cherish the shared memories, and although they may no longer have a place in my present or future, they remain a celebrated part of my history.

Let’s look at what happens when friendships fade or break down. I don’t want to dwell on the negative; this is a celebration of friendship and ourselves. We learn how to dance the healthy friendship two-step only when we learn to be our best friend.

A head tilt to Elizabeth Day

I recently finished reading Friendaholic by Elizabeth Day. This book is a personal exploration of friendship. Day is vulnerable, honest, raw, and often self-deprecating about how she shows up in her friendships. The deeper I progressed into Friendaholic, the more I felt the tacky paws of resonance gripping me. This book exposed me and my friendship style and made me feel utterly seen.

What is friendship?

I have always viewed friendship as a reciprocal love, a mutual celebration of each other, and an unspoken agreement to help each other celebrate wins and commiserate losses.

I believe friendship is about acceptance while also encouraging each of us to live a life of fulfillment and purpose.

Friendship is like a pendulum. Sometimes our friend is in a challenging position and requires us to swing our collective focus to them. Other times we may need the pendulum to swing to us. For a relationship to be healthy, true reciprocity requires the pendulum to rest in a position of equilibrium.

In Friendaholic, we learn what friendship means to Day. It makes sense to recognise that we all have different metrics of friendships. To some people, it is important to have shared interests; to others, spending time together may be more important.

There are many other metrics of friendship. What is important to you?

Day shares her friendship metric with us as “reciprocal generosity of spirit: the idea that our starting point is always to think the best of each other.”

According to Emma (Day’s best friend), “A true friendship will help heal past disappointments and present wrongs. True friendship is a raft in the ever-changing waters of life.”

I want to stress that friendship is not an obligation. There’s a whole unspoken expectation on friendships. We don’t routinely outline what we need from our friendships, yet this sort of communication is encouraged and commonplace in romantic relationships. Day quite rightly builds a case for a friendship contract. Wouldn’t that save a ton of heartache and help us to be clear on what capacity we have to give and what we hope to receive in our friendships?

Friendship fades, and breakups

Danielle is one of the people who Day quote’s in her book. Danielle, a friendship coach, tells us that we replace half our friends every seven years!

So you see, it is perfectly normal for friendships to evaporate. But if you are anything like me, this may cause you feelings of shame, anguish, and maybe even humiliation. The feelings around a friendship breakup depend on your emotional proximity or what layer they are.

Robin Dunbar speaks of different layers of relationships.

The innermost layer comprises 1.5 people, assumed to be romantic but may not be.
The second layer is the five people who will drop everything for us.
The third layer includes the people we socialise with and have fun with.
The fourth layer is the 50 people we invite to our big BBQ weekend.
The fifth layer comprises the 150 people we may invite to an event such as a wedding.

In my experience, breaking up with friends in the second and sometimes the third layers is where grief and complex feelings arise. At the same time, friendships in the fourth and fifth layers come and go fluidly, sometimes with barely a notice.

Day quotes Friedrich Nietzche. In his day, Nietzche wrote emphatically about friendships' complexities. He refers to dormant friendships as “star friendships.” We may become estranged from some friends, but they are still everpresent - like stars. We honour this shared history of friendship by recognising them as part of our journey, gone from our lives but not forgotten.

In the last few years, I have broken up with two second-layer friends. One day I will write about these in more detail. The waters are choppy, and I still feel a disturbance in my system. I must wait for the silt to settle before I can write clearly and fairly. But what I will say is both these break-ups were excruciating decisions. They gave me sleepless nights, were the subject of several therapy sessions and deep soul searching, and took all the strength and self-respect I could muster to initiate their untangling. No one walks away from a second-layer friendship unscathed. My wounds are still raw.

Friendship flowers

Be open to new friends. Some of my closest friends came into my life on waves of serendipity.

Friendship is sacred. They say it takes 140 hours for a good friendship to develop. But we forget to discuss the maintenance needs of this. What happens after 140 hours if we stop making an effort? For our friendships to survive and thrive, don’t forget the rules of reciprocity and remember to keep showing up for each other and building new memories together.

I consider my bouquet of friends like a flowerbed. They are each unique and beautiful in their own incomparable ways. But as every gardener knows, flowerbeds take time and energy to keep them looking healthy and nourished.

Tend to your friends and have the courage to remove those who have become weeds.

Thank you for reading.

How do you view friendship? How do you keep your friendships healthy, and how do you handle friendship breakups? I’d love to hear your input in the comments.