Friendaholic: Confessions of a Friendship Addict

Introduction

I was once told about a man who despised small talk. If he found himself at a party, he would never ask about someone’s job or comment on the weather or enquire how long it had taken a guest to get there and what route they had taken and did-they-avoid-the-traffic-on-the-A40. Instead, his opening gambit was always: ‘Aside from work and family, what’s your passion?’

When I was first told this story, I admired the man’s inventiveness. But I couldn’t immediately think of how I would answer. What was my passion?

As a teenager, I had been taught the importance of having hobbies to put on your CV in order to show you were a well-rounded person. I had struggled to scrape any together. I went to one salsa class and hated it, but I whacked it on my CV to placate the careers adviser. My father had taken me abseiling as a child, so I added that into the mix. I played the trumpet and put that down too. ‘Film’ I typed because it’s true that I did like going to the cinema and ordering a medium bucket of sweet and salty popcorn. The result was that any prospective employer would consider me a well-qualified salsa-dancing, trumpet-playing, cinema-going abseiler. But I couldn’t say that I felt passionate about any of it (other than the popcorn). Besides, a passion is different from a hobby, isn’t it? The former can be a concept, a feeling, a person; the latter involves some form of activity, occasionally with crampons.

Then, two years ago, the answer came to me with sudden clarity. We were living through a pandemic and, like millions of people around the globe, I went from having an active social life to none at all. I missed my friends with startling acuteness. I missed their faces, their hugs, the smell of their particular perfume. I missed our chats. I missed making sense of things by talking to them.

I had discovered my passion: it was friendship.

My friends had seen me through life’s unexpected turns. They had been there to support me through break-ups, fertility issues, marriage, divorce, miscarriage, job changes, home moves and more. They had given me support and kindness and good advice. And when things had gone well, they’d celebrated with me. We had laughed and cried and walked hand in hand through both hardship and success.

There wasn’t any language I could reach for to describe precisely what they meant to me. Most of the vocabulary around love had been co-opted for romantic relationships. I told my friends I loved them all the time. But of course I wasn’t in love with them. It was more nuanced than that. I was passionate about them.

Like many passions, it had grown to obsess me. Looking back, I realised that I loved the feeling of connection so much I came to rely on it. I sought out new friendships again and again and again. I would meet a person and instantly want to bond with them in some small way. We would fall into conversation and I knew that if I listened closely enough, I would be able to find something we had in common: a shared sense of humour or a mutual liking for a particular book or song or TV show. I would get a buzz from that moment of exchange; a hit of pure friendship adrenalin. In that moment, I would feel worthwhile and liked and accepted. I wanted more of it. Then I needed more of it. Then it became something I relied on for my own self-worth. I must be OK, the reasoning went, I’ve got so many friends!

At some point in my late thirties, it started to feel unsustainable. I found myself unable to keep up with all my friendships in the way that I wanted to. There wasn’t enough time to be there for everyone and still maintain a functioning life. It meant that I became a conspicuously less good friend because I was spreading myself too thinly. I was trying not to let anyone down, which ensured inevitably that I did. I said yes to invitations and dinners and shopping trips and weddings and birthdays and baby showers because I was worried a friend might be disappointed with me if I didn’t. I was indiscriminate in my attentions. The most important thing, it seemed to me, was to keep saying yes in order to keep the friendships afloat. If I didn’t manage that, I would be deemed unlikeable. I would be excommunicated from the circle of the sociable. And if I had no friends, I would have to look honestly at myself. I would have to confront the existential loneliness of the unloveable. That felt scary.

It turns out I wasn’t just passionate about friendship: I was addicted to it. I had a physical and emotional dependence. I had an urge to pursue it, even when it came at a damaging cost to my own peace of mind. I was, in short, a friendaholic.

You might be reading this and thinking ‘well, too many friends hardly seems like a problem’. You might be reaching for your metaphorical tiny violin and your imaginary crocodile to cry the requisite tears. And you’d be partially right: having a wide circle of acquaintances can be a wonderful thing, especially when the alternative is enforced isolation. There are those who suffer from crippling social anxiety, who have communication difficulties or live with an array of mental health conditions. They can struggle to leave the house, let alone make friends. A 2017 report published by the counselling service Relate found that 13 per cent of people have no friends at all.1 A lack of social interaction can be just as bad for your health as smoking fifteen cigarettes a day, and it can be twice as harmful to your life expectancy as obesity.2

But if having no friends decreases the quality – and length – of your life, having too many friends also has a negative impact. Researchers studying adolescent friendships have found that those with either too large or too small a social network both have higher levels of depressive symptoms.3 People aged fifty or over from across Europe display a similar pattern: depression is minimised when individuals have four to five close relationships and engage in social activities on a weekly basis. Any more than this, and the benefits decline, disappear altogether or become actively disadvantageous. This downward spiral is especially marked in those who have seven or more close relationships. The demands of maintaining those friendships were linked to an upswing in depressive symptoms.4

And while there is a widely held assumption that someone with lots of friends must be a person worth being friends with, it turns out the opposite is true: people prefer to befriend someone with a relatively small social circle, rightly intuiting that if someone has an overabundance of friends, their ability to reciprocate in any meaningful or reliable way will be severely diminished.5

All this time I’d been busily making and maintaining connections and I’d actually undermined the thing that was most important to me. I’d become a worse friend to the few who really counted in my desperation to be accepted by the many I barely knew.

It wasn’t, in fact, that I had too many friends, it was that I’d misunderstood the fundamental concept of friendship, which is that it should be stable, reciprocal and attentive. And for the purpose of clarity, my definition of a friend is someone you voluntarily want to spend time with, to whom you are not attached through familial bonds and with whom you don’t have a sexual or romantic relationship. A true friendship, to my mind, is founded on mutual respect, support, affection and kindness. You can’t be those things to everyone who enters your orbit unless you first work out a way to reconstruct the space–time continuum.

But understanding that you might be addicted to friendship does not mean you know how to cure yourself. I had no idea how to course-correct. I did not know where to look for resources, for understanding or for a lexicon of friendship itself. I didn’t really know what friendship was. It was a term so diffuse as to be rendered almost meaningless. Yet, for me, it simultaneously encapsulated all that was most meaningful and this also rendered it beyond the grasp of mere words.

So I did what I always do when I try to make sense of the world: I spoke to my friends. This book is the result. It is an attempt to fill in some of the gaps and provide some of the words. It is a journey of discovery, with a starting point of curiosity, and as such it will not have all the answers. It might not have any. But I hope it asks some interesting questions and contains some thoughtful jumping-off points for bigger conversations.

There are so many ways to be a friend that it’s impossible to do justice to them all, especially because attitudes to friendship diverge according to background, upbringing, age and geography. Ghanaians are more likely to advocate caution towards making friends and to emphasise the need for practical assistance, for instance. Americans, by contrast, have larger friendship networks and are more likely to emphasise companionship and emotional support.6 Chinese adolescents are concerned with the moral quality of close friendship whereas their Western counterparts focus predominantly on interaction, intimacy and keeping promises.7 The British and Australians value friends who are alike in outlook, with whom they can bond over similarities. In India, the Middle East and Southeast Asia, people are more likely to say that ‘a large social network’ is an essential quality to have in a best friend.8 In Kazakhstan, the nineteenth-century poet and philosopher Abai Qunanbaiuly had this to say about how to recognise true companionship: ‘A false friend is like a shadow: when the sun shines on you, you can’t get rid of him, but when clouds gather over you, he is nowhere to be seen.’9

Friendship is highly valued in various religious traditions. In Islam, the importance of surrounding ourselves with good company is emphasised as a necessary social and spiritual construct. The Hadith encourages us to ‘try to have as many as possible true friends, for they are the supplies in joy and the shelters in misfortunes’.10 One of the foundational principles of Christianity is to ‘do unto others as you would have them do unto you’.11 In the gospels, Jesus prepares his disciples for his impending arrest and death by saying that ‘greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends’.12

In Buddhism, a true friend is someone with the compassion and courage to tell us even those things we would rather not hear, with the Buddha quoted as saying that: ‘Admirable friendship, admirable companionship, admirable camaraderie is actually the whole of the holy life.’13

But if most religions agree on the virtue of friendship, the approach to it differs according to age group. Gen Zedders (born between 1996 and 2006) and Millennials (born between 1979 and 1995) are more practised in the art of internet friendships: 33 per cent of them feel loved after interacting with a friend online, while only 18 per cent of those born between 1944 and 1964 feel the same.14

There is no single work on friendship that could accurately convey this multi-faceted magnitude, which is why this book is, by necessity, a personal take.

This means that my perceptions are informed by my life which, broadly speaking, has been a very fortunate one. I am grateful to live in an era when past injustices and systemic inequalities are beginning to be addressed and I wholeheartedly support the idea that people like me must be aware of privilege and the advantages it has given us. Part of this privilege means acknowledging that I cannot convey every different experience of life with equal authority – and it would be ham-fisted of me to try. Where necessary, I have asked for contributions from individuals who can speak far more eloquently to the things I cannot.

We should all be allowed to tell our stories. And stories, by their nature, are specific. So, yes, this is a personal book, with personal reflections, insights and research. Along the way, I have been lucky enough to interview a great many people with wise and interesting things to say, including five of my dearest friends, each of whom represents some different, integral aspect of what friendship means to me. You’ll meet Joan, Sathnam, Sharmaine, Clemmie and Emma. And there are first-person glimpses into what friendship means to others – from a neurodivergent Iraqi woman to a paraplegic film-maker in her thirties and an eighty-year-old living with a terminal illness. They all have their own extraordinary stories of friendship to tell. As do you. Perhaps the following chapters will inspire you to tell them.

All of which is to say: I hope this book is encompassing, inclusive, generous and wholehearted; that it keeps you company and entertains you. I hope you are seen in its pages and that it helps you understand your own passions. I hope, in short, that it feels like the best kind of companion.

And if it doesn’t? That’s OK too. As I’m learning, we don’t have to be friends.

1.

PANDEMIC

What Lockdown Taught Me about Friendship

There is a car park in a drive-through Starbucks that will forever hold a special place in my heart. It’s located just off the A3, one of those modest roads out of London with pretensions: not quite a motorway but somewhat more chic than a standard dual carriageway. The Starbucks itself is a low-slung, single-storey building painted a slate grey that a posh paint brand would probably call ‘Pigeon Breath’. If you google it, which I had to do for directions, you will find that it has a 2.5 star rating on Tripadvisor. The reviews that customers have gone to the trouble of writing are quite disparate in tone. One is entitled ‘Shambles of a coffee stop’. Another has criticised the breakfast roll, claiming ‘The Smell [capitals, reviewer’s own] upon opening was disgusting’. If you keep scrolling down, you’ll get to a man who is delighted that there is ‘loads of parking even for long vans’, so I suppose it all depends on personal proclivities.

I have not left an online review for this Starbucks, but if I did it would be a rave. For it was here, in May 2020, that I saw my best friend Emma for the first time in two and a half months. We had, like so many others, been separated by the Covid-19 pandemic. The first national lockdown had been imposed some weeks previously. The government announced on 16 March that all unnecessary social contact should cease. By 23 March, the then Prime Minister Boris Johnson gave a televised address in which he instructed the British people to ‘stay at home’. We were allowed out only for one form of exercise a day, he told us. Gatherings of more than two people from different households were banned. Non-essential shops were told to close. Weddings and funerals were immediately halted. We shut our doors that night on a very different world. The worst part was that no one knew what was to come.

In times of crisis, I have routinely turned to my best friend. But this was a situation where I knew I would be unable to hug her for an unidentified period of time. I couldn’t just catch the train to go and visit, safe in the knowledge that she would already have stocked the kitchen cupboards with my favourite foodstuffs (namely crumpets and Marmite). She couldn’t come up to see me and spend the night in the spare room which she claimed – quite rightly – as hers and subsequently felt aggrieved any time we had other guests who slept there. We couldn’t sit next to each other on the sofa, analysing the finer nuances of Married at First Sight Australia as one of us reached out her arm to be lightly stroked by the tips of the other’s fingers. Knowing this wasn’t going to be possible for the foreseeable future made us both feel untethered, even a bit panicked.

Emma and I have been best friends since meeting in freshers’ week at university. She was funny, smart, half Swedish and popular. I was unsure of myself and had sprained my ankle after the Lacrosse Club fed me one too many vodka jellies and encouraged me to run for the ball while wearing high-heeled boots on the college bar’s concrete forecourt (which, if anyone reading this is tempted to try it, is definitively Not A Good Idea).

Emma had long, curly blonde hair. I sported an ill-advised brunette crop – the legacy of an over-enthusiastic Cape Town hairdresser I’d met on my gap year. It took me several years to grow that crop out, by which time I’d burned through approximately 570 hair clips from Claire’s Accessories and Emma and I had bonded over our shared talent for recalling word-perfect dialogue from the first Austin Powers film.

I still consider it an extraordinary stroke of good fortune that I met Emma, let alone that I somehow bamboozled her into becoming my best friend. What were the chances that the extraordinary randomness of the universe had led us both to that point? What serendipitous magic ensured that her Scandinavian forebears passed down a chain of genetic chromosomes to her mother Ingrid that would mesh so perfectly with the DNA of Keith, her British veterinarian father, and form the foundational structure of this uniquely special human? How was it that despite our different backgrounds and being raised in entirely different parts of the country and wanting to study different A levels and different degree subjects, we still ended up meeting and falling in platonic love?

It was gorgeous happenstance, as it is for anyone who is lucky enough to meet a kindred spirit, and the frequency with which this occurs is in itself a kind of beauty. For while most of us only ever anticipate meeting a tiny handful of romantic partners (and, ideally, one true soulmate, according to Mills & Boon and the legacy of Victorian puritanism), we are expected to fling ourselves into multiple friendships throughout the course of our lives.

We do not have to be monogamous with friendship. In fact, people think it’s odd if you are. Imagine someone saying during the course of a conversation ‘I only have one friend’. You’d probably think there was something a bit strange about them, wouldn’t you? Whereas to say you only have one spouse at any given time is not only socially acceptable but the Westernised default, unless you’re a Mormon.

My friendship with Emma has sustained me through some of the toughest periods of my life – miscarriage, divorce, illness – as well as being one of the greatest sources of joy. Before I met my husband, Emma was the person I most wanted to spend my time with. She understands me better than I do myself, partly because she’s known me longer than most and partly because she’s a psychotherapist, so is professionally qualified to call me out on my bullshit.

Of course, as time has moved on, so have we. When she was twenty-seven, she got married to a lovely man and they are still together. I ricocheted from one relationship to the next, before ending up divorced at the age of thirty-six. After my divorce, I set about putting all I had learned about dysfunctional relationships to good use by ignoring it and falling into a rebound that lasted two years before ending dramatically just before my thirty-ninth birthday. By the time I met Justin, my now-husband, on an app,15 I had lost so much faith in my own judgement that one of the first things I did after a few weeks of dating was ask him to have dinner with me and Emma. That way, I could get her eyes on him and she could tell me what she thought. I imagined her silently raising or lowering her thumb like a Roman senator as he ordered his starter. She didn’t actually do this, but she did send me a thumbs-up emoji the following day which was all I needed to know. Justin didn’t realise he was sitting a test (I wasn’t going to tell him, are you mad? No, I would just leave it a few years and then write about it in a book), but luckily he passed and I felt able to carry on getting to know him, with full confidence.

If anything, Emma and I have become closer over the years, even though there are things that set us apart. Geography, for one – we don’t live in the same city. Then there are family responsibilities: she has two children; I have a ginger cat. She is no longer blonde, having reverted to her natural darker colouring. But the nice thing is that I am still brunette and the older we get, the more people tell us we look like sisters.

Before lockdown, it wasn’t that we were seeing each other every single day. Nor were we talking every single day, because neither of us likes a phone call when a lengthy text or voice note will do just as well. But knowing that we could see each other if we wanted gave us both a sense of security. When lockdown happened, that safety net was ripped from under us. We couldn’t have seen each other even if we’d wanted to. And we did want to. We longed for it. We missed each other with a numb, foggy sadness. We missed each other so much, in fact, that we broke our usual communication rules and began FaceTiming. It wasn’t that bad, it turned out. It was actually quite nice.

We even started doing the same live online yoga class together on Saturday mornings, but after a while the pleasure started to pall. It turned out that peering into Zoom squares to see each other’s downward dogs and crow poses as Bart, the instructor, gradually became more uptight about our lack of attention to detail, had a finite appeal.

‘Rachel, left leg forward,’ I would hear him say as I tried to float effortfully into Half Moon. ‘No, not the right leg, Rachel. The left leg.’ Bart’s voice would become tighter and more clipped. As I glanced at him through the screen, I could feel his attempt to project external Zen while his interior organs melted into a lava of inexpressible rage. ‘Left one. That’s it. Look at me. No, Rachel, not that one. The left leg.’ By this stage, both Emma and I would be wanting to scream ‘THE LEFT FUCKING LEG, RACHEL’ and any hopes of leaving the class refreshed and enlightened would be dashed. I really hope Rachel worked it out in the end.

Emma and I felt a bit silly about missing each other so much because it wasn’t that different from our usual level of interaction but I suppose, if I look back now, we were scared. We’d never experienced a global pandemic before, with an unknown virus running rampant across the globe and killing millions of people with unexplained ferocity. None of us had. And when you’re feeling frightened, even if you can’t acknowledge that fear to yourself, you turn to the people you love and trust most in the world.

For me that was Emma. Which brings us, poetically, to the Cobham drive-through Starbucks. After a six-week, near-total lockdown, restrictions were very slightly relaxed. Some cafes opened for collection only. Emma knew how much I’d missed my regular cup of Starbucks jasmine tea16 and so she started googling to find a place we could meet that was equidistant for us both and that would provide us with refreshments and enable us to hang out in the car park afterwards like a pair of lovesick teenagers. That’s why I found myself there on a windy Saturday morning, having driven the best part of an hour to get there with my heartbeat pitter-pattering in anticipation. I felt excited. I felt emotional. I felt, dare I say it, nervous. All those feelings that we’re told to expect in romantic love were transposed here to platonic companionship. It was like going for a first date with an old flame you’re reuniting with after a prolonged absence, but without any of the bother of working out what to wear to give an impression of nonchalant sexiness and enigmatic availability. It didn’t matter what I wore to meet Emma. All that mattered was that I would see her.

Then: there she was. Driving up behind me in the grown-up, family-sized car that always shocked me when I saw her at the wheel because it reminded me we were adults. We got our drinks. We parked up side by side (and that Tripadvisor reviewer was right: there was plenty of space for long vans). We sat socially distanced on a concrete breeze block until we tacitly acknowledged that it was a bit too cold and went back to our cars, speaking to each other with the doors open. It was overwhelmingly lovely to be with her, but it was also odd and constrained. I’m used to bowling up and hugging her as soon as I see her. Emma, although far less given to tactile displays than I am (‘I just need to not be touched for a bit,’ I remember her once saying when she’d had a morning of being pawed over by her two young children), found it strange that I couldn’t do my normal thing. So we sat there awkwardly, wanting to touch but not being able to, and there was a moment of emotion when we both had tears in our eyes from the simultaneous joy of being together and the inability to give physical expression to that.

We talked about everything and nothing, as we usually do: how lockdown had affected our families, how wretched and tragic the pandemic was, how lucky we were to be comparatively safe and sheltered, how our self-esteem had taken a nose-dive because all the usual beautifying tactics we used were now beyond our reach and we had to embrace our grey hairs (or at least pretend to embrace our grey hairs) and did we think Bart was all right because he seemed on the brink of a nervous breakdown the last time he had almost screamed at Rachel during side-plank and also, was Rachel OK, and was there maybe a kind of illicit flirtation going on between the two of them? On it went. The joyous, untrammelled flow of conversation and laughter and fellow feeling. We talked long after we’d finished our drinks until finally we realised we couldn’t sit in this car park forever, however much we might want to. There were other people driving through and needing parking spots, including an HGV that was even longer than a long van. So we closed our car doors and turned our keys in the ignition, and we smiled at each other through the windscreen (I say ‘we’ but actually Emma made a comedy sad face) and we drove back to our homes, unsure of what the future held but surer than ever of our friendship.

I kept hold of that takeaway Starbucks cup. I took it home with me and washed it out and set it on the kitchen countertop. Every day for a few weeks after that, I would make myself a cup of tea in that paper cup. When I drank it, I felt closer to Emma. After a while, the cup became soggy and gross and I had to throw it out, but the mental nourishment I’d gained from those couple of hours in the Starbucks car park sustained me for much, much longer.

A few days into the lockdown, long before I’d got my takeaway tea cup and discovered online yoga classes, I received a message on Facebook from a friend called Ella. This was a strange way to contact me, given that she also had my phone number and we normally chatted via WhatsApp and honestly, who has time to check their Facebook messages any more? Despite Facebook’s stated ambition to connect the world, it has instead become a primordial soup of irritation and misinformation: the online equivalent of one of those wedding receptions held on a boat so there is literally no escape from the groom’s cousin, Bob, who believes the mainstream media is lying to him about the efficacy of vaccines.

Anyway, Ella had fallen victim to that haunting online algorithm, the Facebook Memory. A picture of us taken at a party some years previously had popped up on her feed like an overnight mushroom on a moist garden lawn. My friend had sent it to me, accompanied by this message:

‘Before you became obsessed with babies and decided you didn’t want to have fun with me any more,’ she wrote.

I had to read it a couple of times before I realised she wasn’t joking. She was being deliberately mean. I was surprised not only by the content, but by the fact she had actually pressed send. I’m sure we all feel annoyed by most of our friends at various points during our life, but to write it out in black and white and then decide that you want the other person to see how angry you are – that seemed like overkill. And to do it on Facebook seemed, well, naff.

But, I reasoned, the pandemic is making everyone feel a bit unhinged. Maybe this was just an error of judgement. And perhaps I would have been able to let it slide, had it not been one of many slights Ella had casually lobbed my way over the time we’d known each other.

We’d met through work when we were both temping at the same recruitment agency over the summer holidays. Ella was fun. She was a party friend. We’d go out and drink too much over dinner and a man at the adjacent restaurant table would hit on her (she is extremely hot) and then we’d go clubbing and more men would hit on her while I danced alone, nursing a tepid vodka tonic in a plastic tumbler, pretending that I was fine with having no attention, pretending I was absolutely, positively having a total riot, pretending that I knew how to dance to Britney Spears’ ‘Toxic’ in a nonchalant way until I finally had to admit I probably wasn’t having as much fun as I should have been. I didn’t know any better then. I had fallen into the trap of assuming that culturally sanctioned fun – the kind of heteronormative, unimaginative fun enshrined in a million television sitcoms and American frat boy movies – was the sort of fun I should be having. If I didn’t enjoy it, then the fault surely lay with me?

On and on it went. And then, in our thirties, we both got married and Ella, who had never wanted children, carried on having fun, and I was happy for her, and then she moved to a different country for a while. This was the first sign that our friendship had fissures. She would ask me to come and visit her all the time – and I did, on several occasions. But it never felt as though it was enough. Ella actually said as much, and it began to feel as though I were trying to feed a ravenous beast whose appetite would never be fully sated.

She moved back to London at around the time I was trying to have babies. I wasn’t conceiving naturally. Then IVF didn’t work for me either. Then, some months later and entirely out of the blue, I did get pregnant and Ella persuaded me to go to Krakow for a weekend because she’d been invited to a hen do she didn’t want to attend alone. So I went, not thinking to question whether it would be enjoyable to spend money attending a hen do of a woman I’d never met before, in a foreign city without being able to drink. I went because Ella had asked me and she had made it sound Fun-with-a-capital-F and I desperately wanted to be Fun-with-a-capital-F for her. As it turned out, I spent most of the time feeling ill at ease in a group social setting with lots of impenetrable private jokes. I was generally exhausted by midnight, at which point I would schlep back to our Airbnb, getting lost on the way, only to be woken by Ella as she careened upstairs at 4