7 Types Of Friends & Their Categories
Best friends, work friends, neighbors- how long is your list?
We generally classify a “friend” as a woman we love and trust. Someone who is supportive, and the person who we can bare our souls to. The one person who we know with out a doubt will tell us the hard truth, (no you can’t wear that dress unless you lose 10 pounds first girl!) when they must be told. I’ve learned over the years, however, that this is a narrow point of view. The friendships I have meet different needs, but all important in different aspects of my life.
Here are 7 different types of categories I’d like you to consider.
1) Convenience Friends
These are the women that if our paths weren’t crossing, we’d have no particular reason to be friends. The woman next door, a woman in our carpool, a mother to one of our children’s friends. These women are convenient indeed. They’ll drive our kids to soccer when we are sick, feed your cat when you’re on vacation, as we would for them. But we don’t with our convenience friends get too deep or personal. I’ll talk to you about being overweight but not about being depressed. I’ll admit to being in a funk but not that I’m really mad with rage. I might say that we’re pinched this month but not that I’m worried sick over money and bills. But this doesn’t mean that there isn’t a sufficient value to this friendship.
2) Special- Interest Friends
This friendships aren’t really that intimate, they don’t involve our children or anything too personal. This may be your favorite coworker, a girl in your yoga class, a woman you see on the bus everyday who you make small conversation with. While they aren’t really a permanent part of our lives, these are usually people we look forward to seeing as a familiar face in something we do routinely and share.
3)Historical Friends
We all have a friend who knew us back in Mrs. Wild’s second grade art class, when you lived in the small 2 bedroom apartment in Brooklyn, when your dad was out of work for 5 months, when your sister moved and went to a big university in a whole new city, when we lost our virginity, she was the first, the only friend you told. The years have whistled by and we have little in common now but we are still an intimate part of each other’s past. So when we go back home we always visit this friend who knows how we talked before our voice got “un-Brooklyned”. She knows what we ate before we discovered artichoke and hummus, who, with her presence, puts us in an earlier, important part of ourselves that we never want to lose.
4) Crossroads Friends
Like historical friends, our crossroads friends are important for what was. Maybe the time we roomed together in college, worked our first jobs as waitresses together, went through pregnancy, birth, and that first year of motherhood together.
5) Cross Generational Friends
Another kind of intimacy exists in the friendships that form across generations in which us women refer to as daughter- mother or mother- daughter kind of relationship. Things we can share that we probably wouldn’t share with our own mothers or daughters. What we get is the benefit of her experience and what she enjoys is a youthful perspective. This is usually a great balance and pleasure for both.
6) Part -of-a- couple Friends
Some of the women we meet are through the men we are dating at the time. His brother’s girlfriend, or his best friend’s wife. We usually don’t hang out too often outside of being coupled with our guys, a family event, a birthday party, NYE gathering. For whatever reason, a lack of time, or, lack of chemistry, the fact that we sigh a “I’m so glad she’s here” when walking in and spend half the evening talking together says that this too, in its own way, counts as a friendship.
7) Men Who are Friends
I wanted to write only about the women in our lives but it’s naive to think that men and women can’t be really good friends. Sometimes you talk on the phone, have lunch to catch up. You may vent to him about a guy you’re dating and want to get a male perspective. You trust him to see you without make up or when your hair’s a mess. You feel like he is a brother and will always have your best interest at heart. He sometimes comes to you about things that he needs a woman’s help with, like what type of pot to buy to bake a roast in or what his girlfriend would like for Christmas.
There are medium friends, pretty good friends, and very good friends which are defined by their level of intimacy. What we reveal at each of these levels are calibrated with care. We might tell a medium friend that we got into a fight with our husband. And we might tell our pretty good friend that we got into a fight with our husband and that it was so heated that you’ve been sleeping on the couch. And we might tell a very good friend that the fight was about the girl that works in his office. But it’s only to our very best friend that we are willing to tell all about what’s going on with the girl in his office.
Best friends totally love, trust, and support each other and come running, no questions asked and tell the harsh truths when they must be told.
