Understanding Friendships

See also: Making Friends as an Adult

Friends and friendships are wonderful. Friends will support you, build you up, and hopefully tell you when you’re wrong, as well as when you’re right. They are ideally there for you, but in all the right ways.

However, sometimes friendships can go wrong, among both adults and children or young people. When that happens, it can feel like one of the worst things that has ever happened to you, akin to the breakdown of a romantic relationship. In fact, it can sometimes be worse than the breakdown of a romantic relationship, because you may well have known your friend longer than your ex-partner, and have invested more time into the relationship. This page explains more about friendships. It proposes some classification systems to help you understand friendships better, and enable you to recognise why some last and some don’t.

The Secret to Managing Friendships: Accurate Classification

Each one of us probably has some kind of mental map for categorising platonic relationships in our lives. You may not be completely aware of it, but it is quite likely that whenever you meet someone new, you spend time assessing how close you are likely to become: do you like them? Do they seem to like you? Do you share common interests? Do you laugh at the same things?

These questions are crucial for deciding whether to become friends, stay as acquaintances who can meet periodically but are unbothered by not doing so, or to avoid each other in future.

However, even within the ‘friends and acquaintances’ category, there are different sorts of friends.

Learning to appreciate and understand these categories of friendship is crucial to managing friendships appropriately.

Not rude, just appropriate


It may feel a bit rude to talk about classifying friendships. It might sound like you are trying to put people into a box. However, it is crucial for managing friendships appropriately. Get the box wrong, and you will (both) find yourselves in some discomfort. One or both of you may also be uncomfortable if you classify each other into different categories, and therefore behave in a way that the other person sees as inappropriate.

You may not like it, but it’s best to have a system that you can use to make sense of situations.

What kind of system might you use to classify friendships?

American author Darren Hardy, former publisher of SUCCESS magazine, is reported to have a time-based classification:

  • 3-minute friends are those that you are happy to meet on the street, or have a brief exchange about a shared interest. They are often colleagues with very different lives from you, but you can still happily spend a few minutes sharing a conversation.

  • 3-hour friends are those who you would happily accompany to lunch, out for a walk or for dinner. You can comfortably spend a few hours in each other’s company without getting bored, and you know some or even many of the details of each other’s lives and families. However, you wouldn’t necessarily go on holiday with them, or even invite them to your house.

  • 3-day friends are the ones that you would happily spend an extended period of time with, for example on holiday, bearing in mind the adage that “fish and guests stink after 3 days”. You know each other well, you (and your families) are comfortable in each other’s company, and you have plenty of shared history and interests. These are probably the people that you are closest to in your life apart from your partner, and possibly some family members.

T. D. Jakes, the American motivational speaker, offers a slightly different categorisation, into Constituents, Comrades, and Confidants:

  • Constituents are people who are “for what you are for”, meaning that you share a common cause. They support the same things as you, and you can happily spend time together, as long as your interests align.

  • Comrades are people who are “against what you are against”, meaning that you share a common enemy. They will fight by your side, until you no longer share an enemy.

  • Confidants are those who are “for you”, without judgement. They will be with you through good times and bad.



Comparing Categorisations

These two categorisations are similar on the surface, but actually quite different in practice. They offer different ways of thinking about friendships. They may therefore be useful together to explain different aspects of relationships.

The time-based classification is a very practical approach to friendships.

It simply asks you to consider how much time you are happy to spend in each other’s company. It is therefore a good measure of the level of shared interests, or whether your lives are broadly compatible. It’s also a helpful way of judging whether you want to extend the friendship any further—or even of testing that out.

For example, you might be very happy spending an evening with a particular friend—so much so that you agree to go away for a weekend together. However, you may then find that the weekend is disastrous. You have different ways of spending time, or you run out of things to say, or you just don’t really enjoy spending that much time in each other’s company.

If so, you will probably both want to avoid ever doing that again.

However, you don’t need to abandon the friendship completely. You may still consider that it is fun to spend an evening in each other’s company. It’s a 3-hour friendship, not a 3-day one—but that’s not a bad thing. You need these friendships too.

One of the more interesting aspects of this categorisation is that it offers no assessment of how long a friendship might last, or whether you will drift apart.

It merely says how comfortable you are spending time together, and therefore focuses much more on behaviour. In fact, you may well drift apart, in that you see each other less frequently. However, it’s quite likely that when you do see each other, you will still be happy to spend a few hours in each other’s company.

The 3 Cs is a much more values-based approach to friendships.

It asks about your underlying values or beliefs, and whether they are shared with your friend. This is quite different from looking at behaviour, and your level of comfort in each other’s company (and for more about this, you may be interested to read our page about Dilts’ Logical Levels).

This system of classification gives some idea about which friendships are likely to last for any length of time. This is fundamentally only those with confidants, because the others are based on common causes or enemies that will come and go.

The problem is that it is very hard to distinguish between value-based categories in the moment.

We don’t tend to wear our values on our sleeves. Indeed, we very often don’t know what they are ourselves until they are challenged in some way. It can therefore be hard to distinguish between a common cause and a common enemy, especially if we’re not really trying to do so. It is even harder to look beyond those common causes to identify when what you have is actually a shared appreciation of each other. Friendships with comrades or constituents can be extremely close while the common cause or enemy is apparent.

However, once that common cause or enemy falls away, the friendship often does so too.

Additionally, a misalignment of categories, or a misunderstanding of which one the friendship really falls into can cause problems.

If you think that someone is a confidant, and they see your friendship as more akin to sharing a common cause, you will encounter issues with expectations. You might want them to be there and support you with another issue, and they will simply not be interested. It can also be a shock if you feel very close to someone, and they do something that shows that they don’t see you in the same light (see box).

Case Study: The Wedding Party


Jo and Paul were planning their wedding, and talking about who would be involved. Paul planned to have a best man and two ushers. He told Jo that he was going to ask his childhood best friend to be his best man, and that he would have two ushers, a friend from a recent college course, and Jo’s brother.

Right, good idea,” Jo agreed. “But what about Ben?

Ben was another friend from the college course—and Paul was going to be his best man the following year.

I didn’t think I’d involve him,” Paul replied, sounding puzzled.

Right,” Jo said again. “But he’s asked you to be his best man. He might be upset if he thinks that much of you, and you then don’t ask him to do anything.

Oh. Yeah,” Paul said, more thoughtfully. “That would be bad, wouldn’t it? I’d better ask him to be an usher too.”

Potential crisis averted.

Neither was wrong, of course. Paul really didn’t see Ben as that kind of friend, only as someone who had shared a common cause (the college course) for a while. However, Jo had accurately recognised that Ben saw Paul in a very different way, and they both realised that some sort of reciprocation was important to preserve the friendship.


A Way of Rationalising Friendships

These ideas about classifying friendships are not the answer to every friendship issue that you may encounter.

However, they do offer a way to rationalise and understand friendships a little more. They also provide some ideas that will help you to understand why some friendships last a long time, and some—though very intense at the time—fade away completely after a period. They may also help you to appreciate why you feel much more comfortable around particular friends or at particular times. Finally, they should enable you to ensure that your own behaviour is appropriate to the circumstances of the friendship—or at least understand more about why your friend might think your behaviour is not appropriate.


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