Not best friends, not acquaintances: ‘Medium friends’ are complicated

When a medium friend gets sick, do you offer to accompany her to an MRI, drop off a bolognaise sauce or do nothing at all? Where is the line between bolognaise and nothing? Does the medium friend belong at the deathbed, offering hugs? Or would a phone call do? I once observed myself become paralysed at the terminal diagnosis of a medium friend; I loved her, but we had grown apart, and I had no idea how to appropriately assist or condole – to my everlasting regret.

R handled the request from his friend in recovery by placing a weekly reminder on his calendar. When the alarm went off, he’d send her a text, checking in – although just as often he’d ignore it. R saw that his discomfort with this medium friendship may have said more about him than it did about her. “I tried to examine my own sense of self-importance,” he says. “This person thinks I’m important, so I feel obliged.” Was his oversized role in her life a sign of her dependency or a figment of his ego? They had not discussed it, so he did not know.

A polite but selfish ambiguity

The trouble with any discussion of medium friendship begins with the word “friend”. For many people, everyone from a lover to a work acquaintance is a “friend” – which is “why some people say they have three friends, and other people say they have 100 friends,” explains Fischer, of Berkeley. Women, in general, lean on their friends more than men do and more readily share life details, leading to blurrier definitions of friend categories – and more confusion about where people fit.

My former colleague Allison Davis, who is writing a book about sex, concurred. She is a person with many friends and has noted the lack of gradations in language.

“We can have a million words for the ways we have sex,” she says, “but when you’re friends with someone, you’re just … friends.”

Scholars who study social networks have attempted to classify the strata of friendship. “Best,” “close,” “good,” “casual” and “acquaintance” is one taxonomy they use. “Support clique,” “sympathy group,” “friendship group,” “clansmen” and “acquaintances” is another. These scholars have imagined friend networks as a pyramid, with close friends and family at the tip and everyone else ranked and sorted below; or as concentric circles, “like ripples on a pond,” says Oxford evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar, with the closest people at the centre; or as a convoy, with certain people accompanying an individual throughout life, and others falling back, out of the procession altogether.

Loading

Dunbar has extensively diagramed friendship, his findings summarised in his book Friends: Understanding the Power of our Most Important Relationshipspublished in 2022. In a widely cited 1993 article, he posited that humans have the brain capacity to maintain about 150 friendships, with five or six at the very core (including certain family members), 10 to 15 in the second tier, and 30 to 40 in the third tier. The fourth tier encompasses everyone else you are not embarrassed to greet upon meeting accidentally in an airport lounge in the middle of the night. The fifth, gigantic ring is composed of acquaintances.

But social science – which has intensively studied how marriage, close friendship, family relationships and acquaintanceship all affect the individual – has seemingly done nothing to investigate the dynamics of medium friendship, leaving us to navigate its complications without a guidebook.

“This juggling you have to do among all these people, it’s very complex,” Dunbar says. “You don’t want to draw very hard lines – ‘No, you’re not in my 15 now, I’m moving you out.’“

The silence around medium friendship is intended to protect others’ feelings. Someone refers to you as a “work friend,” and you privately huff, “I thought we were closer than that.” You learn about a pregnancy on Instagram, and you’re miffed you didn’t hear it firsthand.

“I don’t want to feel so – resistible; I want to feel like I matter,” my close friend Nathan (his middle name) laments, describing a couple who keep promising to invite him to dinner but haven’t.

Such an imbalance confounds and wounds us, leaving us feeling powerless, angry or self-critical. But we have no recourse.

“We know that when there is an issue in a friendship, people tend to be really passive, really reluctant to bring up issues that are negative, that might cause conflict,” says Beverley Fehr, a social psychologist at the University of Winnipeg.

Dunbar speculates that the ambiguity around the maintenance of medium friendship may be polite, but it is also selfish. His research has shown that people move friends out of the innermost circle extremely slowly, about one per decade. Especially those friendships established in the college years “seem to be so ground in stone that nothing on God’s earth will ever shift them,” he says. These are the friendships you can pick up where you left off, without maintaining too much.

Loading

But at the medium level, there’s a lot of churn. Young adults tend to turn over 30 per cent to 40 per cent of their medium friends annually, Dunbar says, and although that pace slows with maturity, the principle remains.

You demote friends when your kids switch schools. Or when you leave a job or move away. And you promote them when you find yourself sharing a new experience: You both are getting divorced, have an ailing parent.

We aren’t explicit about ground rules with our medium friends in the way we are with our best friends or lovers because we want to avoid hurt feelings, yes. But also “because you might want them back in two years’ time,” Dunbar says. We want to keep our options open.

Can less ‘good’ be better?

Some social scientists and even philosophers suggest a different vision of friendship, in which friendship is conceived not as a ledger of emotional debits and credits but as an organic creation – an artwork – built by the friends themselves. Conceived in this way, friendships are not ranked or stratified along a bright line from BFF to near stranger but are instead a perfect mirror of two people’s investment, reflecting their enthusiasms, commonalities, differences and limitations.

Medium friends can thus be seen not as inferior to best friends but as delightful and beneficial on their own terms: a well-matched tennis partnership; a bond over breast cancer; a mentoring dynamic; a rediscovered childhood chum; a gamer buddy abroad. Relieved of the pressure to be “good,” the friendship can flourish and serve each person as it is.

At its best, a medium friendship can be “almost freeing, without a big sense of obligation,” says Fehr, at the University of Winnipeg. She points to recent research showing that “in a lousy marriage, having good friends will sustain your well-being,” and other studies showing that a wide, diverse friend group composed of weak and strong ties is optimal. She called this “not placing all your eggs in one relationship basket.”

The emotional and psychological benefits of medium friendship have not been studied, but Fehr believes they are considerable.

My good friend Liz O’Connor, a Boston-based consultant in organisational strategy, takes this thought one step further: if people could be honest about their own limitations in friendship, imagine how much they could do to solve bigger social problems. She reflects on the times she hasn’t stepped in to help medium friends – in sickness, in financial crisis – out of fear of disappointing them by not helping enough. If she had been clearer about her limits, she might have been able to do something. In an epidemic of loneliness, perhaps we undervalue the casual connections that give us bounded, but particular, pleasures.

I’ve known R, who struggled to strike the right note with his college friend, for many years. We’re too different to be very close – mainly, he’s at a different stage of his life than I am – but we share a temperamental anxiety, a certain darkness disguised as irony, and professional thirst. I am always delighted to see R. I look forward to it. We have a few drinks. We move easily and quickly to the most important subjects – personal, professional – and then we say goodbye. Neither of us wants more than the other can give.

I say this to R when I speak to him for this article, the first time I ever dared to reveal to any friend, beyond my besties, their status. I say, “You are the perfect medium friend.”

R laughs. “I’ll talk to you in six to eight weeks,” he says.

The New York Times

Make the most of your health, relationships, fitness and nutrition with our Live Well newsletter. Get it in your inbox every Monday.