Best Friend

Chatting with my professor after a meeting today, I touched on the topic of my moving growing up. After a discussion of how that's shaped me, she asked "Do you have a best friend?"

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Ummmm. wow. I was silent for a few seconds before replying, "I have different best friends from different areas of my life."

That is how I describe people: My best friend from grad school who's not in my department. My best friend from my first year teaching. My best friends from my hall freshman year. One of my best friends from camp. My friend that I still keep in touch with from high school. I mean, my last post referenced my best guy friend, but really his title is "my current best guy friend who really we weren't that close in college and then we supported each other through those outcast jobs and then he moved here two weeks after I did...."

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I've thought before that my formula for determining my best friend is some function of:

• length of friendship
• current rank of closeness
• peak rank of closeness
• how quickly we reconnect after time apart
• how much I don't actually think about this formula because obviously they're in my top friends list

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Robert Putnam (whose book I really need to read) and others who study the General Social Survey talk about how Americans have fewer and fewer close friends. Shrinking social networks no matter what Facebook tells us.*

I don't think my delay in answering the question was due to not having close friends. I think it was the way I categorize friends.

But I think I'm also going through friendships in transition. The process of losing touch with people I was once close to. Realizing that some of the connections I've made here won't follow the friendship trajectory I originally placed them on--some because I didn't expect to be friends at all, others because I expected to be much closer. Bracing myself for further separation as people move. If I knew who my best friends were, say 10 months ago, I'm not sure the same holds true anymore. Maybe.

Are they your best friends if they change?


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Tomorrow morning I get to have breakfast with one of my best friends from college. We haven't seen each other in almost 3 years. Rarely figure out the time zones enough to schedule a Skype call. And who knows when we'll manage to see each other again. I'm super excited to catch up. And need to straighten my apartment so I can show her around.

My life may never fit the sitcom style. The core group of three to five bestest buds who hang out together at the same bar/coffee shop/apartment. But the best friend model has never been my style. And I think that's okay.





*Speaking of which, one of my best camp friends and I became Facebook friends this weekend. Love how one of the few people who I've kept in touch with since before I went to college, someone who I've traveled the better part of a day to visit, someone who can ask about my other friends who she's never met hasn't been labeled a friend in the new normal way. (And that several of my other best friends still aren't.)