We all have those amazing friends who aren’t really your comrades. Wait But Why blogger Tim Urban explains how these people got into your life and what to do about them now.
It’s good to be a child, a schoolboy, a student. At a young age, you don’t have to think about friendship and work on relationships. Friends just exist because that’s how it happened.
From birth, we live the life our parents chose for us. Our friends live this way, and the differences are not so significant as to prevent friendship. So friends are sure to appear. During our student years, we find ourselves in an environment that is ideal for forming friendships. It is easy to meet all the necessary conditions for a strong friendship. Sociologists believe that there are three of them:
- Proximity (in a geographical sense).
- Constant unplanned meetings.
- Something that allows you to relax in the presence of another person and begin to trust them.
So the number of friends in universities and colleges grows. Maybe they are real, maybe these relationships are short-lived. But you do nothing special to make them or maintain them. They just happen, you are just an observer.
One day, student life ends. The people you communicate with take their places in your environment, each in their own social circle. It looks something like this:
Imagine that your life is a mountain. You are standing at the top. In the green sector are your first circle friends. Those who have become your brother or sister. These are the closest people: they are the first to know about all the events in your life, you love them with all the shortcomings, they give a speech at your wedding, you know them inside and out. These relationships are eternal. Even if you do not communicate for months, each meeting proves that nothing has changed.
Unfortunately, life is such that the first circle includes your worst enemies. People who can ruin your day with one sharp remark, because only they know where to hit. These are the people towards whom you feel a burning irritation, envy, with whom you compete. In the first circle, the stakes are high.
Below, in the yellow zone, are the friends of the second circle. These are just good friends. Relations with them are much calmer than with brothers and sisters from the first circle. They can invite you to a wedding, but not as a best man. If you live in the same city, you meet once or twice a month with great pleasure, but if someone leaves, you may not talk to each other for a year or two. And if something important happens in their lives, mutual friends will tell you about it.
Further down the slope is the orange zone, where fake friends are. You can sit together in a cafe over a cup of tea and decide that you should meet again, but five years will pass and it will turn out that in that time you have never had any tea together again. Such relationships exist in a large company or on social networks. Even if someone from this circle suddenly inherits a million, you will not care much. Sexual partners for one night appear from the orange zone.
The third circle flows smoothly into the huge category of acquaintances. It contains people with whom you would stop to exchange a few words if you bumped into them on the street. You send them business letters, but you wouldn’t meet them at the cinema. If you hear that one of them has had a misfortune, you might sigh sadly, although in reality you don’t care at all.
Finally, your acquaintances dissolve into a sea of strangers.
Depending on your personality and how you’ve spent the last 25 years, your mountains may look different.
For example, this is what the life of a person looks like who doesn’t let anyone close to him.
Or a person who tries to be everyone’s best friend.
Even the last sociopath has his mountain.
No matter what your mountain looks like, when your youth is behind you, sooner or later (usually between the ages of 25 and 30) there comes a day when you realize that making friends has become difficult.
Without a doubt, friends will appear (work, your spouse’s company, children will help), but you are unlikely to add them to your first circle of relatives or even to your second circle. People who meet as adults cannot spend all day with each other or chat all night long. And this is necessary for the birth of such strong relationships. Over time, you realize that real friends appeared in your life by chance, spontaneously, and you did nothing special for this.
You met them, firstly, not on purpose, and secondly, at a time when you still knew little about yourself. Therefore, the people closest to you are randomly distributed according to the graph below.
As time goes by, fewer and fewer people remain in squares 2–4. We grow up, begin to respect ourselves more, and set a higher bar in our interactions with others.
But the fact remains: many relationships formed in our formative years stick to us. And even if the friendship is far from ideal, among our close friends there are people with whom communication does not bring more joy and meaning to life. We will talk about ideal friendship later, but for now let’s look at 10 types of strange friends that are around us.
1. A friend who doesn’t ask questions
You will have a good day. Or a bad one. You will be happy at work or quit. You will fall in love. Or you will catch your lover cheating on you and kill them both in a state of uncontrollable rage. It doesn’t matter, because no event can be discussed with a friend who doesn’t ask questions. Never, under any circumstances, will he take an interest in your life. Why does he behave this way? There are three explanations.
- He is completely self-centered and wants to discuss only himself.
- He is afraid to get close to people and does not want to talk about personal things (neither his own nor yours), he agrees to support only abstract conversation.
- He knows that you are extremely self-centered. If you ask him a question, you will talk about yourself all evening.
To make this friendship meaningful, take just two steps.
First: if you are bored with this person, remove him from your first circle of communication. This is your green zone, it is sacred, self-obsessed people have no business there. Move such a friend to the second or third level and enjoy rare meetings.
Second: keep communicating. You may even use such a friend “in the dark”. Meet once every couple of months, but do not touch on personal topics in the conversation. Believe me, you can communicate with a person for many years, but not even know whether he or she has brothers and sisters.
2. A friend in a common company with whom you will not be left alone
In any group there are a couple of people who don’t talk to each other one-on-one. Not that they don’t talk because they don’t like each other. They get along great. They just have nothing in common except mutual friends. When they are alone in a room, they freeze like stone statues.
There is nothing worse for them than to end up in the same car if the group is going somewhere by car. Smaller troubles also happen all the time. For example, if such people are the first to arrive at a meeting place or when the third friend goes to the toilet. It is not at all necessary that these people will never be able to become friends. Sometimes no one dares to take the first step and change the current state of affairs.
3. A friend who always laughs
This is a friend who is afraid of serious communication, so any meeting with him turns into a skit, and you must always be in high spirits when talking.
Sometimes the joke is that you have to laugh all the time. And constantly joke, throw out sarcastic remarks, otherwise your friend gets scared.
Another version of the always ironic friend is a person who loses his temper when his shell is broken and something honest is said. Such people hate sincere interlocutors, because they make them crawl out from behind the armor of sarcasm and irony and show their true face.
The third version: your communication is described by the phrase “you’re cool, I’m even cooler, why isn’t the rest of the world so cool?” Of course, your friend doesn’t consider you ideal. When he talks to someone else, he dissects you. The trick is that you always have to be on his team. The only comfortable mode of coexistence is to stand on an imaginary pedestal together and throw mud at the world around you.
You can play along with such a friend and everything will be fine, even if deep down you despise each other and yourselves. Or you can take it upon yourself to disagree with him. For example, to defend the person from criticism. This will destroy your fragile team and cause a backlash. Your strange friend will most likely agree with you, say something like: “Well, yes, you are probably right.” Congratulations, this means that for the first time you have earned this person’s respect. And it also means that behind your back he will criticize you five times more than before.
No matter how you look at it, the mask of a cheerful person is a wall behind which your friend hides so as not to let anyone get too close. If you have enough strength to break the ice and calm down such a sociopath, he can become a real friend. If the person is completely closed, then nothing can be done, such a friendship is doomed. Although if you like to constantly grin, then why not.
4. Friend by obligation
Think about a friend you rarely see. Before you set up a meeting, you spend a lot of time calling and texting to find a time that works for both of you. But when you wake up in the morning and realize that you have a friendly dinner scheduled for today, you are not at all happy.
Maybe you don’t want to be friends with this person, he even irritates you. Most likely, you don’t understand: this friend doesn’t want to see you either.
Friendships with mutual obligations imply that both of you are burdened by the relationship. But each person thinks that the other person really wants to see you. So you can’t find a place in your schedule to meet.
When people want to communicate, they find opportunities and ways.
This friendship lasts because you don’t even think about the fact that you don’t like this kind of relationship. Or you consider meeting this person as part of your life story. But even if you understand that you don’t want to communicate, you don’t know that your feelings are mutual. A difficult friendship can last forever.
5. Friendzoner
This friendship could turn into a happy marriage , except your boyfriend or girlfriend doesn’t see you as a partner. Just a little something is missing. You may also find yourself in a situation where someone loves you. No matter how you look at it, this is not the healthiest relationship in your life.
If you’ve gotten yourself into the friend zone, isn’t it time to get out of it? Even if you have to stop communicating. Because while you’re dragging your feet on such a relationship, you’re destroying your self-esteem and looking like a little crying seal. Take a step, where’s your self-respect? Perhaps it’s a bold decision that will make the object of your love look at you with different eyes.
If you are the one friendzoning, know this: there is a person in the world who is suffering, and you like it. Because every time you see someone else’s pain, your vile ego is filled with pleasure. You are so pleased that you are even ready to deliberately warm up someone else’s interest and not say yes or no, in order to feed on the blood of a friend wounded in the very heart, like a vampire.
Go and do something else.
6. Historical friend
A historical friend was one of your first, because you met when you were kids. You were friends for years, even though you were an odd couple. Many old friends fall into this category. But a historical friend is someone you would never be friends with if you met now.
You don’t like who this person has become, and the feeling is mutual. You’re no longer right for each other. Alas. You’ve been close friends since you were four, and there’s nothing you can do about it.
7. A friend with whom you go in different directions
When you’re a kid and a student, most people your age are on the same level as you. But when it comes to making it on your own, people take different paths through life, so your recent friends suddenly turn out to be completely different people.
Everyone who is around 30 goes through this stage. Some people think about how they will live at 50. And some people remain 20 years old. In some ways, turning 30 is akin to puberty, only in a different sense.
There are also hidden situations in which the paths with friends diverge. Let’s say Zhenya refuses material well-being partly because of her calling as an artist, partly so as not to envy rich people. And Sasha despises all bohemians because she considers creative people slackers or envies their freedom of expression. Sasha and Zhenya have problems. Maybe they still like each other, but they can no longer be as close as before. Each of their life paths challenges the path of the other, which leads to awkwardness in communication. This also happens when your moral values do not coincide.
8. A friend with whom you don’t need enemies
“Feud” is very damaging to you. I’m not talking about the kind of friend who feels a twinge of pleasure when you fail or break up with your partner. And I’m not even talking about those who envy your success. These are toxic emotions, but they can sometimes arise even among true friends.
We are talking about real “enemy” – a relationship with a friend who genuinely wants to harm you. Just because he wants to.
Most likely, you have been communicating with your enemy for a long time, and the problems did not start yesterday.
There are complex psychological reasons behind hatred. It is generated by the internal pain of your friend-enemy, by his shortcomings and regrets. And you, by your very existence, hit where it hurts.
A slightly less dark, but no less dangerous situation arises when a friend-enemy sees your weaknesses and sensitive points and constantly presses on them out of sadistic pleasure or to raise his own self-esteem.
This kind of friend knows exactly how to hurt you because you are similar in some way or have something in common.
Moreover, he will ruin your life constantly, at any convenient opportunity, but so skillfully that you will not even always notice it.
Be that as it may, if such a person appears among your friends, immediately throw him out of your social circle. The cooler your relations become, the better. As the distance between you increases, the toxic force of the enemy dissolves.
9. Friend – social media star
This person is not a star for anyone but you. You know what I mean. There are a few people whose social media pages you know all too well. And these people have no idea that you are so interested in them. It must be said that there are probably people who know when you changed your hair, even though you haven’t seen each other for seven years.
This is a third-circle friend or just an acquaintance who ended up on the list of strange friends because you managed to make your relationship burdensome without even communicating with the person. You had to be able to do that.
10. One-sided friendship
Friendship can be skewed in a number of ways. Someone is higher up in your friend pyramid than you are in theirs. Someone wants to communicate more than the other.
One of the friends listens 90% of the time and speaks only 10% of the time, and when it comes to difficulties, the conversation is more like a therapist’s appointment. In general, the balance between what you give and what you take from the relationship is disrupted.
Ideally, the two people put equal amounts of effort into the friendship. But if the ratio is about 65/35, that’s okay too. After all, the difference can be due to personal characteristics. Sometimes, even a bigger gap in who puts how much into the relationship isn’t so bad. But only if it suits both parties.
There are several questions that reveal who is who in a friendship. When one person talks longer than another, does the “talker” get interrupted by his friend? Does one friend’s opinion carry more weight? Is one friend allowed to be mean to another sometimes?
Another test for lice is to find out who sets the mood in the company. Let’s say friends meet, but they have different moods. Sooner or later, the mood comes to a common denominator. Whose mood usually wins? For example, Sasha is in a bad mood, Zhenya, on the contrary, is on the rise, and Valya adjusts to Sasha and is bored until Sasha starts having fun. But if Sasha is happy, and Zhenya is gloomy, then Valya even forgets about her bad mood and tries to smile in order to get on the same wavelength with Sasha. In this example, Sasha has the strongest position among the friends.
It’s not all that bad
You might think that everything is bad. But let’s mentally return to the graph with squares. We discussed those friends with whom relationships do not bring pleasure and benefit. That’s why we listed the worst options. But there is also such friendship that is worth the effort.
There is nothing ideal, but there are also true friends . Those from communicating with whom life becomes better for both parties. And if a friend falls into the first square of the graph and at the same time into the first circle of communication – this is one of the cornerstones on which your life is built.
Trustworthy friends make us happy, investing time and energy into such friendships is a life strategy for many years to come.
But closer to 30 we think that we have:
- no time specifically for friends;
- the available time should be divided equally between people from the first and second circle of communication.
And we will fall into the eternal trap. When we do not see our friends for a long time, we start talking about something supposedly important first. About career, marriage, family problems. Theoretically, after you discuss important issues, you can move on to jokes, chatter and actually friendship. In fact, if we do not devote time to friends, and then start asking about all the news of the last months, then there is not a minute left to actually enjoy friendship and discuss anything except recent events.
So, there are two items on the agenda:
- Think about your friends who are not in the first square. Move them off your friend mountain. Not in the sense of stopping communicating with them altogether. Treat them well as before, do not forget about them. But if something does not suit you, do not be with these people all the time. In general, cleanse your environment.
- Spend more time with real friends. If you are already about 30, then you are unlikely to find other real friends. They deserve to receive five, ten times more attention than other acquaintances. And just having lunch during a break is not enough. Real friendship deserves a close atmosphere. So now go and plan an evening with your best friend.
