A person’s social network can be surprisingly complex. Yet, we think we only need a romantic partner and a nuclear family. Maybe one good friend. Otherwise, those not legally or biologically fastened to us fall victim to hierarchical thinking. Like a pyramid, we imagine good friends at the apex, and everybody else takes second, third, or fourth place beneath them. This keeps us lonely at a time when the loneliness public health crisis is at an all-time high. At best we have several good friends, but still no community.
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]In the natural pecking order of things, friendships can become lackluster. You get busy. You acquire more relationships and obligations with age, so each friend receives less of your time. Friendships become long-distance because of jobs, and visiting is expensive. Plus, along life’s journey, somehow, we get convinced that of all relationships—family, romantic, and professional, to name a few—friendship is the least consequential. Friends are for partying, Sunday brunch, or watching Netflix. They are peripheral, not central bonds.
We need a new vocabulary for talking about friendship, and perhaps even a new template for friendship itself. Rather than ranking friends into a vertical hierarchy, each a block climbing into a pyramid’s apex (good friends), what if we unstacked them? Because the truth is that friendships are more like a jigsaw puzzle, not a pyramid. One piece is not greater than another. Some differ in size, some form the borders, and some snap into place within the center. But every irregular piece together forms a complete picture.
If we see friendship as a puzzle rather than a pyramid, we become more attentive to where each piece fits. This attentiveness can cultivate a worldview inclusive of a diversity of relations, even if they appear irregular and nonsensical at first.
For instance, I met someone at a party in San Francisco a few years back. She jumped onto my bus, accompanying me on the ride back to my apartment. Friendship requires effort, but also luck. Luck, such as chemistry. An attraction to a friend; qualities you admire, even if it is, at minimum, her desire to be a good friend. I felt a spark with Sophia. My bus stop was approaching, and I felt it was approaching too fast. We shouted over the noise, heads leaning in. City lights splashed colors onto our faces. My eyes darted nervously to the stop names flashing in pixelated yellow letters by the driver’s head. Exchanging numbers in a rush, Sophia then sputtered something, which brings me to the second element of friendship’s required luck: the tremendous luck that you both can be good friends to each other.
She was moving across the world.
Long-distance does not necessarily curtail the possibilities of good friendship. But I was tired, bogged down by an injury that left little space for growing a new good friendship, especially one in an opposite time zone.
I once would have let Sophia go. For me, it was good friends or nothing—what was the point of a half-hearted friendship? But I am learning otherwise. You will meet people who are good friends but cannot be a good friend to you, whether because of their job, geography, health, or their commitments to the good friends that they already have.
To be clear: I am not arguing for lazy friendships here, or simply adding a person on social media and calling it a day. While social media is useful for maintaining friendships, strictly social media friendships are empty. And they are designed to be. Deep and challenging friendships do not make social media companies money, entertaining ones do. From an average of one hundred and fifty Facebook friends, a 2016 study found that only four can be relied on in an emotional crisis.
Read More: How to Make Friends as an Adult—at Every Life Stage
Instead, I am arguing for nuance—welcoming bonds that are not superficial, but not as tightly wound as our good friendships are either. Mismatched life paths cause missed opportunities. Instead of becoming good friends, these people can become just friends. Or maybe something between “stranger,” “acquaintance,” and “friend,” but we do not have the words yet.
“The limits of my language,” philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote in his book Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, “mean the limits of my world.”
English does not differentiate types of relationships, it hierarchizes them: friend, best friend, or best friend for life (BFF). Our language limits. Friendship is robbed of its expansiveness and curtailed. In Arabic however, there is نديم, a drinking companion and confidant, أنيس, a close friend, جليس, someone who you sit around with, نجي, an intimate friend, and قرين, someone who is like a spiritual double or soulmate (and these are simplified definitions). What this does is train our brains to unlearn hierarchy. Just because a good bond in your life is not a good friendship, you should not discredit it. Difference is not always hierarchical. Sometimes, different is just different.
When friendships are neglected, all the possibilities of friendship—the political possibilities, the possibilities for love, joy, and community—disappear as well. The link between friendship and broader solidarities is especially evident in my research of Toni Morrison, Angela Davis, James Baldwin, Yuri Kochiyama, June Jordan, and others who we admire for their impact on the world. These individuals are often framed as heroic solo icons, but they were also really good friends. With June Jordan in particular, a prolific poet, writer, and activist who passed in 2002, it was likely that through good friendships with Morrison, Davis, and others that she managed to be not only a good friend to her friends, but even to the loneliest stranger on the other side of the planet, whether in Berkeley where she lived, Brooklyn, Mississippi, South Africa, Nicaragua, Lebanon, Northern Ireland, or Palestine. In our individualistic society, how else can we develop the muscles required to connect with strangers, if we do not practice loving friends first?
To do better, to revitalize our connections and bonds to one another, there is no single model of friendship to rush into. It is not good friends or no friends. Nobody is greater than, nobody is less than. It is not a pyramid, but a puzzle. How you assemble the pieces depends on your box’s distinct picture.
A few years later, Sophia and I reunited in San Francisco, sitting side-by-side on a green bench overlooking Mission Dolores Park. Looping my arm through hers, I thought about how the future is long, and you cannot yet imagine what any single relationship will become to you if you allow it the grace.
Adapted from the book GOOD FRIENDS: Bonds That Change Us and the World by Priya Vulchi. Copyright © 2025 by Priya Vulchi. Reprinted with permission of Legacy Lit, an imprint of Grand Central Publishing. All rights reserved.
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