How many kinds of friendships are there

On the weak side, a sense of value is shared in the sense that a coincidence of interests and values is a necessary condition of developing and sustaining a friendship; when that happy coincidence dissipates, so too does the friendship. The message might be that merely having coincidence in evaluative outlook is enough to satisfy 4 and 5. Of course, Aristotle and Annas would reject this reading: friends do not merely have such similarities antecedent to their friendship as a necessary condition of friendship.

One way to make sense of this is through the Aristotelian idea that friends function as a kind of mirror of each other: insofar as friendship rests on similarity of character, and insofar as I can have only imperfect direct knowledge about my own character, I can best come to know myself—both the strengths and weaknesses of my character—by knowing a friend who reflects my qualities of character. On this reading of the mirroring view, my friend plays an entirely passive role: just by being himself, he enables me to come to understand my own character better cf.

Badhwar First, they claim that this view places too much emphasis on similarity as motivating and sustaining the friendship. Friends can be very different from each other, and although within a friendship there is a tendency for the friends to become more and more alike, this should be understood as an effect of friendship, not something constitutive of it.

Our friends, they argue, play a more active role in shaping us, and the mirroring view fails to acknowledge this.

Lynch provides further criticisms of the mirroring view, arguing that the differences between friends can be central and important to their friendship. In an interesting twist on standard accounts of the sense in which according to Aristotle, at least a friend is a mirror, Millgram claims that in mirroring my friend I am causally responsible for my friend coming to have and sustain the virtues he has.

For more on the problem of fungibility, see Section 2. Friedman offers another way to make sense of the influence my friend has on my sense of value by appealing to the notion of bestowal.

According to Friedman, the intimacy of friendship takes the form of a commitment friends have to each other as unique persons, a commitment in which the. As noted in the 3rd paragraph of Section 1.

Whiting argues that such an approach fails properly to make sense of the idea that I love my friend for her sake. Moreover, Whiting argues, to understand my concern for her for her sake in terms of my concern for things for my sake raises the question of how to understand this latter concern. Consequently, the reason I have to care for myself, including my future selves, for my sake is the same as the reason I have to care about my friend for her sake: because I recognize the intrinsic value of the excellent character she or I have Whiting , 10; for a similar view, see Keller It should be clear that Whiting does not merely claim that friends share values only in that these values happen to coincide; if that were the case, her conception of friendship would be vulnerable to the charge that the friends really are not concerned for each other but merely for the intrinsically valuable properties that each exemplifies.

Such a commitment on my part is clearly a commitment to her, and a relationship characterized by such a commitment on both sides is one that consistently and non-accidentally reinforces the sharing of these values. For similar criticisms, see Jeske It is only in terms of the significance of the historical relationship, Brink argues, that we can make sense of the reasons for friendship and for the concern and activity friendship demands as being agent-relative and so in this way personal rather than agent-neutral or impersonal, as for Whiting.

To be directed by your friend is to allow her interests, values, etc. Thus, your friend may admire your tenacity a trait you did not realize you had , or be amused by your excessive concern for fairness, and you may come as a result to develop a new understanding of yourself, and potentially change yourself, in direct response to his interpretation of you. It is a bit unclear what your role is in being thus directed and interpreted by your friend.

Is it a matter of merely passively accepting the direction and interpretation? Yet this would seem to be a matter of ceding your autonomy to your friend, and that is surely not what they intend. Rather, it seems, we are at least selective in the ways in which we allow our friends to direct and interpret us, and we can resist other directions and interpretations.

However, this raises the question of why we allow any such direction and interpretation. One answer would be because we recognize the independent value of the interests of our friends, or that we recognize the truth of their interpretations of us.

But this would not explain the role of friendship in such direction and interpretation, for we might just as easily accept such direction and interpretation from a mentor or possibly even a stranger. This shortcoming might push us to understanding our receptivity to direction and interpretation not in dispositional terms but rather in normative terms: other things being equal, we ought to accept direction and interpretation from our friends precisely because they are our friends.

And this might push us to a still stronger conception of intimacy, of the sharing of values, in terms of which we can understand why friendship grounds these norms. Unlike similar accounts, Sherman explicitly includes pride and shame as emotions I sympathetically feel on behalf of my friend—a significant addition because of the role pride and shame have in constituting our sense of ourselves and even our identities Taylor Thus, as she summarizes a passage in Aristotle b11—12 :.

Rather, the values are shared in the sense that they are most fundamentally their values, at which they jointly arrive by deliberating together. The intent of this account, in which what gets shared is, we might say, an identity that the friends have in common, is not to be descriptively accurate of particular friendships; it is rather to provide a kind of ideal that actual friendships at best only approximate.

Like the union view of love, this account of friendship raises worries about autonomy. Even so, much would need to be done to spell out this view satisfactorily. In each of these accounts of the kind of intimacy and commitment that are characteristic of friendship, we might ask about the conditions under which friendship can properly be dissolved. Thus, insofar as friendship involves some such commitment, we cannot just give up on our friends for no reason at all; nor, it seems, should our commitment be unconditional, binding on us come what may.

Understanding more clearly when it is proper to break off a friendship, or allow it to lapse, may well shed light on the kind of commitment and intimacy that is characteristic of friendship; nonetheless, this issue gets scant attention in the literature. A final common thread in philosophical accounts of friendship is shared activity.

The background intuition is this: never to share activity with someone and in this way to interact with him is not to have the kind of relationship with him that could be called friendship, even if you each care for the other for his sake. Rather, friends engage in joint pursuits, in part motivated by the friendship itself.

These joint pursuits can include not only such things as making something together, playing together, and talking together, but also pursuits that essentially involve shared experiences, such as going to the opera together. Rather, the activity must be pursued in part for the purpose of doing it together with my friend, and this is the point of saying that the shared activity must be motivated, at least in part, by the friendship itself.

And this generally seems to be the case: for example, Thomas , , , , who argues for a weak conception of intimacy in terms of mutual self-disclosure, has little place for shared activity in his account of friendship, whereas Sherman , who argues for a strong conception of intimacy in terms of shared values, deliberation, and thought, provides within friendship a central place not just to isolated shared activities but, more significantly, to a shared life.

Nonetheless, within the literature on friendship the notion of shared or joint activity is largely taken for granted: not much thought has been given to articulating clearly the sense in which friends share their activity. This means in part that a particular theory of friendship might be criticized in terms of the way in which its account of the intimacy of friendship yields a poor account of the sense in which activity is shared.

For example, one might think that we must distinguish between activity we engage in together in part out of my concern for someone I love, and activity we share insofar as we engage in it at least partly for the sake of sharing it; only the latter, it might be argued, is the sort of shared activity constitutive of the relationship of friendship as opposed to that constitutive merely of my concern for him see Nozick Consequently, according to this line of thought, any account of the intimacy of friendship that fails to understand the sharing of interests in such a way as to make sense of this distinction ought to be rejected.

Helm develops an account of shared activity and shared valuing at least partly with an eye to understanding friendship.

He argues that the sense in which friends share activity is not the sort of shared intention and plural subjecthood discussed in literature on shared intention within social philosophy on which, see Tuomela , ; Gilbert , , ; Searle ; and Bratman , for such sharing of intentions does not involve the requisite intimacy of friendship. Friendships emerge, Helm claims, when the friends form a plural agent that cares positively about their relationship, and the variety of kinds of friendships there can be, including friendships of pleasure, utility, and virtue, are to be understood in terms of the particular way in which they jointly understand their relationship to be something they care about—as tennis buddies or as life partners, for example.

Friendship clearly plays an important role in our lives; to a large extent, the various accounts of friendship aim at identifying and clarifying that role. In this context, it is important to understand not only why friendship can be valuable, but also what justifies particular friendships. One way to construe the question of the value of friendship is in terms of the individual considering whether to be or continue to be engaged in a friendship: why should I invest considerable time, energy, and resources in a friend rather than in myself?

What makes friendship worthwhile for me, and so how ought I to evaluate whether particular friendships I have are good friendships or not? One sort of answer is that friendship is instrumentally good. Moreover, she claims, friendship is pleasant in itself as well as useful to the friends. Annis adds that it helps promote self-esteem, which is good both instrumentally and for its own sake.

Cooper b , interpreting Aristotle, provides two arguments for why this might be so. Hence, a flourishing life is possible only through the epistemic access friendship provides. Such activities include moral and intellectual activities, activities in which it is often difficult to sustain interest without being tempted to act otherwise. Friendship, and the shared values and shared activities it essentially involves, is needed to reinforce our intellectual and practical understanding of such activities as worthwhile in spite of their difficulty and the ever present possibility that our interest in pursuing them will flag.

Consequently, Cooper concludes, the shared activity of friendship is partly constitutive of human flourishing. Similarly, Biss argues along Kantian lines that friendship and the sort of trust friendship involves, are a central and necessary part of the pursuit of moral self-perfection.

So far these are attempts to understand the value of friendship to the individual in terms of the way friendship contributes, instrumentally or constitutively, to something else that is valuable to the individual. Yet one might also think that friendship is valuable for its own sake. Indeed, we ought to expect that fleshing out this claim would involve a substantive proposal concerning the nature of that community and how it can have a separate federated?

Friedman existence and value. Once again, the literature on shared intention and plural subjecthood is relevant here; see, for example, Gilbert , , ; Tuomela , ; Searle ; and Bratman A question closely related to this question of the value of friendship is that of what justifies my being friends with this person rather than with someone else or no one at all. To a certain extent, answers to the question of the value of friendship might seem to provide answers to the question of the justification of friendship.

After all, if the value of friendship in general lies in the way it contributes either instrumentally or constitutively to a flourishing life for me, then it might seem that I can justify particular friendships in light of the extent to which they contribute to my flourishing.

Nonetheless, this seems unacceptable because it suggests—what is surely false—that friends are fungible. To be fungible is to be replaceable by a relevantly similar object without any loss of value. That is, if my friend has certain properties including, perhaps, relational properties in virtue of which I am justified in having her as my friend because it is in virtue of those properties that she contributes to my flourishing , then on this view I would be equally justified in being friends with anyone else having relevantly similar properties, and so I would have no reason not to replace my current friend with someone else of this sort.

This is surely objectionable as an understanding of friendship. In solving this problem of fungibility, philosophers have typically focused on features of the historical relationship of friendship cf. Brink , quoted above. If my friend and I form a kind of union in virtue of our having a shared conception of how to live that is forged and maintained through a particular history of interaction and sharing of our lives, and if my sense of my values and identity therefore depends on these being most fundamentally our values and identity, then it is simply not possible to substitute another person for my friend without loss.

For this other person could not possibly share the relevant properties of my friend, namely her historical relationship with me. However, the price of this solution to the problem of fungibility, as it arises both for friendship and for love, is the worry about autonomy raised towards the end of Section 1.

An alternative solution is to understand these historical, relational properties of my friend to be more directly relevant to the justification of our friendship. Thus, Whiting distinguishes the reasons we have for initiating a friendship which are, she thinks, impersonal in a way that allows for fungibility from the reasons we have for sustaining a friendship; the latter, she suggests, are to be found in the history of concern we have for each other.

However, it is unclear how the historical-relational properties can provide any additional justification for friendship beyond that provided by thinking about the value of friendship in general, which does not solve the fungibility problem. It is not clear how the appeal to historical properties of my friend or our friendship can provide an answer.

In part the trouble here arises from tacit preconceptions concerning the nature of justification. But in exchange for that work, a friend can provide an immense amount of support and comfort in good times and in bad. Keep reading to learn more about the various types of friendship. Again, rarely does a person go from virtual stranger to insta-bestie. It's how trust is built between people — through mutual sharing of increasingly intimate or personal information," says Degges-White. In fact, research has revealed that it takes about 50 hours' worth of face time for a mere acquaintance to become a casual friend, then 90 hours to upgrade to the status of a standard friend.

Then, it takes about additional hours of interaction for a "close friendship" to develop! Before we get into the nitty-gritty of the types of individual friends, it's important to note that we as individuals prefer different types of social structures, according to research published in a issue of the journal Contexts.

Tight-knitters tend to maintain a dense social network where everyone is friends with each other; whereas compartmentalizers have multiple cluster groups of friends, which often hail from different time periods in their life or serve different functions, like advice or entertainment.

Samplers have one-on-one friendships, but steer clear of groups [source: Wang ]. According to Degges-White, there are four core types of friendship: acquaintance , friend , close friend and best friend. Acquaintances are easy enough to categorize. They're the people who aren't complete strangers, who you run into regularly at a place like the coffee shop or work cafeteria, but you don't really know. By contrast, standard-issue "friends" are those that we try to run into or mix with.

Or people that are your 'crowd' and the ones that you tend to socialize with on a regular basis," she explains. These buddies are certainly valuable, but when the going gets rough you're more likely to reach out to a "close friend" for help or support. They're also the people you trade secrets with. Degges-White elaborates: "There's not just a strong level of trust between these friends, there's also a whole lot of unconditional regard and affinity. You may not like a close friend's choices, but you'd defend her right to make them.

Last but not least is the truly few and far between phenomenon of the "best friend. It's the friend who gets you without you having to explain yourself. It's the type of friend who loves you no matter what," Degges-White says. And they're not necessarily people you talk to every day.

These friendships are different in their ability to flex and endure even if life temporarily gets in the way. These are 'heart-to-heart' or 'soul friends' and they can give you comfort even if you're out of touch with this friend.

It's important to note that in today's social media-heavy society, people often get confused about their friend status. What has changed is the blanket labeling of acquaintances, acquaintances of acquaintances, and close friends all with the same title, 'friend,' Degges-White says. Sometimes, even seemingly true friendships can go sour.

Keep reading to learn more about the signs of a toxic friendship, and how to take action. Although there are a lot of similarities between both kinds of friendships, experts have observed that women tend to bond over sharing intimacies and secrets.

Men tend to bond over a shared activity — watching sports, for instance. However male friendships might be more durable as they demand less from the other person than female friendships do [source: Bates-Duford ]. There are a bunch of versions of a wise, old saying that there are three types of friends — friends for a reason you lived next door to each other growing up , friends for a season high school, college, new parenthood and friends for a lifetime.

Sometimes, the season of life passes and friends fall out of touch due to no particular problem. Occasionally, however, a once healthy friendship turns toxic. There are six common signs that the so-called friendship is less than stellar, according to Degges-White:. There is a pure intimacy between you, and the walls are down. When something painful is happening in your life, this friend walks through the door and sees your messy kitchen and screaming toddler.

She shows up with a big, open heart, and you are always glad to see her. My mom is a profoundly spiritual person. One day we talked about friendships, and she was telling me how much fun she recently had with one of her oldest friends.

She said they laughed and laughed. Robin Dunbar performed experiments to determine the role of laughter in contributing to an overall sense of wellbeing. Laughter bonds us with others. When we can let go and laugh, we are living in one of our highest vibrations. Her studies found that act of laughter releases endorphins that increase our pain threshold. We need them in our lives. This friend takes you under her wing and shows you the ropes. The word mentor evolved to mean a trusted friend, advisor, teacher, and wise person.

This person might start as a mentor, but the relationship can evolve into a blossoming friendship. I had a friend do this for me, and it made all the difference. This friendship offers the opportunity to grow and learn while also connecting and bonding together, making it an extraordinary companionship indeed. After reading these descriptions, can you see all of the types of friendships you have in your life today?

Either way, these friendships are some of the greatest blessings of your life. Valuing, honoring, and celebrating friendships is a great thing to do. Every person that comes along provides an opportunity to grow and discover more about who we are. We get to have the experience of nurturing a friendship, sharing our lives and stories , and laughing together along the way.

Celebrate your friend today by sending her a quote. Do you have the intimate connections that your heart yearns for? Do you have a fulfilling partnership? As I was upstairs getting ready, I felt a quick wave of anxiety.

I […]. These friends are your tribe — and you can share lifelong experiences […]. Your email address will not be published. Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment. Offering women wisdom for introspection and practical tools to reframe their life experiences as opportunities for personal growth, inner knowing, and deep fulfillment, helping them see the beauty, love, and possibilities within themselves and in the world around us.

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Please be aware that this might heavily reduce the functionality and appearance of our site. Changes will take effect once you reload the page. The different types of friendships you have and need in life: 1.

The lifelong friendship. A blessed type of friendship — the spiritual connection. The compatibility friendship. The oldest type of friendship — the childhood friend.