“17 Secrets Only Your Best Friend Knows About You”…“15 Signs Your Best Friend Is Actually Your Therapist”… “15 Signs You and Your BFF are Basically Dating”…Whenever I go on the internet or open up a magazine, it seems I’m inundated with articles like these. Not that there’s anything wrong with articles written in earnest fun, but I always pause at the word “BFF.” Who do I imagine when I read such articles? I’ve got a few close friends, each of whom might deserve the title “BFF,” but I couldn’t rate one above the other. I need each of them equally, at different moments. That’s my biggest issue with the term “BFF”: it forces us to rank our closest friends, which will never end positively.
Growing up, it wasn’t very easy for me to make friends. I was an imaginative child, and quite bossy, and I was convinced that no one else would play my fantasy games the “right way.” I had some playmates, but I never really had someone to call my “best friend” until middle school. By that point, I had made a group of friends who all came from my elementary school, including a girl I had been friends with in fifth grade. I guess you could say she was my favorite of my friends, since I knew her the best, and so I thought of her as my best friend. Yet I never really felt that she thought of me in the same way. Sure, I was definitely her friend, but I don’t think I was the person she considered to be closest to her. I liked to think this didn’t bother me—I was glad to have a group of friends, after all. But feeling like you valued someone more than they valued you is never a fun thing. After all, when someone is your best friend, aren’t you supposed to be theirs?
Of course, why should you have to choose who is the best of your friends? Who decided that friendship should have a ranking system? Most people have more than one friend, and each of these friends plays an important role in one’s life. When you sit around a table with a group of your friends, do you think, “this is my best friend, this is my second closest friend, this is my third closest friend?” I would hope not. Why would you need to give each of your friends a rank? That can only serve to spoil friendships, and hurt people’s feelings if they believe you don’t care as much about them as you do about another friend or as much as they care about you. Let’s not even bring that weirdness to the table, and instead value each of our friends for who they are without needing to compare them to anyone else.
Another problem with the idea of having a “best friend” is the expectation it proposes that you only need one close friend. This notion is presented time and again in movies, TV shows, novels, you name it; the main character (especially if she’s female) usually has one best friend she does everything with. But this expectation is not realistic. One cannot depend on a single person for everything for which you need a friend. People are busy and need to take care of themselves sometimes—one person cannot always be there for you when you need a friend. That’s why you need more than one close friend. If you’re feeling bored, or lonely, or just want someone to tell a funny story to, you don’t always have to rely on a single person to be there for you 24/7. That’s an awful lot to ask of one person. It’s also a lot to expect you can spend every free moment with a person and not get irritated with them. I don’t care how much you love someone, if you constantly are spending hours upon hours with them, the little things they do will eventually get on your nerves. Just like you wouldn’t want to spend every moment with your significant other (absence makes the heart grow fonder, as they say), you don’t want to spend every moment with one friend.
Yet because of all of these representations of “BFFs” in the media, we might feel like there’s something wrong with us if we don’t have a similar friendship. Even if we have a close group of friends we adore, it still might feel like you’re missing out on something without that one “BFF.” But realistically, it just doesn’t make sense. A girl needs a few good friends in her life, not just one. And she definitely doesn’t need to come up with some convoluted ranking system of her friends. Of course, it’s becoming more popular to simply call all of one’s closest friends your “BFFs,” which is definitely an improvement. But the term has become so rooted in our vocabulary to mean one single best friend that it can still cause weird feelings if you hear one of your closest friends calling someone else their best friend. So think about it, the next time you encounter the term “best friend,” in life and in the media, and don’t feel bad if you don’t necessarily have one “BFF.” The important thing is to value all of your friends.
Image Credit: Rebecca Frank, Hello Giggles, Favim