Why Friendship is Totally Underrated (8 Must-Haves)
Let's talk about friendship. I would argue that true friends are one of the best things about humanity and human connection. I know that's a pretty bold claim, and I’m sure some would argue romantic relationships or having kids is actually the penultimate experience. I’ll explain below why I believe friendship is more valuable than even romantic relationships, and to be fair, I don’t have kids, so I can't speak to that component.
There's something about good friends that makes you feel alive. It's the best of an intimate, romantic relationship without the really low parts that come from being so invested and tied up in the other person’s quirks and hangups. (I suppose some relationships don't have that highly charged need to control or fix, but that’s probably less common.) When you have friends that love you and are really there for you for no reason other than just because they value who you are– that’s priceless.
I’ll be diving into the 8 components I see as vital for healthy friends, and a few other thoughts on how friendships stand apart from other types of relationships that make it so special, and even what happens when you don’t have those key friendships in your life. It’s really an overarching topic, and this will only be scratching the surface.
8 Necessary Components for Healthy Friendships
There are a couple ingredients I see that are needed for healthy friendships:
Mutual respect
Lack of judgment
Mutual intimacy/vulnerability
Genuine care
Healthy communication
Honored boundaries
Shared values
Humor
Let’s talk about each of these and a couple things friendship has taught me about each one.
1. Mutual respect
For me, respect is about seeing the other person with the same dignity and importance as yourself. This comes down to being on a peer to peer level with someone where your opinions don’t count for more than theirs, and vice versa. You each matter.
Respect often comes into play when differences exist between friends. Let’s say for instance, you have different political beliefs–respect is the glue that holds you two together where you can have a conversation about the way you see things differently without it defining how you think of each other.
Respect is about not needing to agree with each other to hold each other in a high regard.
2. Lack of judgment
Having a friend that you know won’t judge you, no matter what you’ve done or admitted to thinking or feeling is of immeasurable impact. That safe space is so sacred. It gives you a place that you can come back to after you’ve f’d up, and you know they’re not going to shame you for it. They’re going to be there to help you pick back up the pieces and learn from what went wrong.
Now, this shouldn't be misconstrued as having no moral code and letting everything roll off your back “with no judgment.” Part of true friends is they’re also honest with you about when you did mess up, and they can call you out on it in a loving way. That’s where genuine care comes in.
3. Genuine care
This is about really caring and loving someone. If they’re hurting, a part of you hurts. And when they’re celebrating, you celebrate with them. (I say “a part” to distinguish between a codependent relationship where there’s no boundaries between I-You with how one person is feeling and the other automatically taking that on as well).
You want what’s best for them at the end of the day in their own life. You want to see them happy and everything you do is to build each other up, never to tear each other down.
This also means having tough conversations at times, and giving hard truths to each other when appropriate. For instance, if someone wanted to better their life by moving to a different state, a good friend wouldn’t look at it only from a selfish perspective of how they wouldn’t want their friend to move, but they’d express their honest feelings while also supporting their friend’s drive for something different.
4. Mutual intimacy/vulnerability
It’s hard to have a deep friendship between two surface level, walled up people. Of course, intimacy and vulnerability grows and deepens over time, it’s not an overnight thing. It gets fostered over countless little interactions where trust grows.
You can’t have a deep friend overnight–that’s like asking for a six pack overnight. The whole part of what makes it so worthwhile is that there aren’t shortcuts; it takes dedication and commitment to get to that place of a deep sense of connection and trust where you can let your guard down and have someone feel comfortable to do that with you as well.
But once that happens, it’s magic what the relationship turns into.
5. Healthy communication
This is such a great lesson of friendship–how to express yourself and how to be a good listener. There’s such a lesson of how to give and take, and how communication isn’t about giving advice. Sometimes it’s just about being a listening ear, a place for someone to say something out loud and start to process what they couldn’t easily do on their own.
It’s a developmental need that we need psychological mirroring–we need to know that in intense moments of pain or confusion, that we’re not crazy. That it’s natural to feel that way, and that it’s all going to be okay.
With that healthy communication comes expressing boundaries, however big or small. Whether that’s certain topics you don’t broach, or just a respect of considering someone’s time.
For instance, it’s through friends that I learned that it’s okay to be the one that ends a phone call conversation by saying that you have to go. Simple as it may sound, I always thought it was rude to do that, and I’ve learned how to do that from friends expressing their own needs for when they’re done talking on the phone.
6. Honored boundaries
So for intimate, trusting friendships, it’s important not just to be able to express those boundaries, but to also know that they’ll be honored. In other words, smooth friendships work by almost having boundaries that do not need to be explicitly reminded and restated over and over again, because they’re honored from the beginning and not trampled over.
7. Shared values
It’s going to be tough to have an intimate, lasting friendship if some of your core values that drive your behavior and way of looking at the world are at odds with each other. Each of these doesn’t need to be shared, but there definitely needs to be some overlap. And there probably shouldn’t be values that are polar opposites to each other.
Imagine going to a friend about an issue you’re having with living in integrity and really being honest in a certain area of your life. You share that with them because it’s what you’re dealing with. Then, imagine that friend trying to dissuade you from trying to be better in that area, since honesty isn’t important to them as well.
That may be an extreme example, but I find that it’s hard to really let my guard down with folks that I don’t have foundational values in common with.
8. Humor
I’ve mentioned a lot of deep, serious stuff so far, but the thing is, friendship is about having fun, sharing laughs, forming inside jokes, and enjoying each other. Without a sense of humor and lightness about things, friendship can seem more like a stoic business arrangement.
Humor is being able to playfully make fun of each other and not take ourselves so seriously. Or in my case, it’s about being able to joke about how I was late to my friend’s wedding and missed the ceremony. It’s not something that’s held over my head as a grudge that’s brought back up to make me feel bad, it’s something we can genuinely laugh at together.
Humor is like the salt that you don’t want to forget in the recipe. (My dishes tend to have a lot of salt in them– I like it that way!)
The relief of having friends with no ulterior motives
Some years ago, I had this random moment of awareness for how grateful I am that I’m not rich and wealthy. The thing is, at that point in my life especially, I was just a college student with loads of debt. The great thing about that, is that I don’t have to question if there’s an ulterior motive behind someone wanting to be friends with me.
They can’t be wanting my money, because I didn’t really have any!
As funny as that is, it really gave me this gratitude to be able to settle into the fact that my friends are people who really do just value me for who I am and what I bring to the planet, and that’s enough. There’s something so peaceful about that.
Friends know the depths of where you’ve been
Friends know you, your struggles, your growth and successes. They’re the first ones you might call when something really amazing or really painful happens. They’re there to remind you of how hard you’ve worked to get to where you’re at. And when things are heavy, they’re there with you in depths, reminding you of who you are, and how it’s going to be okay, that the heaviness won’t last forever.
How friends play a role in romantic relationships
Friends are what get you from one hard time to the next. Sure, they might have less of a central role if you’re in a romantic relationship, but friends are the constant ones you can go to even when you need someone to talk to besides that partner. They get you through those early moments of falling in love, the milestones along the way, and even the painful splits. They’re always there.
The effect of lacking deep friendships
I would argue that a lack of deep, intimate friendships is a contributing factor to a lot of the wrongs that we see in the world. When you're not able to get emotionally naked with somebody, and let them know what's really going on with you on an intimate level on a regular basis, it’s no wonder people resort to destructive patterns of coping–damaging both to themselves, and others.
Without a loving, safe place to turn to when you’re going through difficult feelings, you have no one to mirror and validate your experience. And then it’s often the case that you get frozen there in that hurt state–you’re never able to process and move through it to the other side.
I’d argue that’s why so much of what we see is people acting out their pain on themselves and each other–they never had a safe, loving person to help them process, heal, and actually put it to rest.
Sure, could some of this work be done on your own, definitely. But we are social beings. As author and researcher Brene Brown says, we are neurobiologically hardwired for belonging and connection. Friends are the most consistent and abundant path to achieve that connectedness.
And I get it when people don't have that, that it’s a pretty tough, lonely road.
What about family relationships?
Some might say family is a greater path to that connection–it definitely can be, but there are lots of caveats there about the need for a truly healthy dynamic, which oftentimes doesn’t exist in inherited family units. That’s why I say the chosen family of deep intimate friendships is a greater source for that belonging.
Friendships are often the first place that you might learn what some of those characteristics are that you lacked in some of those familial relationships growing up. Relationships should feel good—friendship teaches us that.
Friendship is the basis of all deep relationships in life.
Not just about what you get- but what you give back
Much of what I’ve talked about is from the perspective of receiving, like what you get out of the deal of friendship. But there’s a whole component as well of what you get out of giving back. In other words, there’s a reward itself in having the opportunity to be a good friend to someone. In giving back, it reaffirms the duality and fluidity of the relationship. You’re not keeping count of who needs who more–you get to give and receive in a natural way, even if in certain periods of time, it might seem unbalanced (one friend going through a rough time and needing more support than they’re able to give), knowing that it’s mutually beneficial for both of you in the end.
When there’s a component of friends who have families of their own, there’s also the joy of how you get to be a part of that. You get to be the honorary aunt or uncle, if you’re lucky, and form your own bond with their kids. There’s a real treasure in that. Again, this ties back to that concept of your chosen family.
How friendship ties into other relationships too
After the end of a long-term romantic relationship that was pretty toxic, I remember telling a friend of mine, I have no concept of what a healthy relationship really looks like. '' She corrected me with, “Yes, yes you do. You have healthy relationships with friends– that counts.” And it took me a while to see it like that. That it’s not different.
The basic tenets of honest communication, vulnerability, respect, boundaries– those are also the foundations of a healthy romantic relationship. And I get to practice and have experience with what a fulfilling feeling it is to have those things in a friendship that I can then apply towards any relationship, whether a romantic, family, professional (to some degree), or otherwise.
Anyway, that’s why friends are one of the most underrated things in the world.