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Chapter 3

How Many Friends Do You Really Need?

“Kindred spirits are not so scarce as I used to think. It’s splendid to find out there are so many of them in the world.”

— Anne Shirley, Anne of Green Gables

“You really need only one good friend in life,” my grandmother has repeatedly told me. “To expect anything more than that is just selfish.” She’s not wrong, of course; one really good friend in life is actually an amazingly huge gift. She and her best friend, Lou, literally knew each other their whole lives, and the tales of their shenanigans are legendary in our neck of the woods. They have entire conversations made up of single words, partial phrases, and meaningful looks that leave them doubled over in stitches or “hmmm-ing” in mutual disapproval. A friendship that’s more than ninety years in length means most of the words are simply unnecessary. I agree with her. Expecting God to grant us more than one Lou in life would be selfish; it would also be a recipe for ending up in jail. Old ladies or not, there are shenanigans.

While I recognize the truth in what she said, it has never failed to make me feel sad and a little lonely to hear. The extrovert in me always asks: “Only one? That’s all we get?” Now that I’m a grown-up and have seen a little more of life, I can clearly see both her wisdom and where she was wrong.

Grandma’s “one good friend” is a bare minimum. When God said, “It is not good that the man should be alone” (Gn 2:18) at the beginning of time, he gave Adam the starter set of just one companion. Eve may have been all Adam needed, but as soon as there were more people around, it’s likely he didn’t mind the extra company. It’s also important to note the word “expect.” Just because we shouldn’t go around expecting God to gift us with more than the bare minimum, it’s not wrong to ask for it. Ask God for all of the people you want, but recognize each one for the gift that he or she is.

Not everyone can be a Lou, and thank goodness for that. We really can’t be super close with more than just a tiny handful of people at any given time, and usually not more than one or two. The anthropologists who study these kinds of things say that human beings can’t have more than five best friends, ten regular friends, thirty-five acquaintances, and a hundred or so people you just happen to know. Even that seems like a lot for anyone who’s a decade or more beyond college.

If you read the Introduction (and if you didn’t, you really should) you’ll recall that people are only capable of caring for approximately 150 people at any given time. That includes best friends and acquaintances, as well as all of the people you sort of keep up with through your mom or social media (like your ex-best friend’s nerdy younger brother and that girl you sat beside in the third grade who ate the paste). If you can tell me what they named their dog, where they went on vacation last year, or what their kid was in the school play, you know too much information to pretend that you don’t care; they’re in your circle. If you’re keeping up with your favorite reality TV stars with this same level of involvement, your brain may not realize that you don’t actually know them and may be placing them in your circle, too. That’s some valuable give-a-crap real estate to be turned over to people you were just “following.”

A hundred or so “give-a-craps” may initially seem like a lot, but it fills in pretty quickly. There’s more than just that third-grade girl who ate paste in that big group (she became a doctor, by the way). The people who fall under the acquaintance umbrella also include our prayer circles and support groups. This isn’t a group of people we barely know or that most of us would be willing to do without.

Even though there can be a pretty high turnover in our circle of acquaintances and give-a-craps, we like having them around because they can turn out to be pretty important. Let the stuff start hitting the fan and suddenly those people on the periphery of our lives morph into our safety net. When our middle daughter became a paraplegic a few years ago as a result of a medication side effect, that give-a-crap group joined our closer friends and family in rallying to our side. They contributed enough money in twenty-four hours to buy her wheelchair and were tireless in helping us chase down specialists and answers. They arranged Masses for her and sent us e-mails and letters of love and support from around the world. Over three years later, we’re still hearing from the people who once were “people we used to know” or “internet people we’d never met in real life.” These people may not be our main support system, but they were definitely our people. Just because the group is large or not in your inner circle doesn’t mean that they’re not a big deal. They definitely can be.

Which brings us to our friends — not our best friends, but a step closer to us than our acquaintances. You’re probably not going to have more than a dozen people in the friend zone. Your friends are mostly a fluid group, with individuals moving in and out, depending on what’s going on in either of your lives today. People in the friend zone tend to “step forward or back,” depending on who is suddenly fun to be around or who has dropped out of favor for being annoying as heck. Our friends tend to fall into loose categories, such as “the people I work out with” or “people I can call at the last minute for an adventure.” They’re your group, but not your inner circle. They’re in your life for a good time, but not necessarily for a long time.

At last we come to the chosen few — the ones who have seen you ugly cry and whom you have seen at their worst, and yet y’all still love each other anyway. The experts may say you can’t have more than five BFFs, but that seems like a lot to me. Most people I know have between one and three very close friends. (This is the one that Grandma was talking about!) Your best friend is your sanity walking around, the only person you will always answer the phone for, unless you’re in church. My best friend has been with me (on the phone) as I took the pregnancy tests for my youngest five children. You know someone loves you when they’re okay with listening in while you pee on a stick. (That’s a delicate balancing act, by the way — phone in one hand and pee stick in the other.) She’s the only person I’d trust in a moment of such vulnerability, and, of course, I’ve returned the favor. Someone this close is as essential to our lives as breathing. From cradle to grave, we need that person (or two) to walk with through life.