How to Take Stock of Your Friend Network:
• Create a list of who your friends are. Note why these people are your friends, and estimate the number of hours you spend each month interacting with each.
• Identify individuals who are either low utility to you or you don’t really “like” being friends with. Dial down your interaction with them while dialing up interaction with “better friends.”
• Identify areas in which your friend network is weak (e.g., you do not have any friends who live close to you, you do not have any friends you can bounce business ideas off of, etc.). Focus time and energy on shoring up those areas of your friend network by meeting new people in a directed manner.
• Optional: Use a free CRM system like Streak to manage your friend network efficiently, keep track of recent conversations, and remind yourself when you haven’t contacted a friend in a while.
Types of Friends
When sorting through your existing friend network, it is useful to understand why someone is your friend. By determining the reasons why your friends are your friends, you can more easily decide how much time/effort to allocate to each person. Remember that every friendship you choose to maintain either represents another friendship that you will never have or time/resources that could otherwise be directed towards other areas of your life.
There are four common types of friends:
- Utility Friends
- Convenience Friends
- Character-Reinforcing Friends
- Character-Inclusive Friends
Utility Friends
Utility friends are friends that have access to a limited exclusive resource you value (or may have access to such a resource in the future).
Relationships with utility friends are primarily driven by access or potential future access to an exclusive resource. This resource can range to anything from sex, knowledge about a certain topic, good life advice, social capital, money, business contacts, access to parties/venues/clubs, interesting ideas that challenge you intellectually, social status, etc. Many of the resources we seek through utility friendships are non-economic in nature and instead revolve around things like spirited debate, the ability to intellectually challenge you, or the ability to expose you to new ideas.
As emotionally healthy individuals reach middle age, utility friends typically comprise the majority of their friendships as it is difficult to maintain large friend networks and, with all else being equal, a friend that has something to offer you or who can improve you as an individual is always going to be preferable to one who cannot.
Convenience Friends
Convenience friends are friends that you associate with primarily because you naturally encounter them on a regular basis. Convenience friends include people ranging from classmates to colleagues, roommates, family members, neighbors, fellow hobbyists, or people who frequent your favorite bar.
Convenience friends are not people with whom you have any special connection other than the emotional connection humans inevitably develop between people living in close proximity (so long as they do not actively dislike them). This connection feels special to people—especially younger, less-experienced people—but it is a feeling that humans inevitably form with any group of “allies” who operate in close proximity for long periods of time.
When we are younger, convenience friends will make up the majority of our friendships. With age and relocation, the transient nature of these relationships becomes apparent and they decrease as a portion of our friend networks. Normal, emotionally stable adults regularly replace old convenience friend groups with new ones as life circumstances change (i.e., when they leave a job, while they may stay in touch with a few coworkers, those co-workers will largely be replaced as friends by your new coworkers).
The earlier in life we learn not to invest significant time in convenience friendships, the better off we are in the long run. Whenever you enter a new environment, try to meet as many individuals as possible and get to know them as well as possible.
Having met a large sample of potential friends, focus building relationships with the ones who yield some form of utility. This is not what you will do on autopilot; studies have repeatedly shown that the friends we invest the most time and emotions into are those that are serendipitously placed closest to us (such as individuals who happen to work on your floor at work or those who live next door).
Ideally, most of your friends—especially those to whom you devote significant time and resources—will be utility friends. Again, remember that every friendship you settle on takes the place of another friendship or project you will never get to explore as your time is inherently limited.
Character-Reinforcing Friends
Character-reinforcing friendships help us better align ourselves with our internal self-images. Examples of friends who fall into this category include:
• People you are still friends with only because you don’t like to see yourself as someone who casts off old friends as your life moves on (e.g., convenience friends who no longer are convenient).
• People who you haven’t cast off as friends because they don’t have many other friends and you want to see yourself as nice.
• People you remain friends with to relive moments of some past part of your life you cling to or with whom you share a memory that is important to both of your identities.
• People you are friends with because of their minority status (e.g., a token gay/black/white/Asian/Latino/etc. friend that reinforces how magnanimous and unbiased you are).
• Someone you are friends with as your “zany” friend with a lot of character.
• Someone you are friends with because the kind of protagonist you see yourself to be needs that sort of supporting character (such as a dashing husband, a sibling struggling with addiction/mental illness only you can save, an admiring mentee, etc.) to make sense.
This type of friendship becomes increasingly common through high school/college and again in old age.
A character reinforcing friend is arguably the best type of friend to be to someone else because it requires the lowest time investment on your part. Conversely, a character-reinforcing friend is the worst type of friend to have as this friend type costs the most in terms of time investment to maintain (by definition, they are not convenient) and offers you nothing in return other than the positive emotions that come with character and self-image alignment.
Everyone will always have a small handful of friends who fall into this category; however, we strongly recommend limiting that number to five and dispersing those five character-reinforcing across life stages.
Character-Inclusive Friends
This is by far the rarest category of friendship and is composed of a friend that is actively part of your self-identity or public identity. People in this category interact with either the world as a whole or a certain subcategory of the world (such as their high school) as a single unit.
There are three core subgroups within this category:
• Romantic partners in which both of you present yourself to the world as a single entity. Note that many romantic partners do not fall into this category and, in those cases, are utility friends. For early life relationships, the utility friends model for a relationship is typically superior due to its lower complexity, however the character-inclusive model for a relationship becomes viable with extremely long-term romantic partners.
• Best friends are a type of character-inclusive friendship very common in younger life in which you and one or more individuals present yourselves to the rest of your school’s social world as a single unit. This is often an effective strategy for having backup in otherwise difficult times in our lives. However, as soon as you leave high school, no matter how much these people felt like BFFs, these friendships will transform into either character reinforcing friends or will drop off your radar altogether because you will no longer be able to present yourself to the world as a single entity. Buying into the illusion that character-integrated best friends will always have a unified public image with you can encourage very unwise decisions (such as following a best friend to the same college when you got into a better one).
• Parents who incorporate their children into their self-images. Such individuals are common amongst parents who feel that their own lives have little value and thus find themselves unable to build a self-image that satisfies them without leaching off the life of another individual.
Ultimately, all friendships fall into one of these four categories, but a friendship can contain elements of multiple categories and evolve between categories (most utility friends start as convenience friends). Being aware of what type of friend you are to others and what types of friends others are to you can help you see through the distortion field of emotional attachment that can lead to poor decisions that are not optimal for your objective function.
Note: Since the original publication of the book my co-author, Simone, was diagnosed with autism. The view of friendship she created for this book was cited in her diagnosis. But here’s the thing: I, Malcolm, am not autistic and I think an objective look at reality says she is correct. Apparently, not accepting society’s delusions about the magic of friendship is a component of an autism diagnosis these days.
Simone’s diagnosis may explain why she was interested enough in understanding how humans think and process emotions to spend years working with me to develop predictive models for their behavior, testing those hypotheses, and writing a series of books on the subject. I am lucky to have found someone like her. (Oh, and if you want to find a great partner, be sure to check out our next book, The Pragmatist’s Guide to Relationships.)