Tiffany Watt Smith is an award-winning writer and historian, and author of The Book of Human Emotions and Schadenfreude. Her writing has appeared in the Guardian and The New Scientist, and she is a BBC New Generation Thinker and Reader Emerita in Cultural History at Queen Mary University of London. Her TED talk, “The History of Human Emotions,” has more than 4.5 million views.
What’s the big idea?
What is a good friend? Or what even is a friend? Across history and cultures, the definition of friendship and how we appraise the quality of this bond has taken many forms. Even today, notions of friendship vary around the world. During our modern moment of rising isolation and loneliness, the search for friendship is tinged with despair. By examining the evolution of our ideas about friendship and acknowledging the infinite ways a friendship can look, we can renew our confidence that forging meaningful connections is always within reach.
Below, Tiffany shares five key insights from her new book, Bad Friend: How Women Revolutionized Modern Friendship. Listen to the audio version—read by Tiffany herself—in the Next Big Idea App.
1. It’s time to re-examine our expectations of friendship.
In my early thirties, I had a catastrophic breakdown in my relationship with my best friend. It’s common to lose confidence after something awful transpires, but I was also at an age where all my friendships felt like they were drifting and dwindling as people became busy, moved away, or got preoccupied with raising families or with their jobs.
Images of friendship, particularly female friendship, are often highly glamorous and aspirational. When I compared my own friendships with those I saw on TV or in adverts, I began to wonder: Did I lack the courage friendship took? Was I a bad friend?
I’m a historian of emotions and study the cultural narratives that act on our most intimate worlds. It took me ten years, but eventually I started to ask myself: How had I learnt what friendship ought to be, and that I was falling short?
Since Aristotle, philosophers have glorified romantic, life-long friendships between men as the truest friendship. In the 19th century, women’s friendships were elevated even higher than that, their bonds celebrated as the pinnacle of empathy and tender love. Other, more ordinary friendships (ones which might be transient, based in pragmatic usefulness, neighborly convenience, or marred by ordinary frustrations and arguments) were looked down on.
It’s time to re-examine how we define true friendship. We live in an age of loneliness. At the same time, social scientists believe that as families live further apart and marriage rates decline, our friends will become our primary supports. There has never been a more important time to make our expectations of friendship more reasonable and expand our understanding of friendship and where we find it.
2. There are more ways to be friends than we think.
Some languages have precise words to describe different kinds of friends. The Mossi of Burkina Faso talk of Reementaaga, meaning friendship between neighbors, and Tudentaaga, the friendship you have with someone you grew up with who has since moved away, and Zoodo, a very intimate friendship. In Russian, there are different words for your very close friend, the kind of friend you might meet up with a few times a year, and then the kind of friend you might have met a few times but don’t know much about their life.
“A friend is someone with whom we can be ourselves, free from instrumentalism.”
When I first started writing about friendship, I wished English also had these finely grained words. But ultimately, I came to value the capaciousness and possibilities of the English word “friend.” I like that in the 18th century, a person’s “friends” might include distant cousins, neighbors, or even benefactors and employers. In the contemporary West, we tend to see friendship as an emotional bond. A friend is someone with whom we can be ourselves, free from instrumentalism. But not all cultures see friendship in the same way. When anthropologists interviewed Ghanaians to define friendship, their respondents emphasized that friends should help one another. When they asked Americans the same question, the answers emphasized emotion: “I can cry in front of a friend,” one said.
If you have ever asked yourself what a friendship is, the answer is that there isn’t a simple definition. There are infinite ways to be a friend. Each friendship is completely singular and must be invented for itself.
3. Trust is essential to friendship.
During my research for Bad Friend, one word came up again and again: trust. For some people trust meant being able to share secrets without fearing they would become gossip. For others, it meant believing you could rely on your friend to listen without judgment. And for others, trusting a friend meant knowing they were reliable and would show up when they said they would (it is a revelation to know how easily friendships are lost by flakiness).
The word trust comes from the Middle English word tryst. In the English Middle Ages, when villagers wanted to catch rabbits, they would split into two groups: one would drive the game from the undergrowth, while the rest would stand by to catch the animals and kill them. If you were a catcher, you were said to be “standing tryst.” Nowadays, a “tryst” refers to a rendezvous between lovers, but looking back at that history, it’s clear that while trust can be about secret pacts, it is also about our need for one another.
One pattern I saw in my research was that many trusting friendships began with exchanging small acts of care. These might be small physical gifts, thoughtful gestures, acts of noticing, or practical help. When they are reciprocated, a feeling of togetherness emerges that becomes the basis of a trusting relationship. When I want to make a connection with someone, I think: What can I offer them? What gifts, however small, can I give? It always surprises me how quickly connection and trust follow.
4. We might be signing friendship contracts in the future.
In my early thirties, around the same time as my catastrophic friendship breakdown, I became friends with my neighbor, Jan. She was in her seventies and had no family or other friends. As she developed dementia and her health declined, I became involved in supporting her care. One day, on a form from her social worker, I saw my name in the box marked Next of Kin. It was strange to see how our friendship had shifted to a new semi-legal one, with distinct responsibilities.
Because of this experience, I began interviewing many women who had formed legal contracts with friends, from owning property to holding power of attorney. From the legal philosopher Natascha Gruver, I learnt about the idea that in the future we might sign friendship contracts, akin to civil partnerships, where friends might clarify their shared rights and responsibilities. Such contracts are about social justice for those whose friendships, rather than romantic or biological bonds, are their primary support and ensuring they are not discriminated against, for instance, when accessing an employer’s carer’s leave or making insurance claims.
“Friendship pacts have existed many times throughout history.”
We tend to see friendship as voluntary, so the idea of a friendship contract seems counterintuitive. Yet friendship pacts have existed many times throughout history. In 13th-century Iberia, amid political turmoil, friends publicly swore allegiance to each other. In 17th-century France, friends could go before a notary and enter an affrèrement, pledging to share “one bread, one wine, one purse.” In some cultures, friend contracts still exist, for example, in Northern Cameroon, young Aku women select a belayDo friend who pledges to support her through life’s major transitions.
Amid the multiple intersecting crises we face in the 21st century, we may well find ourselves needing to make more resilient and pragmatic bonds with friends.
5. There are no perfect friendships—only good-enough ones.
I interviewed a woman who lived in a co-housing community, the kind of place where people are endlessly negotiating their expectations of and relationships with one another. She described her relationships with the other people in her community as “good enough friends.” Not perfect. Not terrible or toxic. Just ordinary.
The history of friendship is littered with evocations of perfect friendships and their opposites. From Aristotle and Seneca, who claimed that ideal friendships were soul-mates, to the Renaissance scholar Montaigne, who said his friendship with La Boétie was so rare and mysterious that such a bond could come around but once in a generation. Today, when we see glamorized images of besties or bromances, it can be easy to feel a little envious.
But Montaigne and La Boétie only knew each other for around four years, and their friendship was conducted mainly by letter, untroubled by the realities of living together or arguing over love or money. Perhaps even they were not the ideal friends they imagined themselves to be.
In a world where friendship can be easily idealized, and where those who fail to live up to the hype can be dismissed as toxic, it is important to hang on to the value of being a good-enough friend. Sometimes a friend will astonish you with their kindness and loyalty. And sometimes a friend will disappoint or confuse you. And sometimes you will wonder at how connected you feel, and other times you might feel frustrated by the yawning gaps between your lives. Friendship takes great strength from being forged in difficulties as well as pleasures. It is in the flawed and imperfect that we find the real meaning of friendship.
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