In the hierarchy of social relationships, a bestie ranks pretty high. It towers over parents sometimes. It competes in rankings with romantic partners. It enjoys privileges no one in the system does (secrets, lazy holidays, unexplained laughs). Your homie/soul sister/ ride-or-die has your back, will help you hide the body, and be your alibi.
And one of the unspoken rules of being a bestie is that No Other Friend can take their place. That’s the rule that stirs up so much drama that it may need an amendment. Hear us out.
Besties have been doing more and more of the emotional heavy lifting in the last few decades. They’re expected to hear us grumble about Bumble, sign off on the sneakers we saw online, help us break free from generational traumas, order mid-week margaritas, remind us that our boss is an idiot, push us to go paragliding, dissect the last text we got from our crush, take a quick look at our emails before we hit Send, say “You got this!” convincingly before a big event, and join us on that long-weekend trip to Goa, again.
“No single person can meet all of these emotional, physical, and mental needs all the time,” says Sohini Rohra, counselling psychologist. And it’s foolish to believe that the buddy who let you copy off their Civics exam in Class 7 is likely to have the same interests and bandwidth as you all your adult life.
{{/usCountry}}“No single person can meet all of these emotional, physical, and mental needs all the time,” says Sohini Rohra, counselling psychologist. And it’s foolish to believe that the buddy who let you copy off their Civics exam in Class 7 is likely to have the same interests and bandwidth as you all your adult life.
{{/usCountry}}Dump too much on someone, and the relationship starts to crack. “You begin to see your friend as either perfect and always available, or completely unreliable and rejecting you,” says psychiatrist Dr Era Dutta. “We call this black-and-white thinking, which leads to one or both of the parties feeling wronged by the other.”
To cope, go wide. Reframe the idea of the bestie as not a single person but a cabinet of close confidants. Mindy Kaling’s namesake character on The Mindy Project (2012 – 2017) didn’t get many things right about life. But she did know this: “A best friend isn’t a person...it’s a tier.”
Friendship is not a Christmas tree, it’s possible to have more than one star on top. It allows friends to shine in areas they know best. The school buddy can keep you grounded as your world-domination plans unfold. The college friend can draw on old-crush files to show that you are, indeed, attracted to pretty losers. “One friend may be a patient listener, while another is great at discussing cinema,” says Dutta. “One may have great taste in clothes, and another be a great financial advisor. You too will fit someone’s bill for something, and not everything.”
The best part: There’s no guilt-trip involved, and none of the besties have to be friends with each other if they don’t want to. It means older or long-distance friendships can be allowed to quietly fade without resentment. Or they may just hang on for longer because there are fewer demands of them. “Set a recurring date, like a monthly brunch or weekly call with an older friend so your connection doesn’t get lost in the chaos of daily life,” says Kasturi M, relationship therapist. It’s unlikely that you’ll sit a Civics exam again, but sometimes an old friend may have answers to questions you didn’t even think to ask.
From HT Brunch, December 28, 2024
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