Do You Really Need A Best Friend?

Celebrity best friends: Stella McCartney and Gwyneth Paltrow. Photo: Getty Images.

I do not have a best friend. In fact, I have never had one. I have loyal friends, long-standing friends, Facebook friends and former friends...but I have never conferred the title ‘best’ on any of them.

And let me tell you, remaining a BFF virgin all this time hasn’t been easy. I grew up, after all, in a TV age dominated by the likes of Carrie Bradshaw and Bridget Jones - women who could put up with anything provided a bestie was on call. Over time, the message has become very clear: if you don’t feel the need to form a life-long, intense and exclusive relationship with another woman, then there’s something fundamentally wrong with you.

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In fact, when I told a few of my friends I was planning to write this article they counselled against it. “People will think you’re emotionally stunted,” warned one. But why so? At what point did a best friend become a must-have accessory?

During my school days, I distinctly recall finding the dramas over who was best friends with whom faintly bemusing. Best friends were chosen on the basis of coolness of shoe, proficiency at French skipping and ownership of Cabbage Patch dolls. Aged seven, I couldn’t wait for the day when I would no longer have to pretend to care whether Claire had been dumped by Jess because her brown T-bar sandals were ‘too square’.

Yet despite the strength of its grip, our female obsession with the best friend is a very recent thing. If you’d offered our grandmothers advice on ‘banishing toxic friendships’, they’d have assumed you’d been at the sherry. Not that our female forebears didn’t care about friendship - of course they did, but they didn’t view friends as emotional status symbols. For them friendship was a private affair rather than a competitive sport.

Susan Shapiro Barash, friendship expert and author of Toxic Friends, believes this modern friendship fixation is all about anchoring ourselves in an age of family and marriage breakdown. “Sex And The City demonstrates this modern model of female friendship very well,” she says. “There are no mothers, no sisters, no aunties - no other significant females at all - just friends.”

This notion that friends are the new family now forms the backbone of a huge amount of TV output aimed at women - most recently, Lena Dunham’s runaway hit, Girls. In fact, in Barash’s research, 80 per cent of women she spoke to said they would feel more upset after breaking up with a best friend than after breaking up with a boyfriend.

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Barash isn’t the only one trying to quantify our best-friend obsession. The typical 21-year-old has 99 friends - 13 of these being deemed ‘best’.* Meanwhile, the stats say women are twice as good as men at making friends for life and one in three women met their best friend at high school.

But as Barash and her fellow friendship gurus will tell you, searching for a best friend means also having to manage the pool of potentials. Facebook has picked up on this and launched a new ‘suggested acquaintances’ tool. The idea is that it works out (based on your activity) which friends are no more than acquaintances and suggests you secretly demote them, meaning you hear less from them.

I have long suspected, however, that this exhausting culling of sub-standard relationships and frantic cultivation of a ‘best’ friend (as opposed to the nurturing of several lower key and less pressured friendships) isn’t good for us. And it seems that a number of behavioural experts agree.

Psychologist and author Dr Lucy Atcheson - whose work has earned her the moniker “the relationship doctor”- believes that women have got themselves into this position by trying to recreate childhood friendship patterns. “We are social animals living in socially uncertain times,” she says, “so it’s natural we seek to form strong bonds with other women.”

However, she points out it is not practical to expect the intensity of childhood friendships to persist. “Girls maintain strong friendships bonds by analysing and mirroring each other’s behaviour closely,” she explains. “That involves spending a great deal of time with a friend, which just isn’t possible in adulthood when we have so many other roles to fulfil.”

As we enter adulthood, most psychologists agree that well-balanced adults with a strong sense of their own identity need around three to five key influencers in their lives. So we should be looking for five good friends, not wasting time agonising over who’s “best”.

Mara Paul, author of The Friendship Crisis, agrees that rather than searching for a best friend, a healthier approach is to nourish what she terms a “friendship boutique”. In other words, to seek out situational friends: the fellow runner, the great shopper, the good listener, the close colleague and the girl you have history with.

And as if the search for the perfect best friend wasn’t stressful enough, we’ve also set a time limit on it. My lovely (but not best) friend Holly, who’s 32, recently moved out to the suburbs after spending more than a decade in the inner city. Holly is insistent her future happiness rests upon sourcing a new BF locally but that this is virtually impossible after the age of 30.

Holly’s argument is that if you should happen to find yourself sans bestie in your 30s, then you’ve missed your window of opportunity. “It’s just the same with men,” she complains. “The good ones get paired up early and the ones who are still left looking in their 30s are damaged goods. Even if you do find a promising one, life just gets in the way - you can’t spend enough time with her to form the kind of friendship that you would have done if you’d met at university.”

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I’d argue, however, that this heartache is entirely avoidable if you just reconcile yourself to the fact that none of your friends are “best”, that they probably never will be and that you actually don’t need them to be. Of course you need mates, but is the endless editing and ranking actually making you feel any better? Or is it taking up time that you could more profitably be spending in the bosom of your well-chosen “friendship boutique”?

Once my girlfriends had finished warning me about the consequences of ‘fessing up to my ‘no best friend’ policy, one of them (the brainy one in our gang) quoted Aristotle at me: “What is a friend? A single soul dwelling in two bodies.” Nicely put, Aristotle, but in my opinion, a totally misguided sentiment. Personally, I like a woman to be firmly in possession of her own soul, which means that her desires, capabilities and instincts won’t always match mine. And it’s the reason I don’t - and never plan to have - a friend to call best.

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BEST FRIENDS FOREVER? NOT QUITE...

Madonna & Gwyneth Paltrow
Their friendship cooled when Paltrow collaborated with Madonna’s fitness expert Tracy Anderson. The feud was allegedly reignited when Lady Gaga (with whom Madge doesn’t see eye to eye) asked Paltrow to co-host an Obama fundraiser.

Victoria Beckham & J.Lo
It was all going swimmingly for the pair until J.Lo split from her husband Marc Anthony (who the Beckhams still see). Now Lopez admits she hasn’t seen Victoria since baby Harper was born. ‘I wish them the best of luck,’ was all she could manage to say.

Rihanna & Katy Perry
The pair are said to be feuding over Rihanna’s rekindled romance with abusive ex Chris Brown (Katy apparently thinks she’s making a mistake). They both skipped out on each other’s recent parties and their BFF status is looking distinctly shaky.

Kate Moss & Lily Allen
They were once best party pals but when Allen settled into a relationship, her old friend was quickly dropped. In her Channel 3 series From Riches To Rags, Allen said: ‘I still have her number. I just don’t call it very often.’ Ouch!

Kim Kardashian & Beyonce
They double dated with their significant others (Kanye West and Jay Z) but the pair fell out and Beyonce accused the reality TV star of being “desperate for attention in the VIP area” at an event. Reportedly, she reminded Kim that it “wasn’t all about her”.