Tell me who your friends are!

By Galia Barhava-Monteith

31 January 2010

There is an ancient Hebrew proverb:

Tell me who your friends are and I’ll tell you who you are

Basically what it tells us is that the type of friends we choose and who we spend time with says a lot about the kind of people we are. Sometimes it says a lot more about us than we realise. I am sure many of you really enjoy meeting your friends’ friends, or are at times really surprised when you don’t, as we assume we’ll like the people our friends like.

But how often do we stop to think about the nature of our friendships? Of course we think about our friends, and we hang out with them, and mostly enjoy their company. But do we stop and think about who they really are and the kind of friendship we have with them?

This is true for both men and women of course, but women’s friendships are different to men’s. It starts so early! I watch my own children’s friendships. My eight year old son’s friendships are very simple and his best friends have remained unchanged for the last four years or so. Do they like Lego? Cars? To kick a ball? That’s the extent of the screening that takes place. When I ask him for the name of the boy he’s just been playing with for the last couple of hours, he doesn’t know. Of late he’s even started informing me, " Mum, boys have different friendships to girls, you know, we don’t ask someone’s name, we just play!" So there you go, not much talking takes place and negotiations are pretty limited to who has the ball.

My daughter’s friendships are much more complicated and she’s only five! There are friends for school, friends for the park and friends for play dates only, there are ups and there are downs. Her list of best friends changes daily, and sometimes twice a day, and then there’s the hierarchy of girlfriends. The politics are rife and a source of much discussion at bath and bedtime.

I’ve written about friendships before, more than once, and I keep returning to the topic as I find myself discussing it with my own friends as well as with my female colleagues and clients. Much has been written about the difference between men and women’s friendships, and we all agree that they are different and materially so. What I am most interested in exploring are the types of women’s friendships and the importance of understanding them for our own well-being.

Traditional, supportive and challenging friendships

Over the years I have observed that, broadly speaking, there are three prevailing types of female friendships. There’s the traditional female friendships portrayed in many popular literature and films – my personal favourite being Tina Fey’s Mean Girls.

That’s the archetypical fun loving friendship that initially runs hot, sometimes on the border of obsessiveness, and frequently ends up with an episode of massive backstabbing. I think that most of us had these friendships in our teen years; it strikes me as being something like a rite of passage for most women.

That’s the type of women’s friendship that most of the popular literature focuses on. And to some, it’s the only type of female friendship that comes to mind when the topic gets raised. Personally, I think these friendships are not as common as we might think, and I believe there are two additional, and much more frequent and realistic, types of friendships we women have. These are the ones I am most interested in.

The supportive friendships

These are the bread and butter of friendships. The friendships that provides us with emotional support, these are the friends we can always hang out with, we don’t need to think about what we will be talking about, we don’t need to worry about what they might say, we know it’s going to be good to catch up and we can just be ourselves. Indeed research has shown that women turn to these types of friends at times of stress.

These are the treasured relationships where you can just hang out. The friendships where you don’t need to think twice about whether you want to catch up with your girlfriend, you just do it, it is always easygoing and inevitably you feel refreshed and re-charged after spending time together.

These friendships are the ones we should all have and we all need. The academic community and research is just catching up with the importance of these relationships for our physical and emotional health. I hope all of you have at least a few friendships that fall into this category. Remember, quality matters here and not quantity.

The trick for me is never to take these girlfriends for granted. I think it is easy to do so, because they are supportive and always there. When we get busy and stressed we might not necessarily be mindful enough to invest in these friends, and because these girlfriends are the supportive understanding types, they might not remind us. But to me friendships, like most things in life, are the product of what you put in: the more you invest in those special relationships, the more everyone benefits, especially you.

Supportive girlfriends can be anyone, partners in law firms, general managers, students or home executives. You can have in-depth professional conversations with them, or you can as they say just ‘shoot the breeze’. To me what they all have in common is the emotional awareness to know where their friends are at, and be responsive. These are the friends that when you feel down you just know that they will be there for you and nurture you. You won’t need to ask them, they’ll just know.

The challenging, interesting and extending friendships

I think this third type is more prevalent for professional women because in our working lives we all come across fabulous women, women who do really interesting stuff. Smart, challenging women who have achieved great things. At times the friendships with these women are materially different to what I termed the supportive friendships. These friends challenge us out of our comfort zone, they push us and extend us. I see these relationships as the ‘spice’ of friendships. When you hang out with these girlfriends you can almost be sure you’ll end up outside your comfort zone because of something they’ll say. These are those fabulously interesting women who you never can tell what they’ll come up with.

Some of us might like more spice in our friendship mix than others, and this may change over the years as we change and as the challenges we face change too. At some points in our lives we might feel really open to be challenged and extended. At other times, we might just need support, there might be enough things challenging us anyway – say like having your first baby! The key here, like most other things, is to be self-aware about what your needs are and to reflect about the kind of friend that we ourselves are or would like to be!

From Spice to Support

Personally, I’d like to think I have moved from being a predominantly challenging friend to being a more supportive one. I also think that when I was younger I was much more interested in having these interesting friendships and probably undervalued the importance of the supportive friendships. Don’t get me wrong, I think you can be both, but it is hard and requires being mindful and in tune with your friends and sometimes, depending on how things are in my own life, I’m sure I fail.

The thing is, everyone needs to have the supportive friendships in their lives, but not everyone can be that supportive friend. Some of us, I observe, are much more comfortable being the challenging friend and struggle being emotionally supportive.

Variety, someone smart once said, is the spice of life. Having different types of friendships is wonderful and interesting, so I think about the friendships I have and what makes them work and what doesn’t. Being aware of our friends’ strengths and mindful of what they are perhaps not that great at, makes a big difference. You can adjust your own expectations and ensure you have many more rewarding interactions, and hopefully strengthen those friendships in the process.

Finally, I personally don’t believe in New Year resolutions but I do believe in creating new habits. Last year I started a new habit of being mindfully grateful in general, and for 2010 I want to be more grateful to my wonderful girlfriends. So, if you’re reading this article and thinking it’s been a while since you showed your girlfriends how much you appreciate them, take some time to do just that.

Here’s to friendships!