Whatever happens, a friend will be there for you

Ask my children, aged 12 and 10, what their favourite Netflix show is, and the answer might surprise you. It’s not one which is new, or trendy, or even aimed at their demographic. In fact, it’s a show whose last episode was originally aired 14 years ago. It’s Friends, and they love it, not just because it’s funny but for what it represents. Friends: the clue’s in the title (and also in that of the theme tune, I’ll Be There For You).

At their age, of course, friendship is everything. Children define themselves by their friends more than by any other metric. Yet the success of Netflix’s Friends relaunch (it’s the most streamed show in the UK this year) suggests that friendship is just as important to adults, even – especially – in a world as pressurised, fractured and atomised as ours.

Not that you’d necessarily know it. We’re bombarded with advice on how to be better lovers, make more money, lose weight and get fitter, yet rarely if ever on how to improve and maintain our friendships. Yet friendships are critical to our wellbeing. “True friends are a sure refuge,” said Aristotle. “They keep the young out of mischief, they comfort and aid the old in their weakness, and they incite those in the prime of life to noble deeds.”

The word “friend” can be a vague one, lumping together lifelong mates with casual acquaintances. Evolutionary anthropologist Robin Dunbar puts the number of possible actual friends at 150: that is, the largest number of people with whom you can share genuine trust and obligations.

At heart, however, true friendship is about quality, not quantity. Telegraph rugby columnist and former England international Will Greenwood wrote movingly about how, when his first son was born prematurely and died shortly afterwards, he rang his best mate Ben Fennell in Singapore to tell him. Seventeen hours later, Fennell was standing on Greenwood’s doorstep in London, having dropped everything and taken the first plane to London. That’s a proper friend.

I used to play football in West London with a bunch of mates. The first game back after my sister’s death, they each hugged me in turn: and then the match started and the tackles came flying in, just as they always did. It was their very male way of saying both “we love you” and “life goes on”, and I appreciated it more than I could say.

It’s a cliché of friendships that men leave much unspoken and women very little. Like all clichés, it’s a generalisation, but like all clichés it also contains more than a kernel of truth. One approach is not necessarily better or worse than the other. A man who covers deep emotions by talking about sport can turn round and point to the sometimes toxic ways in which female “frenemies” behave.

Friendships between men and women are often coloured, at least in the eyes of others, by the When Harry Met Sally conundrum: that at some me stage the question of sexual attraction will rear its head. But sometimes these friendships can n be the strongest of all, perhaps because of, rather than despite, the different ways in which men and women think and communicate. A man may open up more to a woman than another er man: a woman may appreciate a man’s rational, logical approach

at telegraph.co.uk/ opinion to solving a problem. Or perhaps the truth is even simpler than this: that people are people, and gender is overemphasised.

Finally, of course, there are online friends. When I joined Facebook a decade ago, I was bewildered at how people could have “friends” they’d never even met. But now, when our lives online and offline are so interwoven, the divide is much less clearcut, perhaps even non-existent. In that decade, plenty of people who I’ve still never met in person have become real to me. They’ve made me laugh, and think, and happy, and angry. I’ve listened to their marriage woes, and argued politics with them, and exulted in their children’s successes. I’ve lost count of the times people have written, after a setback or tragedy, how deeply and genuinely they appreciate the kind words of people they’ve never met.

So here’s to friendship. It may not necessarily make you a better lover, or richer, or thinner, or fitter, but in its own way it is worth all those and more.