FRIEND OR Faux
A few good ones are better than plenty who won’t last
Words are tricky. You think they mean something quite specific, only to find that there has been a sneaky bit of semantic drift, and an apparently reliable meaning has changed into something amorphous and puzzling.
Take “friends.” When the beloved American sitcom of that name was launched in September 1994, a friend was universally understood to be someone you hung out with in real life (to use a term not in currency at the time). You might fight, flirt, drink or play sport with your friends, but the essential element of the relationship was the irreplaceable intimacy that comes with spending time together.
Three months, almost to the day, before the final episode of Friends aired on May 6, 2004, the word “friend” embarked on a startling mutation, with the launch of Facebook. From then on, a “friend” might be someone you had never met, even though you were privy to whatever details of their private life they chose to share online.
If social media has strained the definition of friendship almost to the point of meaninglessness, celebrity introduces it to a whole new stratosphere of weirdness — which is perhaps why singer Ed Sheeran recently told an interviewer that he had reduced his friendship group to “four best friends.” The extensive online record of his celebrity chums lists everyone from Taylor Swift to Princess Beatrice (who, in a story later described by another British singer, James Blunt as an invention, was said to have accidentally sliced open Ed’s face with a sword during a late-night “knighting” ceremony, leaving a scar that a 19th-century German student duellist might envy).
Shared experience is the basis of friendship, so it is hardly surprising celebrities tend to stick together. But while Sheeran’s interview links the culling of his friendship cohort to social anxiety (with the implication that the surviving friends predate his fame), you don’t have to be anxious or famous to feel that you have outgrown your friendships.
“You’ll find you spend half your second year shaking off the undesirable friends you made in your first,” the undergraduate Charles Ryder’s pompous cousin Jasper tells him in Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited. Charles ignores him, but (like the rest of us) he discovers that the tendency of most friendships to sprout, blossom and wither is inescapable.
This is not to say that such relationships are without value; just that, like romantic love, they are not made to last. If Ed has found four of them after decluttering his friendship cupboard, he is a lucky man.
A survey of American dating habits concludes that for the first time, more people are meeting partners online than through friends, family or work. One reason for this is apparently that “individuals might not want to share their dating activities with their mother or friends.” Indeed not. Years ago, just before my first date with my partner, I confided in a colleague my anxiety about my recently published book, whose cover image, for impeccable artistic reasons, was a photograph of me without a stitch on. He instantly threatened to use the story in his gossip column.
The Greek chorus of friends and family is one of the most formidable hurdles of a new relationship. Then again, the moment when you realize that it’s serious is generally the moment in which you understand that it’s not all about you.