Who and What Is a Best Friend?

Last night, over dinner with friends, a question came up: Who is your best friend?

It wasn't the first time I'd been asked.

A few years ago, I was sitting with another group of friends when the same question came up. There were four of us, and the other three all answered the same way: their husbands.

I answered my mom.

I remember thinking about the difference even then. Not because I thought one answer was better than another, but because it made me curious about what each of us meant when we said best friend.

Last night, the question came up again, and the answers were just as interesting.

One friend immediately said, "Definitely not my husband." Another said that yes, she thought it was her husband — although maybe he wasn't her best friend right now.

And then we started talking.

One friend described how there are things she shares with her husband, things she might take to her mom or a sibling, and different ways that each of those people shows up for her — and she for them.

I really liked that way of thinking about it.

In my language, I started thinking about it as being in service of one another. Not service in the sense of doing things for someone or sacrificing yourself for them, but in the sense that we each hold different places in one another's lives. We may offer different kinds of support, trust, honesty, comfort, challenge or connection depending on the relationship.

Another friend thought about the question for a while and came back to her husband. Her reasoning was different. At the end of the day, she said, who has my back? Who would give their life for me?

For her, that made the answer clear.

And I loved that too, because it reminded me that what makes someone a "best friend" may be very different from one person to another. For one person, it might be the person they share the most with. For someone else, it might be the person who has consistently shown up, the person they feel safest with, or the person they know will have their back when it really matters.

Somewhere in that conversation, I found myself asking a slightly different question:

What exactly does "best" mean — and what makes someone a friend?

We use the word all the time: friend, best friend, old friend, work friend, family friend, close friend, acquaintance. And yet I'm not sure we're always talking about the same thing.

Maybe friendship isn't one particular kind of relationship at all. Maybe friend is a role we play in one another's lives, just like mother, husband, wife, sister, brother or colleague.

Except unlike many of those titles, "friend" doesn't come with a particularly clear job description.

For some of us, a friend is someone we can tell everything to. For others, it's someone who tells us the truth, knows our history, makes us laugh, shows up when things fall apart, challenges us, protects us, or can simply sit beside us without needing to fill the silence.

Maybe one person does all of those things. But maybe they don't.

And maybe that's where the word best starts to get complicated, because best suggests a ranking, and I'm not sure human relationships work particularly well as a ranking system.

My husband knows parts of me no one else does. We've built a life together, we've grown up together in many ways, and he has been beside me through enormous pieces of my life. My mom holds a completely different place, and there are friendships that carry other pieces of me again. None of these relationships necessarily makes the others less meaningful. They are different relationships, different histories, and different forms of knowing and being known. Perhaps that's the part I've been sitting with the most.

Maybe the question isn't simply, Who is your best friend? Maybe it's more useful to think about what friendship means to us, what we hope to receive within friendship, what we offer in return, and who holds those different places in our lives.

And perhaps that's also why this conversation made me think about work. We don't stop needing connection, trust or friendship when we walk into a workplace, and the language of "best friend" has actually shown up in how employee engagement has been studied for years.

When I was doing employee engagement work, I remember encountering a workplace survey item that always stood out to me. Gallup's Q12 employee engagement framework includes, as its tenth item, the statement:

"I have a best friend at work."

Gallup itself acknowledges that this particular statement generates more questions and skepticism than any other item in its Q12 framework. Yet its research has also found that it predicts performance and reflects the importance of meaningful workplace relationships and a sense of affiliation with others at work (Gallup, n.d.).

And now, after that dinner conversation, I find myself thinking about the question underneath the question.

When someone responds to that statement, their understanding of best friend matters. It might be the person they eat lunch with, the colleague they can say "I'm not okay today" to, the person who makes them laugh, the person who challenges them, or simply someone who knows something about who they are beyond what appears in their job description.

Perhaps what we're really getting at — at work and outside of it — is something about human connection, trust and belonging. About having people in our lives with whom we can be known, supported, challenged, cared for and, in different ways, held.

Which brings me right back to the dinner table and all of our different answers.

Maybe the interesting question isn't whether your husband should be your best friend, or your mother, your sister, someone you've known since you were twelve, or someone you met three years ago. And maybe there doesn't need to be one person who wins the title.

What my friends' answers reminded me is that "best" may mean something different to each of us. It can be about who has our back, who we trust, who knows us deeply, who we turn to for different parts of our lives, and how we are in service of one another. Friendship itself may be less about assigning one person the highest rank and more about the connection, trust, belonging and reciprocity that exist within our relationships — and the different roles we hold in one another's lives.

I'm still not sure who my "best friend" is. But I'm increasingly interested in understanding what I mean when I use the word friend, what I value within those relationships, and what kind of friend I am in return.

Maybe that's the better question anyway.

Source: Gallup. (n.d.). How to Measure Employee Engagement With the Q12. Gallup.

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I live on the unceded and traditional lands and waters of the q̓íc̓əy̓ (Katzie), q̓ʷa:n̓ƛ̓ən̓ (Kwantlen) and SEMYOME (Semiahmoo) First Nations.