What does friendship mean in your culture? How do you recognize that someone is your friend?
I find value in defining terms, so I spent the last month asking people these two questions. While my investigation has been very unscientific and lacks a meaningful sample size, I still managed to discover some important threads. How we define friendship gets to the heart of the first factor of friendship frustration I mentioned last month – expectations coming in.
If I have a certain idea of friendship in mind when I look for new friends, will I be satisfied with anything that deviates from that? How much time will I invest, waiting for an acquaintanceship to become the friendship I want, before I give up and move on? Can I define friendship for the other person so they conform to my idea of friendship? Or do I have to conform to theirs?
My anecdotal evidence indicates that a LOT goes into friendship! Of course personality and culture play a huge role, but people also spoke about economics, the political environment, personal and national histories. Even scientists haven’t agreed on one common definition of friendship. It turns out that, like everything else human, friendship is complicated.
One thing I heard over and over was a version of an American proverb I grew up with. ‘A friend in need is a friend indeed’, means if the person is there for you when you need them, they are your friend. Many cultures have versions of this proverb. Korean: You can’t forget a friend you met in a difficult time. Persian: A friend is one who takes the hand of a friend in distress.
All this leads to an important question: When or for what do you need a friend?
The three areas that came up repeatedly in my conversations were social needs, practical needs and emotional needs.
Let’s start with social needs. This might seem kind of obvious. Friends, after all, are the people we choose to spend time with. One of the characteristics of a friendship researchers can agree on is that a friendship is voluntary from both sides. A 2021 study comparing Russian and North American understandings of friendship showed that while Russians have fewer friends, the relationship itself is deeper, whereas North Americans tend to have a larger group they can hang out with for a good time. Having a lot of friends in North America is evidence of your social skills. We don’t gain, find or win friends in the United States. We make them. And then we do fun stuff with them and we are happy.
Returning to the Russians, in this Substack article from 2023, the writer Olga Khazan describes how her father relied on his vast network of friends to obtain goods and services otherwise unavailable in the then-Soviet Union. Economic and political structures left people lacking and led them to rely on their friends for practical help. After all, you could only trust a real friend in that situation. Anything else would be too dangerous. A Turkish acquaintance of mine (the natural American instinct here is to call her a friend, but she’s not – yet) said, and I quote, “In Turkey people will ruin their own lives to get their friend out of a hole.” I guess in America we might describe that as going the extra mile. A friend doesn’t just do the bare minimum, they go above and beyond, they sacrifice for their friends. She explained that Turkey is geographically central between regions in conflict and its history reflects that position. People needed each other in the midst of that conflict, when there weren’t other reliable sources of assistance.
But she didn’t only mean practical assistance. In fact, she seemed to almost take practical help for granted, whether money, food, a place to live for a time. This woman focused a lot on the emotional aspect of friendship. Friendship means being interested in each other’s lives and fully accepting each other, which creates a sense of safety. In Sweden, we keep a record of who has paid for what and make sure economic investment is fair. The way friendship in Turkey was described to me, it was like there is an emotional calculation. If each friend is equally emotionally invested, then we are friends. A Cypriot woman I spoke to described how having her friends support her during a very difficult time in her life influenced the situation so deeply that she now looks back on it with warm memories of her friends instead of reliving the painful past. What a gift!
Of course I asked my own best friend, who happens to be Taiwanese, about this. She agreed that a friend is there when you need them and the question came up, do friends provide support spontaneously or do you have to ask for it? She said providing help without being asked is the ultimate goal of friendship and hard to achieve. My personal opinion (probably not reflective of my culture) is that providing support to me because you see I need it is the evidence that you are my friend. It proves to me that I am not alone and isn’t that a universal human need? When my mom died suddenly, far away from me in America, and my neighbor appeared uninvited at our door to silently hug me, I knew I had a friend. A small spark of human connection is really all most of us ask for, no matter where we come from or where we are now.
So when or for what do we need friends? That depends on what we’ve been taught. It may seem at first glance that Americans are “friends” with everybody much too easily or that it’s impossible to be friends with a Swede, because they are too busy with themselves, but the truth is that all cultures are found somewhere in the messy middle. All cultures include all three areas of need in friendship, expressed in different degrees. The often-unconscious nature of the friendship calculation, plus the possible mismatch of expectations between cultures, can make the whole dance of finding friends really tricky.
My next post will offer some more practical ideas about finding friends in a new environment, but for now, I encourage you to consider what your culture means when it says friends are there when you need them. When do you need them? What do you expect them to provide? Share your thoughts in the comments section. And be friendly!
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