Derek Gregory hasn’t been in the same state, let alone in the same room, as his best friend Ringo in nearly two decades. Their relationship dates back to the early 1980s, when Gregory and Ringo met as teens in high school, bonding over a shared taste in music and similar haircuts. With Ringo, there was always something to talk about.
“He was big and expressive and larger than life and fell in love with things and people and ideas and music and whatever it was that he was into at the time,” Gregory says, “and could communicate that passion in a way that is hard to ignore.”
After graduating, Gregory moved away from Southern California, where he and Ringo grew up, but they’ve kept up their long-distance relationship ever since. Now 56, Gregory, a content creator in Denver, still maintains daily conversations with Ringo, despite the fact that the latter currently lives in Australia. They’ll send each other voice notes while sitting in traffic, bits of music they’re working on, the minutiae of their days. Ringo’s lust for life, his “spark” as Gregory puts it, their ability to make one another laugh, to cheer one another on during their best days and to support each other on their worst, is the tether connecting the two men across continents and time zones.
Most people have friends — people to confide in, support, gas up, with whom to laugh, grab dinner, mutually despise the same things. Plenty of studies have underscored the benefits of these relationships: Having friends promotes physical health and well-being, staves off depression and even early death. But what special perks does best friendship confer? What qualities do the top confidantes inhabit that others don’t?
The term “best friend” can hark back to the days on the playground when kids ranked and quantified social relationships for sport. You might think: Do you really need a best friend as an adult? But having — or being — a best friend can be an important signifier. Knowing who rises to the level of a “best” friend can be helpful when weighing the amount of relational upkeep a relationship requires. Fostering a few quality connections may also be more beneficial for happiness than having dozens of less close friends.
“What research has consistently shown in the past three decades is friendship is a reliable marker and predictor of individual well-being,” says Meliksah Demir, an associate professor of psychology at California State University Sacramento. “However, it is not necessarily the number of friends that you have, but it is the quality of your best friendship, along with other friends that you have, that makes a difference in your well-being.”
Centuries of best friends
Although the term “best friend” didn’t enter public consciousness until the 20th century, the concept has been around since antiquity. Among Aristotle’s three classifications of friendship — pleasure, utility, and virtue — relationships of virtue are supreme. Beyond just being fun or useful, these friendships are stronger, more durable, because each member strives to make the other better. Roman politician Marcus Cicero dedicated his treatise on friendship, “De Amicitia,” to his best friend Atticus. As early as the fourth century, best friendships were ritualized through a marriage-like ceremony called “adelphopoiesis,” or “brother-making.” For centuries, women wrote to their friends using passionately affectionate language.
Best friendships were especially pivotal for women who, historically, left their homes and communities to join those of their husbands, says Jaimie Arona Krems, an associate professor of psychology and the director of the UCLA Center for Friendship Research. Without blood relatives to depend on, friends — especially best friends — were crucial for support. Today, with young adults increasingly moving farther away from their families of origin for school or work, friends carry many of the same functions as kin.
It wasn’t until the 1960s and 1970s, when friendship emerged as an arena of serious academic study, that the term “best friend” exploded in popularity.
But these connections weren’t always referred to as best friends, according to Rebecca Adams, a sociology professor and gerontologist at the University of North Carolina Greensboro. “Close friend” or “confidant” were more common. It wasn’t until the 1960s and 1970s, when friendship emerged as an arena of serious academic study, that the term “best friend” exploded in popularity, Krems notes. In recent decades, expanded vocabulary, like “BFF” and “bestie,” has further normalized the notion of having one, or few, supreme friendships.
Qualities of best friendship
In research, there are a number of attributes participants use to describe their friends: trustworthy, honest, supportive, loyal, reliable, ethical, pleasant, available, positive, open, sympathetic, efficient, outgoing. Best friends, Krems says, exhibit all of those qualities, but to a deeper degree. “It’s more trust, more disclosure, more understanding, more intimacy, a greater sense of sort of shared reality,” she says. You can have multiple best friends in varying contexts, too: a best friend from work, a best friend from childhood, a best friend from the gym.
Best friends are also those you’re willing to go to bat for, even when it’s inconvenient. In friendship studies, says Beverley Fehr, a social psychologist at the University of Winnipeg, researchers will often ask participants to rank relationships on a scale of acquaintance, casual friend, good friend, close friend, and best friend. What differentiates these levels of friendship is the level of support you offer them. “You might help a close friend with moving, but you might not be as likely to support that person in an intimate way during a divorce, for example,” Fehr says. “Whereas with best friends, the expectation is that we’re there for them, they are there for us, across situations, regardless of what the need is.”
Having at least one person who knows you intimately and has your back can be enough to stave off what’s known as emotional loneliness, Fehr says. Distinct from the experience of social alienation where you long for a larger community of friends, emotional loneliness can arise when you lack a strong, deep connection with one or a few people. “Very often, people think of that close, intimate connection as having to be a romantic partner,” Fehr says, “but it also could be a very close connection with a friend. To feel that you have a best friend probably helps with reducing the emotional loneliness of wishing you had a close tie with someone.”
The question of whether your spouse should be your best friend has been the subject of heated debate. In Adams’s early studies, she says men would list their wives as their best friend, while women would not — they’d name other women. Similarly, Krems’s research participants often don’t consider a romantic partner or family member their best friend, she says, despite the fact that many say they want their significant other to be their best friend.
Time may also play a role in who you consider a best friend. A 2020 study of US college students found that participants, on average, were friends with their bestie for nine years, suggesting that these relationships are ones of longevity. In the absence of extended history, Adams believes best friends might also be those you see most often.
The researchers of the 2020 study also found evidence supporting Aristotle’s ancient theory that best friendships might be ones of virtue: “Our results suggest that there may be a form of friendship in which the primary value lies in the good qualities of the friend and in the friendship itself rather than solely in the instrumental benefits the friend provides,” the authors write.
The crux of best friendship, according to 27-year-old Jay Palmer, is trust. Palmer, a warehouse operations specialist, met his two best friends, whom he refers to as E and Z, online while playing XBox a few years ago. A few months into their friendship, they encouraged Palmer, who hails from Michigan, to visit them in Colorado. Soon enough, he was moving in with Z in Aurora.
Palmer felt comfortable uprooting his life to be closer to E and Z because of the basis of loyalty on which their friendship was built. They opened up to one another, shared secrets, vulnerabilities, personal histories. They give each other space to be upset with each other. “We trust that each of us have each other’s best interests at heart,” Palmer says. Although they live under the same roof, Palmer says he misses Z when he’s not around.
Should we rank our friends?
To claim a best friend, you also admit to having less-best friends, people that fall further down in the pecking order. This might seem cold and calculating, but friendship researchers have found we tend to subconsciously rank our connections. One theory, put forth by British evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar, posits that humans can only maintain around 150 social connections — strangers, family, and friends included — called Dunbar’s number. Those people are stratified into various tiers ranging from best friends in the inner circle to people you’d recognize on the street on the outermost rung.
You’re more likely to invest time and emotional resources in the friends you’ve already devoted significant time and energy to: the three to five people in your closest friend circle.
Because everyone has limited social energy — it’s impossible to meaningfully interact with every single person you’ve ever met — you’re more likely to invest time and emotional resources in the friends you’ve already devoted significant time and energy to: the three to five people in your closest friend circle.
For Heather Kelliher, having a clear picture of with whom she needs to put in the most effort is crucial. Though she met her four best friends in the US, Kelliher, 36, now lives outside of London where she works in cybersecurity. To maintain her friendships, the group plays games virtually over Zoom once a month, regularly exchange texts in a group chat, and FaceTimes whenever they can.
Initially, she worried her inner circle might forget her, but after over two years abroad she’s relieved to have a regular cadence with her best friends. Because she understands exactly who her inner circle is, she knows when it’s time to get another call on the books. “I haven’t talked to Rachel in a month,” Kelliher says, “I should probably check to see how she’s doing.”
A second framework, the alliance hypothesis of friendship, claims that people track their friends’ other relationships to see where they rank relative to those other friends. If a pal considers you their best friend — either they’ve said as much in conversation or your relationship is particularly close — you’re more likely to call them your best friend in return.
These rankings can sometimes play out painfully and publicly. Take bridal parties, for example, where one friend is singled out as the best man or maid of honor. That may come as a shock to some because people often conceal their friend hierarchy, the researchers found, to “make multiple people think that we’re their best friend,” Krems says.
That may make it difficult to know where you really stand with your friends. “Saying, ‘This person is my best friend,’ that’s putting your cards on the table,” Krems says, “and putting your cards on the table — that’s a real signal of commitment, that you are all in on that person, because it cuts off the possibility of alternatives.”
But is it fair or ethical to order friends so concretely? Krems says she’s seen evidence in her studies that when people refer to someone as their best friend, they’re more satisfied with the relationship and feel even closer to them. Beyond the obvious upsides of friendship, having a best friend in particular confers added psychological benefits, Krems notes: higher well-being, resilience, and satisfaction.
The term “best friend” provides Rachel Taylor and Kariyona Craighead, besties since middle school, clarity on how to sufficiently prioritize one another. Since their friendship holds more weight than others, they know how much time to devote to one another. Even during 12-hour days on set as a cinematographer, Taylor, 24, will make time to send quick texts to Craighead, also 24, and other friends letting them know she got their message and will respond thoughtfully when she has time.
Throughout their decade-long friendship, Taylor and Craighead have gone through countless transitions, from adolescence in Charlotte, North Carolina, to adults working full time — or in Craighead’s case, in law school. Other friends from their middle school group have grown distant, but their bond remains steadfast. “Just having that safety within that other person, you know that you can always go to them,” Craighead says. “Having that emotional safety and reliability.”
Best friendship is, in essence, the greatest return on your emotional investment. Because it does take effort to maintain relationships, and is thus not possible to be a best friend to everyone, we inherently pour ours into those who we know will return it in kind.
“Knowing people do put different levels of effort into their friends, and knowing which people value you, can help you invest where that investment does best,” Krems says. “You maintain the relationship that is best for you to maintain.”
