What are your friendship non-negotiables?

Outlining a list of expectations can help you get clear on your emotional needs in platonic relationships.

Back in the day all it took was once of these.

Ever since a difficult separation in 2023 I’ve stepped back from actively seeking out romantic relationships. Decentering romantic relationships not only gave me time to heal and better understand what went wrong but has also helped shift my focus to the other important relations in my life – my daughter, my family, and my friends.

After from my daughter, friendships are actually where I spend most of my time and energy. Sometimes this is great – I get to choose who I want to spend time with rather than it feeling like an obligation, which can sometimes be the case with family relationships. But other times, relying so much on friends can be challenging. During holidays most people can rely on the security of longstanding plans with their extended families, whereas I’m often assembling gatherings of other orphans or trying to find another family to join.

Still, I feel fortunate to say that there are a lot of wonderful people in my life. I tend to meet new people easily, and I also don’t easily let go of old friends. While this is great, I also sometimes tip over into feeling over-extended in relationships.

This has led me to reflect on choice and intentionality in friendship lately. I’ve been gradually warming up to the idea that friends enter your life for a reason, a season, or a lifetime — and that just like romantic partners, setting a lifetime arrangement as your benchmark for success may not be the best approach. Relationships don’t always last forever — and maybe that can be for the best.

As we change throughout our lives, our needs and ability to show up in friendship change in turn. When I was a teenager, I yearned for friends who wore black nail polish and wanted to rage dance alongside me to obscure industrial bands. While I still have a fondness for people who wear black nail polish, other needs have ascended in importance.

What would it mean to look more closely at my friendships, and get clearer on what I want out of friendship in this season of my life?

I talked to my therapist about this and she had a suggestion – that I get explicit on what my friendship non-negotiables were, and to list them out.

Admittedly, at first it felt unnatural to do this. Friendships aren’t romantic relationships – they are meant to be lighthearted and fun, and it felt odd to put this kind of pressure on them. I struggled to add the initial items to the list.

But as I got going, I realized that this was a useful exercise. I anyway had these expectations, so why not make them explicit?

The list flowed out of my pen into my journal over 30-minutes one Sunday afternoon. Once it was done, it became clearer what it could be for me – a signpost to identify which among my friendships were the ones that most closely approached my personal ideal. Here it is below.

A good friend should…

1. Check in with a “how are you doing?” by text or phone around once weekly and be interested in knowing the answer.

2. Encourage and support my dreams and aspirations.

3. Try to meet or make plans in a reciprocal manner and be genuinely excited to meet. Not let large amounts of time lapse before meeting; if so, offer an explanation and express an eagerness to reconnect. Not only call when they need something.

4. Listen empathetically when I share my struggles rather than dismissing them or moving immediately into problem-solving mode.

5. Be available within reason to help in situations of difficulty or crisis. Extend help without making me feel guilty or “too much” for asking.

6. Be interested in including and building a relationship with my daughter alongside me.

What the list also made clear was that there were many people who I had considered close friends — either because we had known each other for decades, or because I wanted us to be close — who weren’t really meeting these needs. Maybe they had in the past, but weren’t able to anymore. Or maybe they never had.

Recognizing this didn’t mean that I started cutting people off – not at all. What it meant was that I became better at choosing where to channel my time and energy. The list made it easier to know when to say no to an invitation, and when to say yes. It helped me decide who to choose to reach out to when I needed to talk about something important. It helped me see where I had been trying too hard, and where I needed to step back.

Ultimately, the list helped me see who I should treat as part of my inner circle – who would get the most of me, and who I should be giving the most to in turn.

It seems strange to me now that this wasn’t clearer before. But with all the upheavals of the past years, I had been so focused on just having people in my life and not being alone that I hadn’t slowed down enough to notice if they were really the right people for me.

Does making a list like this mean that I expect every friendship in my life to always meet each item? No. There are many degrees of friendship. My neighbours don’t necessarily support my artistic aspirations, but when I made a request for help in our chat group a few weeks ago, three of them kindly showed up to help me shovel more than 70 cm of snow off my balcony. And I’d have done the same for them.

These kinds of ties around the outer circle are important too. They help us feel supported and remind us – contrary to what the evening news and social media suggest – that most people on earth are not utterly terrifying assholes.

I’m curious to know what you are looking for in friendship. What are some of your friendship non-negotiables? What do you do when they aren’t met? Do your needs in friendship differ at all from your needs in romantic relationships, or are they similar?

And also (maybe the topic for a future post) do you talk about your friendship needs with your friends? When do they come up? Share your thoughts in the comments.

Further reading

As a part of our conversation on friendship my therapist also recommended the book Platonic: How the Science of Attachment can Help you Make — and Keep — Friends, by Marisa G. Franco, PhD. I really enjoyed thinking about friendship through the lens of attachment theory, and thinking about how my own attachment style was playing out in my friendships. There are also lots of great tips not only on how to make friends, but also how to be a good friend. Support small businesses and find a copy at your local bookstore. And thanks to my therapist for sparking the thinking and feeling that led to this post.