What is a friend?
A friend, as most Americans today use the word, refers to someone with whom we have a voluntary, affectionate, supportive, and perhaps intimate relationship, and with whom we need not be entwined in any other way — not as relative, client, neighbor, fellow platoon member, whatever. Such friendship, which persists out of mutual regard and not because of social constraints or pragmatic necessity, is a modern development for ordinary, particularly middle-class people. Classical, biblical, and medieval friendships are described this way, but only among elites. Most humans for most of history lived in relationships that were defined, prescribed, and controlled by family, clan, tribe, and place — often very ambivalent, tense relationships. Relationships outside such arrangements were, like encounters with strangers, suspect, and rightly so.
The historical argument, as put by sociologist Allan Silver, is that the growth of commerce in the eighteenth century established strictly instrumental, market relationships, thereby creating a distinctive space for non-instrumental, personal relationships.4 The latter were freed from other constraints of “necessity” like patronage or family. At about the same time, the western development of a more individuated self reinforced the emerging modern friendship. That bond ideally rests on each individual being in “sympathy” with a particular other individual based on each one’s unique, decontextualized personality. A third western development, lagging a bit, was the intensification of emotion, of sentimentality in particular.5 Fulsome declarations of love (philia) animated the letters of upper-middle-class friends of the nineteenth century.6 In the first half of the twentieth century, “a wider range of people,” wrote historian Mark Peel, “came to regard … intimate and emotional friendship as a crucial component of a good life …” The later twentieth century, “saw the triumph” of this ideal as cultural authorities increasingly prescribed friendship,7 both literally and metaphorically. In the early 1980s, the California Department of Mental Health ran a “Friends Can be Good Medicine” campaign, urging residents of the Golden State to friend up. The Surgeon General of the United States did the same in 2023 when he wrote out an Rx for Americans: “make time for friends.”
But this is a vague sort of prescription. Americans hold quite varying notions of who is a friend. Some include relatives and others do not; some insist that a friend is someone with whom you share deep secrets with while others are satisfied with laid-back companionship; and some simply call anyone a friend who is a congenial acquaintance. This variation is probably the major reason why many Americans claim to have several dozen friends and many others claim to have only a couple. Dictionaries don’t help. Merriam-Webster’s, both in the 1820s and the 2020s, listed the first meaning of friend as one “attached to another by affection” but gave a second meaning simply as one who is “not hostile.” That today’s social media uses friend to mean an online connection muddles things further.