A shared knowing look, a smile.  Conversation ranging from shared experiences and reminiscences to dealing with our deepest darkest secrets and most exposing vulnerabilities. It’s good to have someone who we can lay everything on the table with; this is one of the great things about friendship.
Of course, we also may have those friends on the periphery - those who are friends by title only. We have them, but we probably should find ways in which to let that particular relationship go. We keep them because we don’t want to rock the boat, or we’ve had them for a while and they served a purpose at one particular time. Maybe you don’t have anything in common anymore, or worse, they are the kind who snipe and undermine our confidence and self-esteem with passive-aggressive or sneakily unkind statements.  Somehow we feel like we have no choice about these people being involved in our lives because we are scared of having a confrontation. It’s probably true that we’ve all kept someone in our circle because we mistakenly feel they keep us sharp or we need negative feedback because it’s “reality”, or there is a nagging fear that if we start cutting out toxic people, we might end up with no-one who wants to be our friend.

Are we better off having as many friends as possible instead of being alone? Even the terrible ones?  We can be so worried that we’ll not have anyone to turn to that we accept false friends.  Real friendship is absolutely necessary for our wellbeing, but we often forget that it can take effort to keep it going - and that effort is not all on one person, but both parties.

On paper (well, on screen) it can seem like we have lots of friends - not just geographically close, but potentially those on the other side of the globe. People are more transient as a rule and not so pinned to the one place where they are born, grow old and die. There might even be people we consider friends that we haven’t even met in real life - such are these modern times. Despite this, there is the illness of loneliness, and this has reached epidemic proportions. It is killing us - and scientists have found many physical results from continued emotional solitude.

Depending on circumstance and personality, some of us do ok on our own and are perfectly self-sufficient and self-possessed. Alone is not the same as loneliness. We can also feel terribly alone in a crowded room. There has been a fracture in our ability to connect with others, even with the flood of technology around us. We can blame modern life, but loneliness goes much deeper to the core of who we are, and our ability to prioritize friendships and good relationships. We are spun a tale of how love and companionship should look by what we read and watch, even those people who purport themselves as ‘influencers’ can be more ‘misinfluencers’.

We need each other more than ever before. It’s up to us to choose who does us good, rather than accepting or resigning ourselves to any attention, even the bad kind. Pick who you want to speak into your life and who you want to invest into.