This just in: You’ve been doing friendship wrong, whatever your friendship style. The fact that you have friends at all? My condolences. Instead of categorizing all the friends you have, today’s article is all about making you uncomfortable. Today, we categorize you by the number of friends you have and the type of relationship you have with your friends and find you wanting. Here are eight types of friendship styles that may apply to you:
- The COVID-19 wannabe
You took that Bumble BFF poster that was up at the beginning of the semester in West Union dining hall — about how 17,000 people are arriving on campus and how you’re bound to find some friends within them — a little too seriously. Instead of realizing the poster meant that you’d find a few friends out of 17,000, you somehow thought it was a good idea to infect all 17,000-odd people at Duke with your cheerful presence. No one escapes you, except those of us who live in the library, common rooms or dorms and come out once every fifteen years like periodical cicadas.
2. The Pre-Professional
You’ve got your life figured out, and by life, you mean career. The first time you stepped on campus as a first-year, you were heading to the Career Center to check over your resume (yes, it’s a thing!). You don’t have friends, you have a portfolio of strategic investments in individuals. You set up your LinkedIn account in kindergarten and this is what you use, instead of Snapchat or messages, to ask your strategic investments to lunch conferences at WU.
Which is great! Ideally, you enjoy the company of your carbon-based strategic investments and make time regularly to be a real person in addition to a high-achieving, future-focused pre-professional. But it’s always good to take advantage of resources if you’re able to and have the time to, especially if they may benefit you in the future. If you’re interested in learning about undergraduate student resources and how first-years last year used campus resources and amenities, check out the Center for Documentary Studies’ list of undergraduate student resources and this Chronicle article on how well Duke’s campus resources and amenities are known and used by the Class of 2025.
3. The Friend Group Person
Defined as someone with a group of friends who all know each other. That’s awful! I mean, not only do you have friends, but your friends are friends with each other? That’s so many kinds of wrong.
4. The 10,000 Friends on Social Media Person
Not everyone who uses social media falls into this category, but you know you’re here when you start to tell yourself with increasing desperation that you definitely don’t base your self-worth on the number of likes your posts get and that you definitely feel fulfilled by socializing primarily through little text bubbles and pictures.
Social media is not unilaterally bad: It can be a good way to find community and stay connected to friends. I don’t have Instagram, I wouldn’t know. One of my Fairly Reliable, Interdependent Entities with whom I Non-competitively Debate on a daily to monthly basis does. They say that it’s a good way to learn what events are happening on campus and to be vaguely reminded that friends, acquaintances and famous people exist.
But if you suspect that social media is detracting from your composite digital and non-digital experience of the virtual reality we call life, consider turning notifications off of your social media apps for a day. I dare you, it’s not impossible. Side effects do exist, however, and may include being jump-scared by how blue the sky is and feeling like you have time-traveled back to 15th-century rural peasant life. If you can believe it, some people actually live without checking their phones every five minutes and have survived to tell the tale.
5. The Unfortunate One
You make friends everywhere you go. Going to class? New friends. Hanging out anywhere? New friends. Leaving your room to go to the bathroom down the hall? New friends. You’re becoming concerned. Something’s not quite right. No one believes you when you say you have too many friends. Someone make it stop already.
6. The Gardener
People are basically plants, right? You make sure they get enough sun, water them regularly, and give them pep talks when they’re looking a little droopy — that’s all there is to it.
You’ve been doing this regularly and have strangely not been able to harvest any fruits or vegetables from your friends. Instead, your friends bring you conversation and support and have extended all over your carefully scheduled calendar. Real plants are better than humans: Ditch those friends and check out Duke Farm.
7. The Therapist
You don’t have friends, you have therapy clients who don’t pay you. Your friend just bombed their midterm? Someone’s pet guppy just died? The drying machines in Few Quad caught fire again? Yep, your phone just started ringing.
If I were you, I would start charging for services. But if you actually enjoy counseling people, consider doing so as part of an organization, such as becoming a peer support operator at a Duke-specific line or at a more general support line. Direct your friends to CAPS. Or direct yourself to CAPS — it may be hard to reach out, but it’s okay to not be okay, even for seemingly trivial little things. It’s difficult to help others when your needs aren’t being addressed.
8. The Friend-Free Person
If you’re not lonely and quite happy with your life, then congratulations: You’re perhaps the only person who’s doing this friendship thing right. Friends? Who needs those? Thankfully, you are a superior life form not dependent on base physical needs, like the presence of another human being, to maintain your happiness and efficiency. But sometimes it happens that there’s simply nobody that you click with, no matter how hard you’ve looked.
You may prefer to have one close friend than many acquaintances. It may be that you don’t make any friends in college — and that’s okay, unless it bothers you. Though friends do affect your well-being, you can be happy without friends. You can be busy, talk to people, lean into other support systems and succeed at what you do.
On the other hand, not all of us have the willpower to control our baser urges for friendship. If you’d like to make friends, feel lonely, or haven’t been very social, then consider rescuing Number 5 above (the Unfortunate One). They’re at Abele Quad in front of the Duke Chapel trying to get into the C1 bus, currently trapped at the very bottom of a pile of people and shouting for help. They could use a hand and a partner to share the burden of having so many friends.
If you are feeling lonely, it can be good to make casual conversation with people you don’t know well. Even small gestures, like smiling at someone during a brief interaction, are meaningful. Sometimes it may help to look in different places: I have met all but one of my Duke friends through a club. What clubs, events and groups could you join?
If you’re not that social, that’s fine. I do think that having a few friends you spend time with is fun, and meeting new people is fun, but if you’ve realized that you’re more of a hermit, then good for you! And if you simply are going through it right now, I truly hope it gets better.
Unless you’re truly a superior life form, though, you will unfortunately likely end up having at least one friend. There’s no helping it, I suppose: You’re only human.
Jess Jiang is a Trinity senior who wrote this satirical piece to make Duke students even more anxious about their social lives. Their column typically runs on alternate Wednesdays.
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