So, now that you know the different stages of a friendship according to Irwin Altman and Dalmas Taylor, let’s look back to Julie Beck and look at what she says are the three categories of friendship. Those categories are: active, dormant, and commemorative. Now, active friends and dormant friendships are pretty straightforward. Your active friends are those that we see on a regular basis and consider to be our current friends. On the other hand, dormant friends are those people who we haven’t kept in regular contact with but we still consider them to be a friend and it wouldn’t be weird or awkward if they suddenly reached out to you. Initially, I assumed that these were the only two categories of friends because people are either present in your life or they’re not. As I kept reading, the category that puzzled me was the idea of a commemorative friend. These are basically your ghost friends because you know that you probably won’t hear from this person ever again and that’s okay. Since they were still special to you at an earlier point in your life, you still hold them near and dear to your heart.

When I was reading this, I immediately thought of my female friend who sent the text that she wasn’t being supported to the group chat about a week after the revelation from my first friend. In case you don’t remember, go back to the earlier articles where I explain the inspiration for this project. When I thought about this girl and why it wouldn’t have occurred to me that she felt differently about our friendship, I realized that she was my version of a commemorative friend. I was best friends with her in middle school and I loved going to her house for sleepovers. We liked the same foods, had the same friends, and even tried to get the same teachers in school. She invited me on a trip out of the country with her family and we went on two cruises together. At one point, she was the person that I would go to about everything from advice to gossip. When I was younger, she was a really integral part of my life but that slowly started to change as we got older. We went to different high schools and different colleges. We would still see each other in the summers but we started spending less and less time together. Although she didn’t lose her value to me as a friend, she slowly lost her place of importance in my life and I naturally expected that she viewed me the same way.

This is contrary to what Andrew Ledbetter’s longitudinal study of best friends would tell me to think. Ledbetter found that the number of months that friends reported being close in 1983 predicted whether they were still close almost twenty years later, which suggests that the more you’ve invested in a friendship already, the more likely you are to keep it going. I had already spent years with this girl, making memories, and investing time in a relationship with her, so why was I so willing to let it go? Maybe it had to do with her expectations for me as a friend, my mental capacity to maintain friendships, or maybe it simply had to do with the nature of our friendship. I mention mental capacity because a lot of studies mention the idea of Dunbar’s number, which says that there is a limit on the number of people that we can have connections with. Most studies put that number at 150 people and claim that after 150 people, you can’t really maintain good connections with numbers 151 and beyond. This idea dates back to the time of hunters and gatherers where group-size really affected quality of life and groups larger than 150 did not have good chances of survival. Dunbar has another theory called the social brain hypothesis which says that group size relates to the size of our brains! That’s amazing to think about but it makes sense in terms of evolution of our species. Although it is an ancient idea, it can be relevant in today’s modern, social-media obsessed society. It is very common to have well over 150 “followers” on social media so what does this theory say about the strength of those connections?

Moving on, the great philosopher Aristotle said that there are three different types of friendships. The first is based on being useful to one another and the second is based on the fact that you get pleasure from being around that person. The third relationship as described by Aristotle is one based on admiration for one another’s core values and beliefs. In this kind of friendship, you like what the other person stands for and who they are, not just what they can do for you. Looking back, I think that I was so disconnected from my friend because we had a relationship based on what we could do for one another and when we stopped spending so much time together, that connection simply disappeared because it was no longer obvious how we could be of use to each other. While it is somewhat sad to think about, I definitely appreciated learning about this stuff because it gave me an explanation for what happened between us and helped me to make sense of it. Each of the articles listed on this website has helped me to make sense of my own life in some way and I will always be grateful for that.