h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I had an interesting conversation at the gym today. Part of it concerned friends, and how few really close friends people seem to have nowadays. Some of the implications of this conversation I've elaborated here, but others were actually part of the conversation. I proposed a classification of friends into three classes. Class 1 friends would be the ‘really close' or ‘idealised' ones - the ones with whom you are so close you can say almost anything, tell any secret and know you won't be betrayed, whose opinion you value and whose respect you cherish, with whom you can meet any acquaintance and have that acquaintance become a mutual friend, or fall in love. I am sure that I have no Class 1 friends like that, and the other person I was talking to at the gym felt the same about herself. Modern life seems to preclude such relationships - and yet we all still look for love and wonder why it's so hard to find.

Instead, I have a lot of Class 2 friends - friends with whom I can discuss most things, but from whom I still withhold some opinions, and conceal information when I know it won't accord with their expressed beliefs. These people are great to talk to, but I don't see them enough to make them into Class 1 friends, and they are very much concerned with their own lives outside my interest - or their interests in revealing them to me. Most of my best h2g2 friends I would call Class 2 friends - mainly because I've never actually met any of them...

Class 3 friends are people you know and have nothing against, essentially. People with whom you chat, but whose names you may not know. People with whom you're on ‘nodding' terms. There are a lot of these around the place, even on h2g2.

I wonder whether we exclude each other from our lives deliberately, or whether maintaining the friendships that ‘Class 1' relationships bring is simply too much effort. I wonder whether the modern phenomenon of the ‘communications revolution' gives us the ability to collect so much information about each other that personal characteristics of the people we like become mere statistical abnormalities, rather than just unusually good things. I wonder whether it's right to be able to have such expectations of my friends, or whether expectations should even be necessary with ‘Class 1' people. I also wonder whether it's possible to make a ‘Class 1' friend without realising that they are Class 1 friends.

An interesting conversation, indeed... A really nice way to spend a sunny Thursday afternoon, sipping tea and waiting for the world to turn...