What counts as a friend?

Is it enough merely to see someone often and be mutually friendly with her? To sit together in lecture halls and exchange notes? To talk to each other at weekly club meetings? To sing in the same choir, volunteer at the same lab, worship at the same synagogue?

Or do you need to get to know her more deeply before you’re actually friends?

Do you need to have done things outside of the context that brought you and her together? To have gone hiking, watched a movie, shopped in town, gotten drinks together?

Do you know what else is happening in her life?

Do you text each other every day? Send her dank memes? Tag her on social media? Comment her name without context on meme pages? Keep a Snapchat streak with her? Does each of you send the first text roughly half of the time?

Do you call each other nicknames?

Can you depend on her to answer the call and rally the troops for an In-N-Out run at two in the morning? Can you depend on her to know your sleep habits, your dietary restrictions, your music genre preferences? Can you depend on her to join you for a Stranger Things marathon? Can you depend on her to let you crash for the night on her sofa and hide your car keys because you’re too plastered to drive home?

Have you met other friends through her? Have you met her family? Can you depend on her family to let you crash for the night?

If you disappeared, how long would it take for her to notice?

Have you bared your soul to her, embarrassed yourself, let slip your dark secrets? Across the crackle of a campfire have you waxed poetic about your crushes? Five hours into a road trip have you admitted your strangest fetishes? In the soft glow of an apartment evening have you aired your taboo political opinions? Have you broken down and cried with her? Has she done the same?

Does she know enough to destroy you? And you her?

If you don’t, are you really friends?

(The other extreme. What if you just met her once, added each other on social media several years ago, and never saw her again? Well, at least Facebook thinks you’re friends.)

Friend-gatekeeping makes me uncomfortable.

(“So, your friends in Pucker & Clench, do you actually, like, hang out with them outside of theatre? Or do you only see them while you’re accompanying their rehearsals?”)

I myself have friends. Very good friends, in fact. At least I think they’re very good friends. But I’ve become dimly aware that maybe other people have much more intense friendships than I do. It’s as if I had been colourblind my whole life and just realised that “colour” means something more to everyone than the shades of grey I thought it meant. They can see real colour, and I can see only shadows. They have real friendships, and I have only shadows.

What if I consider someone a good friend, but she considers me a mere acquaintance, just because people have different standards of friendship?

Maybe I text my friends once a week or once a month, and to me that’s enough for a friendship, because it’s hard to imagine a friendship could be anything more.

Can your best friend be someone you only hear from once a week?

I have been taking stock of my friendships. I am six months into the work-force and a year out of university, a year out of that period when friend-making was easy. Back then the conditions of my environment were all very favourable to friendship—we were all roughly on the same level, we had a shared purpose (learning), and most importantly we could expect to run into each other often, unplanned. Now, making friends takes serious effort. Keeping the friends I already have also takes serious effort.

I’ve heard that as I get deeper into my twenties and thirties it only gets worse.

(“Hey Elizabeth, I’m actually coming into your town in three weeks! I know it’s been years since we talked but do you want to catch up somehow? Like maybe get drinks? No, that Friday’s not available? How about Wednesday? Oh. Guess we won’t hear from each other for two more years. And that’s perfectly okay.”)

And we haven’t even talked about relationships.