Emily answers the prompt this week:

“What does a friendship mean to you? Is there a difference between close friends and superficial friends and what are the characteristics that differentiate them?“

Honestly, I’ve been sitting with this question for a while.  I think the reason it’s hard to answer is that friendship, real friendship, is something I’ve mostly theorised about rather than lived.

I had friends when I was a kid, actually a large group of friends, but then my nan died and my world fell apart, and that is when my friends scattered. The people I called my closest friends became the people who hurt me most. They left, or worse, they turned and became my bullies. That does something to you. It rewires the blueprint. Now, when I meet someone new, there’s a part of me that’s already braced for the ending, already waiting for the moment they decide I’m not worth the effort and inevitably ghost me, or fail to turn up to coffee dates, or find someone else.

So what does friendship mean to me? Something that defies easy definition, partly because it’s remained just out of reach.

I don’t really believe in superficial friendship. Not for me, anyway. It’s all or nothing. If you’re not in it for the long haul, if you’re the kind of person who drifts in and out depending on convenience, then honestly, don’t bother. I’d rather have the honest absence of a friend than the hollow presence of someone who’s only there when it suits them. Superficial connection doesn’t fill the gap. It just makes the gap more visible, especially in the world of social media where friends are collected and not gained.

Which means the bar for what I’d call a real friend is high. It comes down to who shows up , not just when things are good and easy and social, but when things go quiet, or dark, or difficult. A close friend is someone who appears in the hard moments without being summoned.

That last part matters to me more than I can really articulate. The not having to chase. The being thought of. I think that’s what I’d want most from a real friendship, not grand gestures, just someone who asks how I am before I have to figure out how to bring it up myself.

I don’t have any friendships outside of romantic relationships. That’s the honest answer. The level of trust I seem to need before I can really let someone in tends to require a different kind of commitment than friendship usually demands. Whether that’s a flaw or just a fact about me, I’m still working out.

But I think that’s why this question lands differently for me than it might for others. Friendship isn’t something I take for granted, or move through casually. It’s something I understand mostly through its absence, through the quiet ache of wishing it were different.