Are you really BFF?

I met my best friend Julia when I was 8 years old. I had just started at a new school and she had volunteered to take care of me for the first few days. Those few days turned into weeks, months and years and last weekend we celebrated 10 years of friendship. In those ten years, we have made new friends and lost just as many but while these friends have come and gone, Jules and I are closer than ever. What is it that makes some of our friendships break down as we get older and others last a lifetime?

Scientists say that we choose friends that we have the most in common with. We have similar behaviour, attitudes and identities as our friends but as we grow up these things change, particularly when we become teenagers. Hitting puberty is never easy and so our friends become our safety rope as we go through it all together; they look after us, and we look after them. None of us want to lose our friends and in our bid to keep them we become influenced and even pressured by our friends.

The research company Adhealth surveyed over 90,000 teenagers and analysed the influence that their friends had over them. They found that most influence is positive. ‘Friend’s pressure can mobilize teenager’s energy, motivate for success and encourage teens to conform to healthy behaviour’ said Dr Ruth Gene, one of the researchers. Basically, It is our friends that prevent us turning into crazy people that smell like fish and mutter to themselves on buses. Our friends work in a similar way to our parents by making sure that we grow up to be healthy ‘normal’ people, although our friends don’t actually intend to do it!

As we get older we move away from our parents as we try to gain independence and our friends can make us feel independent as well as connected. We often feel like our friends understand us better than our parents do as we can relate to one another and accept and understand the frustrations, challenges and concerns that come with being a teenager. This is why teenagers with friends are also physically and emotionally healthier than those without friends and according to Dr Ruth, “close relationships appear to be much more important to girls than they are for boys.” Our friends are our support system as friends understand each other, can talk about their problems and figure out ways to solve them together.

Dr Ruth also says that ‘friends model behaviour for each other, create opportunities in which teenagers can engage in these behaviours and set norms that young people follow.’ This all sounds like complicated science lingo but it can all really be simplified into one example: high school.

In high school we are surrounded by the Cool, the Bad and the Geeky and we work to make sure that we fit into the category that benefits our social lives the most. There are many of us that accept who we are and don’t fit in with any stereotypes at all but still many of us wish we could be in the cool group, with the most popular girls in school. They seem to get all the boys, go to all the parties and have all the fun! We can’t help thinking this way, and according to the survey, it is completely natural.

The popularity side of high school plays a huge part on the friends that we have. Some teens choose friends to make themselves more popular and this means that they may change their behaviour and opinions to fit into a new crowd. Have you ever been friends with someone who has gotten a new friend and suddenly they completely change? Sometimes teenagers will change their entire personality just to keep their new friends. Most of us don’t change our personalities but we do change part of our identities: the way we dress, the music we listen to, give up values or create new ones, change our opinion, even give up old friends and it all depends on the people that we hang around with. This is why the most common question that teens ask themselves is “what will my friends think?”

Caring so much about what our friends think also makes many teenagers take risks that they normally wouldn’t. Some teens will risk being grounded, losing their parents trust or even facing prison, just to try and fit in or feel like they have a group of friends that they can identify with and who accept them. “Friends do help you, but sometimes they want you to do things you wouldn’t do if you were by yourself” said Rebecca, 14. “Or sometimes you feel pressured to do something because everyone is doing it and you want to be cool too.”

All this reshaping that we do of ourselves to fit in is the cause behind the breakdown of many teenage friendships. When you change yourself for a friend, this ‘new’ you does not last very long and eventually your real personality will come through. This is where the problems start because you suddenly find that the real you and your friend no longer have anything in common. As we get older we become more comfortable with our own identities and come to accept and like the way we are so the people we changed ourselves to be with fade away and the friends that we genuinely get along with stay.

If your friends don’t like you just the way you are, then they aren’t really your friends. Don’t be afraid that no one is going to like you because the chances of that are just about impossible! Often people become popular because they are just being themselves. In high school, just being yourself is one of the hardest things to do but when others see you are real, you earn their respect and friendship. You’re never going to get along with everyone and when you think about it, why would you want to? It’s better to have a few close friends that you can hang around with and be yourself than have hundreds of friends that don’t really know you at all. Grab your real friends and start having fun the way you want to!

Robyn