Introducing the Personality Project, and the 3 types of friendship

I'm working on a new book about personality change

Hello readers, and welcome back to the Khazan Kherald. The big update is that I’m now working on a new book about personality change, and I’ll be using this space to provide updates on the new book and insights from my reporting. 

The original story, which was published in the March issue of The Atlantic, has the very apt title “I Gave Myself Three Months to Change My Personality.” I found that my personality really did change, but the experiment made me want to dig even deeper into the five traits of personality and how they shift throughout our lives. Hence, this book.

I’d also love to hear from you—when it comes to personality, what are you curious about? Have you tried to change your own personality? Do you think people can change? Feel free to get in touch at olga.khazan@gmail.com.

(You can still buy my first book, WEIRD, wherever books are sold, and please remember to subscribe to The Atlantic so that your favorite writers can be put through more unusual guinea-pig experiments. And if you don’t want these updates, feel free to unsubscribe below.)

One of the first things I wanted to do for the book was to increase my extroversion score by making more friends. Toward that end, I have been reading a lot of friendship advice books. 

The most interesting, and consistent, takeaway that I’ve come across is that you probably shouldn’t have a best friend. Or at least, not only one. No one friend is going to meet all of your needs, and trying to make one person do that is way too much pressure. You’re going to need different friends for different occasions, and in fact, getting annoyed with a friend can be a sign that you need to diversify your friend “basket.”

That doesn’t mean you should compartmentalize your friends, such that they can never all gather in one big group. But it does mean you can have a work-out friend, a Bachelorette-watching friend, a friend for when you want to celebrate, and a friend for when you need advice. In fact, having different friends who can fulfill different emotional needs is a phenomenon referred to by some researchers as “emotionships.”

Not only do different friendships meet different needs, but there are actually different kinds of friendships that emerge in the scientific literature.

For instance, men are more likely to build their friendships around what their friends can do for them—like opening up job leads or other types of opportunities—while women tend to want friends who will provide them with emotional support, as Lydia Denworth writes in her book Friendship.

The 3 Types of Friendship: 

Denworth also highlights a 1980s study by the sociologist Sarah Matthews, who found there are three distinct styles of friendship: Independent, discerning, and acquisitive.

Independent people have lots of casual friendships, but few enduring, close friendships. They’re happy to socialize with neighbors or coworkers when the opportunity presents itself, but they don’t go out of their way to maintain the friendship when it’s not convenient. When they talk about their friends, independent types say things like “people I know” or “people I have known,” rather than use words like “best friend.” (This is the least common style.) 

Discerning people tend to have very few friends, but those friendships are very, very deep. Born of the fires of final exams and first crushes, these kinds of friendships tend to be harder to establish later in life. When a discerning person loses a friend, it can feel like a deep loss. (This is the most common style).

Acquisitive people, meanwhile, do as the adage says and “make new friends but keep the old.” They form new friendships as they go through life, but they stay in touch with old friends, too. They have a core friend group, but they stay open to meeting new people as their lives change. This apparently isn’t very common either—the average American hasn’t made a single new friend in the past five years—but is, I think, the healthiest, since social connections are one of the greatest predictors of longevity.

Which friendship style do you primarily use? I’m in the process of moving from a more independent style to the acquisitive category, especially since I am, as Denworth puts it, in “the decade where friendship goes to die.” (Your 30s!) Happy friending.

Further reading:

The Friendship Fix by Andrea Bonior 

Friendship by Lydia Denworth

We Should Get Together by Kat Vellos