Friendships are all different and not alike. And according to Arthur Brooks, professor at Harvard, Arthur Brooks there are three profiles of friends that it is essential to have in your entourage. Do you know ?
Having friends to rely on is an essential part of social life. But on closer inspection, you will quickly notice that the relationships we have are not the same. According to science and the famous Greek philosopher Aristotle, there are three categories of essential friends.
Friends at Work, Friends for Pleasure, and Perfect Friends
To achieve happiness, three types of friendships must therefore be part of our lives. There is :
- Work friends, also called “useful” friends with whom we maintain working relationships. Relationships with this type of person can be described as “transactional” or mutually supportive;
- “Pleasure” friends: this type of friendship is based on a sort of admiration of the other, because we find our friend funny or interesting and this gives us pleasure;
- Finally, the “perfect” friends: in this category are friendships that bring two people together for mutual understanding, but which are also linked by another thing that brings them together, whether it be religion or sport. In this type of friendship, there is real satisfaction, because it is possible to discuss difficult or intimate subjects, which is not possible with the two previous types of friendship.
For Professor Brooks, who teaches happiness management at the famous university, we need all three kinds of friends to be happy.
Good in his body, good in his head!
Comrade, buddy, friend, real brother… So many different degrees of friendship
Asked about this distinction, Johanna Rozenblum, clinical psychologist, finds it interesting in more than one way. “This study is very interesting because it reminds us that a friend is not a “Swiss army knife”. We must differentiate the relationships that we can maintain and accept that a friend from the professional sphere is not close enough for us to confide our problems to him.” first notes the specialist.
She emphasizes that this study can explain the friendships we have but also the place we occupy among the friends of our loved ones: “We can’t be this type of person for all our own relationships either.” admits the psychologist.
Johanna Rozenblum added: “This also reminds us that it is important to diversify our emotional sphere, this allows us to see their strengths and their weaknesses, to get the best from each person. It is not for nothing that different terms qualify friendship: the comrade or the buddy will not have the same degree of importance as the friend or the true friend who we consider as a brother“.
