Besties, Shmesties.

Every time I catch one of my daughters say "she's my best friend" I kind of cringe a little.  Okay, a lot.  In fact, I gear up to give her a big fat lecture.  Best friends are just not my thing.  Call it semantics, but it just comes off as so exclusionary, giving preferential treatment to a single friend when there are so many others out there to round out one's life and experience.  Don't get me wrong.  I have a best friend.  He is my husband.  I like him more than anyone else, we share all our secrets with one another, spend as much time together as possible, and we even wear rings to prove it.  But, as an adult, I have found that there's not room in my life for another "best friend" or even a best group of friends - I definitely like to play the field more than that. And I guess I'd hope the same for my kids.

Actually, I've kind of always been this way.  I've never seen myself as being part of a certain social circle.  Sure, it's not as if I broke down my day, spending an equal amount of time with the people in my life.  Still, I never found myself getting too comfortable with any particular friend or group of friends.  At first, it was probably in an effort to protect myself.  As one who moved around a lot, perhaps I wanted to avoid getting emotionally attached to someone only to be ripped away and transferred to another state(or country).  Perhaps.  But even if the initial motivation was self-preservation, I think the end result of spreading oneself thin has multiple benefits.

First, if you spend all of your time with the same person (or people, for that matter), some of your identity and self-confidence gets wrapped up in your little group.  It's easy to experience some insecurity when, somehow, the person you thought was your best friend begins to spend time with someone else.  As a kid, in particular, you might take it personally, like their desire to hang out with another friend is a reflection of some deficiency of yours.  I don't ever want my kids' confidence to be tied to a best friend's exuberance (or lack thereof) at spending time with them.

Second, when I am less wrapped up in my own comfort at feeling settled in a group of friends, I am more inclined to reach out to others. It might be easy to forget the new kid, or the disabled one, or simply the lonely when you are perfectly content in your social circumstances.  At least that's been my experience.  Then again, I suppose, for some people, having an established set of friends might give them the self-confidence to reach out to others and bring them into their circle?   See?  I'm not anti-best friend - just explaining why I've never really claimed to have one.

And finally, life is so much richer with a broad circle of friends with varied backgrounds, interests, skills and experiences.  I am grateful that I've given time for certain relationships to develop, even when, at the outset, I might have written them off.  I'm deeply enriched by the friendships I've made and kept, even when it might have been easier or more fun to just hang with the more of the same time and time again.

This is not to say that I disapprove of best friends (or those who have them) as a general rule - more to explain why I choose to encourage my kids to favor a broader circle of friends rather than a narrow one.  It's my style (not necessarily the right one), and an approach I feel has a positive outcome.  So, at our house, my girls have learned to use the word "good friend" lest they incur a talking to from their old mother.   :)