Best Friends: How Many Is Too Many?!

I always wondered about the definitive requirements for a "Best Friend". Especially when you have people who seem to have about 5-10 of them! It would seem to me that a best friend would obviously be someone that goes above and beyond normal friend duties right? unfortunately people use the term 'Best Friend' as loosely as they use the term 'Virgin', but that's beside the point.

I have always been big on titles and their meanings; specifically when it comes to relationships in all facets. I structure my social circle on 3 basic categories:

Acquaintances

Associates 

Friends 

Look at that! Even the letters get smaller the closer you get to a real friend LOL.

Acquaintances are people whom I know and who know me yet we don't really hang out.  We see each other at parties and other social functions; we say hello, promise to have cocktails and conveniently call and cancel on each other just hours before we're scheduled to meet. Why? Because right up until that time we probably had forgotten we ever made plans with one another and figure it's no big deal.

Associates are a little different; we actually schedule time to hang out, we gossip, have a few cocktails and a kiki and call it a day. These are the people who are simply for fun. They don't know much about my personal life, they damn sure aren't the ones I go to for advice but they get to be a little closer than most who simply know my name and nationality lol.

Now we get to the nitty gritty: Friends; they are the people I borrow money from and who borrow money from me as we share in each others daily lives. I see these people on a regular basis, I call them on a regular basis and when I need advice on things they are who I call. We've probably had a few disagreements and have fought it out, gotten over it and are now on speaking terms again.

Looking at these vastly different categories of my social life, you can imagine why I find it so hard to call so many people my BEST friend. A best friend goes even beyond what a mere friend would do (according to my social circle definition). These are the people whose hands you'd place your very own life in. They are the people who are more like family than friends. I think about my best friend and ALL of the things that we've experienced together.  Car crashes, family drama, even a small stint of a jail experience that we'd NEVER thought we'd make it through but did. We've shared things with one another that we haven't and aren't able to share with anyone else around us simply because they wouldn't get it.

So how do people have ENOUGH of themselves to give to 8, 9 or even 10 "best" friends?  We really should take some inventory of our lives and consider what we're really saying when we give a title to someone in our lives. Titles and positions in our lives should be like money.  You wouldn't just GIVE $500 to a total stranger would you? Hell, you wouldn't give that to someone you knew without a background check on where it was going, when you'd get it back and why they needed it in the first place!

Point being, Best Friends are like marriages; they take work and quite frankly you really only have room and time for ONE!!!