6 Types Of Friends You Should Keep By Your Side (and The 6 You Should Avoid)

Humans are sociable beings who need connection with others. Research reveals that having a strong base of friends has many benefits for our mental health, from reducing the risk of depression to helping us feel more satisfied with our lives. But, there are different types of friends that we can have in our lives, that is, each of these friendships plays a completely different role.

The different types of friends

These are some of the types of friendship health that may exist in your environment:

1. Intimate friends: It is a friendship that we consider stronger and more intimate. The nature of this type of friends can be very different in each case depending on the personality of both parties in the relationship. For example, you could be people who only meet from time to time or, on the other hand, you could constantly talk to this person. The characteristic of this friendship is that they are usually people who trust and support each other when it is important.
2. Lifelong friends: These types of friendship They are those people we have met in the early stages of life. That is, it could be a childhood friend or someone we met during adolescence and with whom you continue to connect. Although you may see little of each other or no longer share as much, you still have a relationship with this person because of everything you have shared.
3. Social friends: A social friend is a person with whom you spend time regularly because this person is fun to be with. That is, it is the person you go to to make those plans in which you want to socialize, have a good time and bring out your most extroverted side. In these cases, it is not someone you trust or seek emotional support with, but you enjoy being with them.
4. Casual friends: This type of friends They are those that we like, but that we do not want to have by our side for a long time. The reason may be that there is some aspect of their personality that you don’t quite like or that simply exhausts you. It is not negative to be with them, you simply have things in which you clash, although in everything else you feel very comfortable.
5. Group of friends: They are people with whom you share a group of friends It is possible that you only see them when you meet these people, that is, you do not have greater intimacy with them. In these cases, perhaps with some of the members of the group you would not be friends outside of it, but there is nothing wrong with that.
6. Situational friends: We can also have friends who are limited to certain circumstances or activities. These friends can be contextual or situational, that is, those with whom we connect in certain situations or specific environments, whether at work or in certain activities. These friendships are limited to circumstances, so they tend to be less intimate than a more general friend.

What types of friends should you avoid?

In addition to the friends As we have mentioned, there are cases in which people can have friends around them that bring you more negativity than positivity:

1. One-sided friends: They are those people who only attend to friendship when they have an interest. That is, he only requires your attention when he wants to show you something of his own and not when you need each other.
2. Ambivalent friends: In these cases, people may act in a different way, causing us pain because of it. On the one hand, he can be very kind and affectionate and on other occasions treat us badly or not give us attention.
3. Codependent friends: A codependent friendship is one in which two friends become too dependent on each other. That is, people can end up in these types of relationships to try to deal with certain problems in their emotional health.
4. Toxic friends: This is someone whose behavior ends up negatively affecting your well-being. This person will try to undermine your progress or may make you feel bad on certain occasions.
5. Fake friends: They are those people who behave like friends, but who in reality are not friends because they do not respect you. In fact, these types of people will try to belittle you or make you feel bad on certain occasions.
6. Interested friends: Those friends who are only close to you because they intend to make a profit of some kind. They can make you believe that they are your friends but they are only there to achieve their goal and then leave it.

Before this type of friendships It is important to learn to set limits or simply put them aside because of all the negative things they can do to your mental health. Friendships should be people in whom we can trust and feel supported, in the event that they end up slowing down our growth, people or even affecting us on an emotional level, it is not a sincere and authentic bond. If you are in relationships that involve this toxicity, it is important that you face them or work on strategies to deal with them through a professional psychologist. Friends are those people who allow us to be ourselves.