Be Fri

When I was seven or eight, living for a few years in New Jersey, I had a best friend. We had those little broken heart necklaces that say “Best Friends” when you put them together. Apart, my half said “Be Fri”, hers “St Ends”. Somewhere, I still have it…
Then my family moved back to England and I left my best friend behind. We wrote letters that ended in ever more complex acronyms. They started as WBSOE (write back soon or else) but soon progressed to fill whole lines of the aerogramme with things like WBSOEIHTCOTAGYAYWNWTWY??? (Write back soon or else I’ll have to come over there and get you and you would not want that would you???) We’re still in touch. There were some gaps and although we missed each other’s weddings, we finally met up again and introduced our husbands to each other in 2006. She has a little daughter now and although the emails are sporadic, I know I won’t lose her.
When I started school in England, another girl asked, after only a few days acquaintance, if I would be her best friend. Of course, I had to say no, I had a best friend already, but she was a very long way away. So this very pragmatic young girl suggested to me that she could be my best friend in England. I thought that would be ok and agreed.
A few years later we went to different schools and drifted for a while, coming back together at various times. I had the privilege of attending her wedding earlier this year.
Role on a few more years to my eighteenth birthday. A very, very good friend gave me the grown up equivalent of that Best Friend heart necklace when she designed me a necklace and had an opposite design made for herself, they did indeed fit together. She was one of my bridesmaids and I did a reading at her wedding a few months ago.
The point of all this? I’ve had so many very good friends, have been so blessed by the people around me, that I’m always very wary of the term “best friend”. Since that first instance when I agreed to call someone my best friend, I’ve pretty much not gone there again. I guess a part of me still feels I would be disloyal to that first best friend if I ever used the name for someone else.
Many of my very good friends have someone else, almost always someone they’ve known their whole life, that they call their best friend. I have in the past found it extremely strange, especially when I have seen the best friend desert them, be inadvertently mean to them, neglect them, fail to understand them. Why did this person get that title? And why were people to keen to point out that this friend, this particular one, was the best one? It is almost a smack in the face to any other friend - you will never be "best".
I used to get quite insecure because of all this "besting" going on and found I never felt comfortable unless I had a label for my friends. So in the run up to my wedding, it was all good, I had labels for everyone as it were - bridesmaids, ushers, readers, prayers... I've also had some slightly more random labels or friends in the past, like my male alter ego (we're very similar, minus the gender!)
Lately, it seems I've relaxed a little. I do still find people insisting on calling someone their best friend a little weird but hope it is lovely for them all the same. I've got a lot of very good friends, how could I pick just the one?!