The Five Types of Friends You Need
In this talk, Chrystal Hurst explains why having a variety of friendship categories is essential for a balanced, supportive life. She begins by noting that people often expect a single friend to meet all emotional and practical needs, which leads to disappointment. She frames friendship within a spiritual context, emphasizing that only a relationship with God can fill every gap, while human friends can meet specific needs. Hurst then outlines five distinct friend types: (1) Close friends – built on long‑term shared experiences and deep trust; (2) Same‑interest friends – connections formed around a common hobby, career, or activity, often more superficial at first but capable of deepening; (3) Same‑chapter‑of‑life friends – friends who share a current life season (e.g., parenting stage, school, career exam) and provide season‑specific support; (4) Lifelong friends – relationships that endure across multiple seasons, surviving ebbs and flows over decades; and (5) Work friends – bonds formed through a shared workplace environment, which can evolve into any of the other categories. For each type, she describes how they form, what they offer, and how to intentionally cultivate or let go of them. The talk concludes with a call to be intentional about building a diverse friendship circle, so that when life’s challenges arise, there are appropriate people to lean on. A brief promotional segment follows, inviting listeners to join Chrystal’s Inner Circle community for further growth resources.
Hey there.
Do you have good friends? Do you need good friends? Are you curious about the kinds of friends you should have, or are you looking for help in making friends and developing your circle? Well, I want to talk to you a little bit about that today. Hi, my name is Chrystal Hurst, and I'm so glad that you're joining me. I wanted to take a minute just to talk to you about friendship. There are different types of friends that we all need, and if you're not aware of the fact that there are different kinds of friends for different reasons, then you might spend all your life looking for one kind. And let me tell you, nobody, nobody can be your everything all the time, 100%. So it behooves you to understand friendship, but more than that, to understand that you and the people that you currently call friends need the freedom to ebb and flow as the friendships need them to. Now, I am usually online sharing this content with the Inner Circle and giving them kind of the lowdown first, and then we cut it up and edit it on the back end. I'm glad that you're here, and I'm glad that you get this overflow, but it is super important that you understand that there are different types of friends. And again, the main reason here is that I see people all the time ruining relationships because they have incorrect expectations. And one of those expectations is that they expect that one friend or two friends can fill all the shoes, do all the things, be all the people. And no one can do that. The reason why we need a relationship with God is because it's God alone who can fill every crevice and every gap and every need. Anyone else is going to fail you. That said, you can look for and keep your eyes peeled for people who might be good friends in the season of life that you're in. And I wanted to give you just some specific things to look for in the different types of friendships so that as you think about, who do I want to have connection with? As you ask God, can you bring me some friends? Maybe you're tired of being lonely or you feel disconnected or you've moved to a city, new city, and You know the people you work with, but that's it. You can really be intentional about developing relationship in your life. And I believe that relationship, whether it's your children or your husband or your mother, your mother-in-law, your auntie, your cousin, but especially your friends, it changes the flavor of your life. So if you don't have a friend group, then I want you to listen in. If you have a friend group, I want you to see if you can identify the different kinds of friends you have as I share this with you now. Because people are different, which means we come in all sizes and shapes. That means we bring our special sauce to each relationship. We bring our attitude, we bring good or bad, we bring our history, we bring our personality, we bring our ability to listen, our ability to speak. You bring everything with you when you enter a friendship. And the goal of friendship is to have different types of friendships that could learn to not only love you for who you are, and you love them for who they are, but also for you to be able to look in the nooks and crannies of how you might be able to connect, combine resources, and move forward. The beauty of friendship, it's like Ecclesiastes 4:9-12 says, "Two are better than one. If one falls, the other can lift up the one who fell." But if you're by yourself and you fall, who's gonna lift you up? When you decide to be intentional, about developing your friendships and pouring into relationships with people, you are setting yourself up to not be alone should there come a time in your life where you just feel like you're falling down. Because you should have somebody you can call, different people you can call for different reasons, for different availability. And if you feel alone or you function alone, then I want to have you consider what the different types of friends may be that you need to develop and pour into. So number 1, let me talk to you about close friends. These are people that are close because of time spent together or a shared experience that you've had together. So somebody can be your close friend from college because you were in the same dorm room together, or maybe you shared a suite, or maybe you were in the same major and you were taking the same classes. And because you kept seeing this person over and over again over time, and because there is some kind of shared experience, you feel a bond. These are your people. They know you, you know them. They've done life with you. They challenge you and you challenge them, and they know how to help you or keep you on your baseline, whatever that may be. They are a safe space. Close friends are a safe space, and you've known them long enough to be able to trust them when they say something out loud to you, or to look at them and say, I totally disagree, for y'all not to get on each other's nerves. Freedom. Somebody say freedom. So close friends is one, and you're tied usually by time and experience. And then we have same interest friends. So these are going to be friends, they share the same hobby, or maybe they share an interest, or maybe they share the same career as you. So maybe you can have other photography-loving friends, or maybe you have, uh, podcasting friends. I know I have a group who podcast. You have writing friends, or traveling friends, or sewing group friends, or business owner friends, or night owl friends, or music-loving friends. But because y'all have a shared interest, you gather together and you know that you're coming or cut from the same cloth. When you talk about friends that are— they're based on a shared interest, they are usually based on affinity, acquaintance, or association. I know you, but I don't really know you, and I might get to know you over time, but out the gate, I don't really know you. I just know that we like hanging out together And I mean, y'all, this is what happy hour is all about, right? If you work in the corporate world and you're working with a group of people that like to drink after work, what do they say? Let's go to happy hour because we're trying to get to know each other better. We work together all day, but I really still don't know you, and so let's get to know each other around a whatever it is that people are drinking these days. It is not necessarily deep, it is not necessarily a safe space, but you enjoy their company. You can grow a same-interest friendship into a close friendship. It's totally possible. But you have to sometimes go fishing in the shallow water before you get frustrated if you're not catching anything big. So I would just encourage you to look around and think, what am I interested? What do I like to do? Who can I do it with? And then start being intentional about those people in your life. Foodie friends, that's my favorite, actually. All right, now we have same chapter of life friends. Now these are friends who you have because whether they are friends for the long haul or friends for a short season, you're connected with them over an affinity related to the season of life that you're in. So again, this could be college, uh, maybe you're a friend with someone in college, maybe y'all haven't been friends 5, 10, 15 years, but you've met and you feel like you know them well enough to go a little deeper. Same chapter friends are friends who you go deeper because you both have kids the same age, or You're both studying for your nursing exams, or you are just now getting to the point where you're able to speak in front of a group because you've been going to Toastmasters and you met someone there. Y'all have a shared interest, but you have not built on that framework of your friendship over time and of multiple shared experiences. So you are an acquaintance. You have the same interest, but you're not necessarily close. So these are friends who are empty nesters, or they're retired, or they're working moms, or they're experiencing a divorce, they're single parent, they're newly married. Uh, they've been single for a while, or they're single again. They like to travel, and they're free to do that because their kids are grown. Season of life says we both are studying for our LSATs, or we both are sitting for the bar, or maybe we're both taking our CPA exam, or we both work in the same building. Same chapter of life, friends, it's when you spend a season together, and because of that season, there's stickiness. Now, the test of time— remember, the time and experience is close friends. You can have a college friend that was close in college, and as soon as you graduate, you're no longer close. A close friend, though, is someone who you met in college, and because your friendship got baked in time and experience, now you can say, oh, I met them in college, but they're a close friend, because you've had long enough to get to know each other and to go deeper. They've done enough life with you to call you out when you need to be called out. They've, they've done enough for you to challenge and support you, and you know that they're there for you. So we've got close friends, uh, same interest friends, same chapter of life friends, and then we have lifelong friends. Lifelong friends are people that have time and experience through the seasons. So you remember I said close friends are time and experience, and then same interest friends or even chapter of life friends are friends for a season. Okay, lifelong friends are friends who, uh, they're close because of time and experience, but the time and experience has gone through multiple seasons. So this is when you have accordion friends, like this year we're close and we talk every day, next year we hardly talk at all. It may be a year we talk a little bit, but the next year life got hard and we dove all the way in. Or maybe we have one or two good meetups a year where we talk for 5, 6, 7, 8 hours And then we're all caught up and we go back to our lives. But then there are other seasons where we get closer. Through the ebb and flow of time, this person is stuck with you through 10 years, 20 years, 30 years of life. It's a lifelong friend. It's somebody who you knew in the third grade, you raised your children together, and here you are about to retire together. That is lifelong. If you're 40 and you've known them since you were 20, that could be lifelong. And the longer your life goes, the more you'll see if this is a lifelong friend. A lifelong friend is someone who sticks through it, and it, it usually involves some bumpiness You've probably had some hard conversations. You've probably had to decide to come back to the friendship. But lifelong friends are one of the best gifts that God could ever give you, particularly if you take the time to cultivate them. And then you've got work friends. Work friends are, I like to call, environmental. Like, you're friends because you're in the same building, you're in the same job place virtually or physically. And because you share the same workplace, but you share a condensed amount of time. So when we talked about same chapter of life friends, you were together, but you were together on a play date, you know what I'm saying? Like, you were together for a Bible study, a couple of hours a week maybe. Work friends, you're with those people more than you're with your own family. And so these are people who not only are friends for a season, but you have a condensed season with them. And so these are relationships where struggles arise, you have to work through conflict, you have support, there's someone you can feel connected to, but you have to work together. You have to be clear about, um, who's doing what and when, or, you know, conversations about the different departments that you work in. But this is condensed, but it is affinity-specific because y'all work at the same place. Now, can work friends become season of life friends? Yes. Can work friends become same-interest friends? Yes. Can work friends become close friends? Yes. Can work friends become lifelong friends? Yes. But work friends is where it started. And then once work changes, what is the tenor of your relationship?
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So the thing is, I, I could give you examples in my life of each one of these. I've got some close friends, um, that I would say we talk when we talk, They don't hold me hostage. I don't hold them hostage. We know each other really, really well. They've done enough life with me to challenge me and support me, speak life into me, and also call me out when I'm wrong. But some of them are not lifelong, but they've been around long enough where I trust them. And these are women that have been in groups at church that I serve with, and maybe they started out as season of life or same interest. We were all serving in women's ministry, but then over time and over space and praying for babies and praying for marriages and praying for new jobs and praying for new cars and asking God to reveal his answers to them— after enough of those, we started in one place and we became close. I have same interest friends, um, as I mentioned. I have a group of friends, we're podcast friends. We have a group in a walkie-talkie app where whenever one of us have a question, we ask. But this group of friends, we really only gather around the podcast table. But I can tell you, we've been in this same group for 10 years. So we decided we were interested in something and we stuck together to develop our interest. So not only do I not have friends now, but I also have knowledge. I have information. And at my fingertips, I can call any one of them. And get counsel. Um, this has been true when I wanted to travel because some of my friends can't travel just yet, they still have little kids. And so I've developed a few friendships with women who can hit the road. If the flights are good and the, the hotel is cheap, let's go, let's go! I'm gonna leave my 15-year-old with my husband. If you're married, you coming on too, or if you're not, that's all right. And because we enjoy hanging out together, podcasting and travel are some of my favorite. Another area for me are other business owners because we just like rubbing shoulders about what we're learning, what we're experiencing, and sharing information with everyone. Affinity, acquaintance, and association. I try to find people— actually, I try to be intentional about finding people who have my same interests and hobbies. You want to know why? Because birds of a feather flock together. When I get tired of working on something, they might encourage me too. Remember the scripture I read? Two are better than one. They'll have good reward for their toil, but when one falls, the other can lift him up. So sometimes the reason why you share your life with people who you share hobbies with is because you want to be able to keep going and working on your craft. Lifelong Friends is my favorite. There's a group of women, my sister's in it, Jada's in it, Michelle is in it, my friend Shandria's in it, and we kind of are friends that are lifelong friends that started with affinity, and here we are looking up, and it's been almost 30 years. So yeah, we've crossed the lifelong category. I would've said we started out with affinity. We were in the same choir. Then we became close. And then over the years, time and experience through the seasons, we become lifelong friends. That is one of the most amazing, amazing gifts that people know you and they've known you throughout all the seasons. It is so important for you to be intentional about developing friendships. Friendships make life, life sweeter. It's not necessarily the big rock, but it sure does add a lot of seasoning, salt and pepper. And I want you to know that if you're not intentional about developing friendships, they will not be there when you need them most. You got to meet people. You got to get out there. You have to ask the first question. Be the one to go first. Be the one to open their doors. You may have to take advantage of things that are happening in your church or in your community. You have to be willing to take a risk and share your phone number or give somebody your Instagram handle from your private Instagram account. You've got to open the doors to create the space to develop new friends, because somebody doesn't come through the door automatically being a lifelong friend. They don't come through the door automatically being a close friend. They may come through the affinity door, or maybe they come through the, um, the interest door. Maybe they come through the season or chapter of life door. But what I can guarantee you is if you will start somewhere It— I believe that work, same interest, and same chapter of life, those are entry levels. And then from there, it's like a pyramid. You decide who's going to stay close. You decide who's going to be lifelong. It is okay to have a friend for one season and that friend not go with you into the other season. No guilt, no shame, no sorrow. It is a good thing for you to know when the season of friendship has ended. And we're going to talk some more about that. I have another whole talk, it's all typed up and ready to go. We're going to talk about how to break up with a friend, and we're going to talk about setting boundaries with your friends. But you got to have friends to do any of that with, capiche? I want you to pour into the relationships you have. I want you to be willing to open yourself up to the relationships that you don't yet. And I want you to know that making friends, developing friends, growing friendship is something that you can do. And I know that everyone in my tribe would say, oh my gosh, it's worth it. It's worth it to take the extra effort to stay a little longer for the conversation. It's worth it to put yourself out there, to do for someone else what you wish they would do for you so that when your day comes, you've poured in to friends. You know just what to do because you taught them along the way who you were and what you liked. Put in the work to develop the friendships. Stick with some, work those out that seem like they're just not gonna work. Why don't you see before you give up? And if this friendship doesn't take off, go back and try again. You will not be the first, nor will you be the last, to have a friendship that ends or doesn't quite go the way you think it will do. So what do you do? You shake the dust off your feet, you clear your throat, you hold your head up high, and you keep going. The right people will show up at the right time in the right place so that you can live your life connected. Because at the end of the day, that's what really matters anyway— your connection. I want to ask you a question, because as I talk about this content, I want you to think about how does this apply to you. So you can, wherever you're watching, drop this in the comments. How might you be overlooking a friend because they don't bring the same thing to the friendship that someone else could bring? How do you have expectations for a friend that they're not measuring up to? But what if they don't even know what your expectations are? Do you have a friend in your life that's disappointing you? If so, are you overlooking them? Did they already apologize? Are they willing to start over? Don't despise the day of small beginnings. And small beginnings sometimes starts with your friends. The second thing is, I'm curious to know, what kind of type of friend are you? It takes one to know one. What kind of friend are you? Who do you aspire to be if you're not there yet? So who might you be looking over that God has put right in your path, but they don't fit a packaging? And then I want you to ask yourself, what kind of friend are you? You can tell me in the comments below. And this is me telling you, take the risk. Take the risk. Why? Because the mere fact that you're asking that question, it tells me that you've probably never even explored this. And exploring your personality and knowing how you operate and how you connect with other people, this is the gift that you will give yourself because friendship is a God-given gift. God told himself, "Let us make man in our image," 'cause we are good. And God wants you to be good and wants you to experience that kind of friendship too. So you've got different types of friends. Release people, don't hold them hostage. Keep looking, but be the kind of friend you want to be and attract great friends. All right, y'all, I hope that was helpful, and we'll see you next time.
