MINTZ: What makes a best friend?

It has been pointed out to me that I call a lot of people “my best friend.” I call my mom and sister my best friends. I call the seven girls from high school who complete my trips home for the holidays my best friends. I call my boyfriend my best friend. I call at least eight people from school my best friends. And the thing is, I’m not being disingenuous when I call any of them my best friend.

Of course, there are some people who know more about me than others. There are those three best friends to whom I go first when tragedy strikes, and the wise-beyond-her-years best friend I ask if I need relationship advice. There are the two best friends who I know will always listen to my rants about how much society sucks sometimes, and the best friend who shares my struggles with mental illness and will always understand. There are the two best friends also in long distance relationships, who will lament with me the near-universal joys and woes.

I will stand by the position that a person is allowed to have more than one best friend. I have many. Too many, some might say, while stubbornly pushing the argument that the word “best” implies only one. You wouldn’t call the silver medal recipient in the Olympics the best athlete — the best athlete receives a gold medal. And I’m here to tell you that friendship is not a bi-yearly display of the world’s best athletes doing athletic things. Friendship is much more nuanced than that.

I am lucky enough to be surrounded by only the most excellent of people in my life. But it wasn’t always like that: in middle school, I only had one best friend (who is still one of my best friends now) and I liked it that why. Why would I need any other friends when I have one best friend?

Well, first of all, I was categorically the worst in middle school: one of those pretentious kids who thought she liked bad pop-punk music before everyone else did and pushed her nose up at any mention of Justin Bieber or The Jonas Brothers. I thought of myself as smarter than everyone, and I couldn’t wait to get to college at Columbia University so that I could finally prove to everyone how much better I was than they were.

Obviously, that didn’t work out. At 20 years old, I proudly sing along to “Sorry” and “What Do You Mean?” whenever they come on the radio, and I go to only the fourth-best school in the greater Boston area. I’ve loosened up a bit, to the point that middle school me would probably scoff at who I’ve become, but it’s for the best. Somewhere along the way, I realized that no one person is going to be able to give you everything you need.

It was a tough thing to figure out. First of all, I am a real, disgusting romantic, which you probably realized if you read my last, disgustingly romantic column. At some point in sophomore year of high school, when I had a tight-knit group of best friends but had never even made out with a boy before, I realized that romantic love was not the cure-all, end-all, be-all of relationships. I had previously, through the help of movies, television and too much listening to Taylor Swift’s album “Fearless,” thought that it was. But strong female friendships helped me definitively realize it wasn’t.

Sophomore year was also when I started starving myself like it was my job, which was probably very frustrating for my newfound tight-knit friend group. One of my best friends told me a story years later in which I left a sleepover early, and all of my friends stayed up and tearfully shared how worried they were about me. Watching me during sophomore and junior year was gut-wrenching. It was wondering whether or not someone you loved was going to wake up the next day, every single day. I credit so much of my recovery to my best friends.

During those two years, there was the best friend who was the best listener I’d ever vented to. There was the best friend who had stuck with me through the worst of my physical illnesses, and also now the worst of the mental. There was the best friend who shared with me that she, too, was struggling with the same thing I was. No one person could have given me all of those things.

In the television show “The Mindy Project,” main character Mindy Lahiri, played by one of my favorite people on this earth, Mindy Kaling, famously proclaimed “a best friend isn’t a person … it’s a tier.” Ever since watching that scene, I’ve kept the phrase in my back pocket for if anyone ever asks me why I have so many best friends.

However, I do not use the phrase lightly: it takes more than just sharing one conversation for me to call someone my best friend. But if I call you my best friend, I mean it. Along with the 13 other people I call my best friend, too.