LESSWRONG
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by Lalit Shankar Chowdhury
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[-]Lalit Shankar Chowdhury30

Over time I have learnt to classify people I know into three distinct categories:

  • Close friends: Childhood friends or a core group of friends from school/college. Low maintenance so we could catch up anytime and resume like we never separated. Or someone I can talk to about any random shit that’s happening.
  • Friendly acquaintances: Mutual friends or classmates I enjoy talking to in class but never out of it. We have our own core set of friends that do not overlap. Potential to be friends but we would have to go out of our way to water the friendship.
  • Acquaintances: Hostel mates or roommate or classmates. People who I can talk to for a while but we don’t have much in common to be friends.
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[-]Viliam20

I find it difficult to make distinct categories, but there seem to be two dimensions along which to classify relations:

  1. How intense is the relation / how much we "click" emotionally and intellectually.
  2. Whether the relation is expected to survive the change of current context.

(Even this is not a clear distinction, because "my relatives" is kinda contextual, but the context is there forever.)

Mapping to your system: close friends = high intensity context independent; friendly acquaintances = high intensity contextual; acquaintances = low intensity contextual.

One quadrant seems to be missing, but maybe that makes sense: if the relation is low intensity, why would people bother to keep it outside of the context where it originated.

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