It’s easy to become anxious about our friendships, especially when we see seemingly perfect girl gangs and ride-or-dies in our favourite films or plastered across social media. Interestingly, research has found we all subscribe to different friendship styles that determine things like the size of our friendship groups and how often we see our friends.

A study of 2,000 people by researchers at the University of Heidelberg in Germany found that people fell into different styles depending on how much they valued things like emotional closeness and socialising. “How people spend their time in friendship is largely down to values and looking at what your role models at a young age taught you about friendship,” says Elman. “It means that each person has different priorities in friendship and different ways of approaching them.”

It’s also true that our friendship style can change over our lifetime. “The philosopher Aristotle developed an interesting framework for the friendships we encounter at different stages in life,” says Dr Sarah Jane Khalid, a psychologist and life coach.

Aristotle outlined three kinds of friendship: friendships of utility – transactional connections based on mutual benefit; friendships of pleasure – friends you share good times with but don’t connect with on an emotional level; and perfect friendships – the highest form of friendship where we have shared respect, admiration and commitment to each other’s wellbeing.

“Different friendship styles may find their friendship circle holds more of one kind of friend than another,” says Dr Khalid. “We might find we move between different styles at different times, prioritising pleasure friendships when we’re young and perfect friendships when we’re older, for example.”

Are you a ‘collector’ or a ‘free spirit’? How to understand your friendship style