Hello Besties, how are you doing? Oh wait… Why am I calling everyone my besties? Because… it’s the trend! Yes, you heard that right.

Growing up and in school, I had to determine much about whom to call my bestie. Whether they consider me their best friend too? That was a pre-requisite. Cut to 2023, when social media has become everyone’s alternate best friend and every stranger on here is now their bestie. My concern is how we dilute the essence of something by overusing and turning it into slang. 

To give a little context, using bestie as a greeting started on Tik Tok, a social media platform where the sound ‘Bestie Vibes Only’ got more than 80,000 videos. It barely takes a moment to change the medium from TikTok to Instagram. First, users started commenting, referring to strangers as besties, and then the rest followed. So now we have creators calling their followers besties and influencing others to do the same. At some point, ‘bestie’ even became a signal of friend-zoning. On the internet, we are all each other’s besties? Off the internet, we think, ‘can I cry in front of my ‘real’ best friend?’

Bestie is, after all, just a shortened form of a best friend. But why does it irk me so much? Because as you go and grow through life, you start understanding who your true friends are. Someone whom you chose in school to distribute chocolates with on your birthday is probably not even in touch with you. Today, can we even give one or more than one person the superlative of being the best when it comes to friendship? Few are lucky to have a different set of best friends, while others rely on their 150-7000 followers as besties. It is just a form of affection; what’s the harm? 

Do You Have a Bestie? 

In today’s age, we are consciously aware of red flags, lousy behaviour, problematic thinking, generational trauma, and objectifying mentality in a person. How many of you know a friend with at least one of these aspects? How are we then deciding on our best friends? Are we improving them, or are we trying to bring in a change among ourselves? 

The internet will give you a set definition of a best friend, but as you experience situations, the implicated meaning will keep changing. 

For example, do you have five best friends you can tell everything about or just two who know what you are going through? Why do you choose the two to share and make sense of or mean something to you and then share tidbits with the others? Why?

Do you have someone you can call in the middle of the night, through every breakthrough and breakdown, and share minor things without hesitation? Someone who can unfold the layers of your thoughts and place them in front of you to pick and choose the good ones and eliminate the negative ones. As we get older, we get entangled in our responsibilities, and the frequency of calls/messages with our best friends reduces. As a result, we genuinely forget to share some things and brush away others for good. 

As of today, with all you have been through, do you have a bestie? Someone who has seen you drunk, probably half-naked, embarrassing yourself, falling for the wrong person, giving you a piece of mind over and over again… Someone who stood by when you lost your pet or cheered when you cleared the exams to go abroad and chase your dreams? There can be a broader spectrum of all these emotions, but to have one person through it all is a blessing of a bestie!

Now the question is, have you been someone’s best friend too? Friendship is, of course, a two-way street. Have you stood like a rock alongside someone through their growth and downfalls? In friendship, this also has to be done without expectations. 

The internet will forget about besties when there is a new word around the corner. The 700 followers on your profile are only doing it for engagement. Remember how everyone went LOL and now it simply means nothing at all without even a hint of laughter. Language is always at the behest of slang. We are soon going to do that to besties. No biggie, as long as we remember who our absolute besties are. 

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