How to turn casual friends into close friends

When Sam Dylan Finch was in his early 20s, he had the friend group he thought he always wanted. “We had holiday dinners, and game nights, and it felt really lovely,” he said.

But then, some dating within the friend group and then a death in the circle split them apart. People split up and chose who they wanted to stay friends with, Finch said, “and I was not the chosen friend.” 

The whole experience sent Finch into “hermit mode,” where he began intensely analyzing his friendships and their patterns. He realized certain tendencies: He struggled to prioritize friendships the same way he prioritized romantic prospects, he was a people pleaser who felt he always had to earn people’s kindness, and he often sought friendships with people who were not emotionally available to him. And he would feel nervous when people were kind to him right off the bat — “It didn’t feel earned, and I didn’t feel like I deserved it.”

Realizing his patterns, Finch was determined to break them. He wanted to start intentionally cultivating friendships with the people who were kind, whose interactions left him feeling safe and nourished. He started by making a list of everyone in his orbit, from current friends to old friends, coworkers, and acquaintances. Then, in his phone contacts, “I challenged myself to put a strawberry emoji next to the people who were really kind to me,” he said. “The kind of warmth and kindness that made me nervous.” 

This handful of “strawberry people” became Finch’s priority friends, and he even told some of them about his intentions to cultivate their friendship. He also put seedling emojis next to the names of people who challenged his ways of thinking and helped him grow.

“It completely changed my life,” said Finch. Clearly marking where he would channel his energy gave him a roadmap to building more purposeful relationships. Previously, he would get easily overwhelmed by text messages, opting to respond to no one. But now, if a text from a strawberry person popped up on this phone, the emoji acted as a reminder to Finch that he values this friendship and should try to respond without too much delay, even if he was tired.

The practice also made Finch more mindful about how interactions with others really made him feel. After hanging out, he made a practice of asking himself “how did that feel?” or “how did that feel in my body?” He noticed times when he was tense versus relaxed and nourished versus drained and made sure his strawberry people were those who left him feeling the former. 

A strategy for everyone

Inspired by the impact this little change made in his life, Finch posted about the strawberry people strategy in a thread on X, which is likely where social psychologist Devon Price heard about it. Price included the strategy in their book Unmasking Autism, which was where psychotherapist Michaia Walker heard about it. 

Walker, who practices virtually from their home in New York City, began talking about the strategy with clients earlier this year. “It’s really similar to a concept of ‘safe people’ that we often use with folks with neurodivergence,” they say. People with autism are often encouraged to find “safe” friends who they can let their guards down around and not worry about being themselves, said Walker, and the strawberry people method can be super helpful for keeping track of those people.

In times of crisis, or in moments when you need to find a person to lean on, most people reflexively turn to family members or the friends they see most often, Walker said. But those might not actually be the people who can best support you emotionally. Attaching a strawberry emoji to the friends with whom you feel emotional intimacy provides a good visual reminder and mental shortcut, Walker said.

Walker said that this strategy could be really helpful for anybody looking for ways to track and maintain emotionally close friendships, whether you’re neurodivergent or not. And you can make it your own. If you wanted to differentiate your strawberry people a little more, you could, for example, “put a strawberry and a suitcase for work friends, and then a strawberry and a flower for regular friends,” they say. 

You could choose a different meaning of the strawberry, or a different emoji, based on the aspect of friendship you’re trying to focus on. You could even teach this method to kids to help them learn from a young age what a healthy and emotionally safe friendship is supposed to feel like, said Walker.

How to make this work for you  

If you’re interested in implementing this strategy, Walker recommends starting small, with just three to five strawberry people at first. If you’re not used to actively cultivating friendships, having more than a few strawberry friends can be overwhelming. But depending on your capacity and what you want out of your social life, “you can build up to 10 or more,” Walker said.

Their suggestions align well with psychologists’ understanding of our social bandwidths. Given our own limited tanks of social and emotional energy, no one is capable of maintaining huge numbers of close friends. In fact, the evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar has posited that we only have the capacity to maintain three to five very close friendships at a time, though his research suggests we can have up to 15 “best” friends (your main social circle and the friends you might turn to for favors like child care) and 50 “good” friends (your “big-weekend-barbecue people,” as Dunbar has described them). 

Once you have your designated strawberry people, decide what purposefully building a friendship means to you. Do you want to check in regularly with them? Or are these simply the friends who you’ll always respond to in a timely manner? Clearly outlining how your treatment of these friendships will differ from others will help crystallize the meaning of the strawberry.

Finch, who uses this strategy to this day, said he’s found the strawberry people method most impactful when you tell your friends what you’re doing. You don’t necessarily have to say “you’re one of my strawberry people,” he said — “that requires more explanation than is actually necessary” — but it can be nice to voice to them that you want to be intentional about cultivating your friendship. 

“The meta conversation, the conversation about the relationship, is normalized in romance and not enough in friendship,” said Finch. But that conversation can be so powerful because, unless you tell them, “it’s difficult for people to know how important they are to you.” Telling someone that you are serious about your friendship can help make sure you’re on the same page and invites them to make this a joint endeavor.

When talking about strawberry people, Finch likes to remind folks that it’s not about ranking your friends or creating some exclusive top tier. “We’re not doing a MySpace Top 8,” he said. Rather, for him, the strawberry emoji is simply an indicator of where he can find kind and fulfilling friendships and a reminder that these are the folks he wants to intentionally build closeness with. 

The strawberry emoji is also not a permanent designation; people can gain or lose strawberry emojis or seedling emojis over time. “I think of it like tending a garden,” Finch said.