Growing up, iconic girl groups from my favorite television shows—like Sex and the City’s Charlotte, Samantha, Carrie, and Miranda—shaped how I thought friendship should look. Sometimes, I wanted to be Carrie, who felt the closeness and security of a tight-knit group, but other times I wanted to be more like Stanford, who could come and go as he pleased, exploring different parts of himself with varying posses.
In today’s terminology, Stanford would be considered a “floater friend.” This type of person has “many acquaintances and friends, but [is] not part of a core group,” says Hope Kelaher, LCSW, a New York City-based therapist and the author of Here To Make Friends: How To Make Friends As An Adult. While social butterflies have flitted and fluttered from group to group for decades, it’s only in recent years that a dedicated term for this type of friend has emerged. The term “social floater”first popped up on Urban Dictionary in 2020, followed by “floater friend”gaining its own definition on the site in 2023. And thanks to social media apps like TikTok, the term has gained even more traction online over the last year. Today, there are dozens of videos by online creators sharing their experiences as floater friends.
When I first came across the term “floater friend” in college, I wondered where I fit on that spectrum; I had friends from varying school organizations and walks of life, but still felt most at ease in one main “group.” It was my default friendship setting—something familiar and comfortable I always came back to, even as I envied those who seemed to dip in and out of different gatherings seamlessly. Now, the instability that comes standard with navigating my early 20s has led me to embrace what it’s like to “float around.” I’m living in a city hundreds of miles away from my closest college friends, which means I’m basically on my own to figure out what kind of adult I want to be. Naturally, socializing with different friend groups and exploring new activities is part of that self-discovery process.
