I Just Want To Have Friends, like The Four Loves, is a form of Wish Fulfillment answering to the desire that some members of the audience have to form many close friendships. A probable reason this is so common in fictional media is the fact that a high amount of people consider themselves to have very few or no friends at all. As this is not limited to real life however, many fictional shy people and those with few or no friends look for the same fulfillment as the reader, leading to two variants of this trope: In Real Life, this trope is defined psychologically as the "need to belong".