Friendship

Friendship is a mysterious thing.  Sometimes it just sneaks up on you.  Sometimes it’s born out of the smoldering fires of antipathy.  And sometimes it just disappears.

We’ve all had the experience of “like at first sight.”  Some people are naturally attractive to us in the friendship kind of way, as if they were soulmates from some prior bout with existence, happily rediscovered.  (This theory was really big in the late Nineteenth Century.)  But sometimes you really don’t like your friends-to-be at first.  In fact, some people who wind up becoming very good friends start off trying to wring each other’s necks.

Of course, just because you like someone doesn’t mean they’re going to turn out to be your friend.  Sometimes you encounter someone whom you like immediately, want to spend time with, and are sure would be a great friend.  They may even indicate that they feel the same way about you.  But it never really happens, because one or the other of you is just visiting, or is about to move away, or is somebody else’s husband or wife and they don’t like you.

Friendships, like marriages, are often over long before they are ended.  People fall out of friendship just like they fall out of love.  Plus, friendships sometimes wither because of factors beyond the control of the friends themselves, for example when it is necessary for one friend to relocate thousands of miles away.  Children are particularly vulnerable to losing friends this way, because they are in the thrall of adults and don’t usually even get a vote.  But it can happen to adults, too, especially those in the thrall of giant corporations where one must move around to every obscure city in the Heartland (or, these days, Asia)  in order to struggle up the corporate ladder.

Of course, “friendship” is a term subject to interpretation.  Deep down inside, we all know that most of our “friends” are really just “acquaintances,” people we know situationally, like “work friends,” or people with whom we hang out through sheer force of habit  (like more “old friends” than anyone will ever admit.)  Sometimes “acquaintances” can evolve into true “friends,” and sadly the reverse is also true: “friends” can devolve into “acquaintances,” or even simple “pests.”

One can be extremely social, amass a myriad so-called “friends,” and be the loneliest person on earth.  You can “friend” a lot of people on Facebook or keep up a busy social calendar, or bounce from one group activity or social event to the next, without ever spending five minutes of actual one-on-one conversation with anyone in the crowd.  You can be acquainted with someone for years and years, and yet know almost nothing about them.  Mostly, these people, just like you, are only hanging for the company and the noise that keeps them from having to listen to the voices in their own heads.
 

Take a minute and think about it.  Which of your “friends” are irreplaceable?  In fact, aren’t most of your “friends” already replacements for other now-departed “friends”?

Show business “celebrities” talk of almost everyone as their “very good friend.”  Well, come on, it’s a tough business and you never know when you might need somebody’s “friendship.”  But could it possibly be true that someone could have thousands of “really good friends?”  I guess that would depend upon your definition of a “really good friend.”  In Hollywood, the definition has to be pretty loose.  And what about all those smiling diplomats on the news?  I guess that Sly Stone was right:  “Smilin’ faces sometimes pretend to be your friend.”

Which brings us to the subject of “frenemies.”  For various reasons, people sometimes choose to hang out with those they hate.  High school and workplace social hierarchies being what they are, I guess folks sometimes feel they have no choice.  So they paste a shit-eating grin on their carefully plucked and made-up faces and wait for a chance to watch from a front-row seat as their “beloved pal”  gets what they pray is his or her inevitable comeuppance.

A somewhat related scenario occurs with romantic breakups, when one or the other erstwhile partner makes the almost obligatory request to “still be friends.”  Many of these people were never friends to begin with, of course, and in such scenarios the suggestion is just a bad joke.  And if they were friends before they became lovers, becoming lovers probably spoiled the friendship for good.  But sometimes lovers are also friends , and when they are the friendship can sometimes survive the breakup.  This, however, is very rare and mostly happens when the breakup is for larger-than-life reasons, e.g., the breaker-upper woke one morning to realize that he or she was gay all along, or the broken-up-with partner was kidnapped by aliens and presumed dead after seven years.

But all of these observations don’t really get us very close to understanding what a friend is.  If you want to understand that, you have to look at the very rarest category of friend, the “lifelong friend.”  Of course, there are “lifelong acquaintances,” too, but it’s pretty easy to tell the categories apart.  “Lifelong friends” are the ones whom you’re still glad to see when you run into them.

Over the course of twenty years or more, probably the minimum threshold for “lifelong friend” candidacy,  people who have been “friends” all that time will have had their ups and downs, they will have had fights and disagreements and troubles of various sorts in addition to all the rollicking good times.  And if they have remained friends through all of that adversity, they’re probably real friends.

A real friend will lend you money, if you really need it and he or she has got it… at least until the first time that you don’t pay him or her back as agreed.  A real friend will drive you someplace if you ask them, and will agree to be a godparent to your obnoxious child.  A real friend will take your part against the world… but will also tell you if you’re acting like an asshole.  A real friend won’t always tell you the truth, but will have a plausible reason for lying when he or she does.  A real friend will be sorry when you move away or die.

When all is said and done, there is still that mystical, mysterious element to “friendship” for which we really don’t have a good explanation.  (I’d say “pheromones,” but that’s already being used to explain sexual attraction.)  All the above-referenced observations may tell you who is actually your friend, but are they really sufficient to explain why?  Maybe the reincarnation thing has something to it, and it really does take several lifetimes to work up a friendship, just like those Victorian romance writers thought.  But one thing is sure: if you have identified a true friend In your life, or maybe even a few of them, you are fortunate and you should treat the friendship with the respect it deserves.