What defines a friend? Two actual friends have asked me recently and it’s a question that, rightly, we agonise over from a young age.
Remember being stood around in the playground asking if someone was friends with so and so and deciding that because so and so was friends with so and so, we were not going to be friends anymore? I hope you do remember this; otherwise I had an abnormally and prematurely political childhood.
I zoned out of the whole thing at some point, realised that keeping up with who was friends with who was too much and decided to avoid cliques for life. This way, I avoided the problem of having to be ‘friends’ with people who, quite honestly, I disliked. Instead of one group of friends, I had individual people who didn’t necessarily have anything else in common.
Affiliations are CRITICAL to being a human. The way that we view friendship is, perhaps, one of the most defining features of our entire life. Friends can be arms-length or close-up, happy go lucky or natural cynics. They just are…
Friends give us a reference point to measure our own thoughts. When we are engulfed by self-doubt and uncertainty, we hope that we can turn to people we call friends to listen sympathetically and come up with either a solution or, at the very least, back up our confirmation bias.
Friendship Essentials.
That brings me to the burning question: What is a friend? I’ve formed my own definition of this and rather arrogantly share it with all and sundry because it’s simple and it works. In my view, friends have to fulfil two requirements:
- They are interested in you (in that they actually think about you).
- They care about you.
- (They like you?)
I put 3. in brackets because I’m not sure that all my friends like me and I definitely don’t like them all of the time. One and two are it for me. As long as people are interested enough to think about me and that’s in a good way, I see them as friends, somewhere along a continuum. That is all I expect of people. I don’t expect availability or shows of friendship outside that.
Yet others go through a tortuous system of expectation of people doing this and that, siding with them on issues and bending to their will. All of which is somehow steeped with emotional expectation when it should be just effortless. In authentic friendships you shouldn’t have to be looking out for this stuff.
This brings me to my next revelation about friendship: a lot of it is transactional. Tit for tat. You scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours etc. Of course there is an element of friends helping each other out and reciprocating, even if it is just by being good company, but recently I’ve seen this morph into direct trades masquerading as ‘friendship. Actually, something happened that made me recoil and think about this sordid side of friendship and share it with you.
I asked a ‘friend’ of mine if I could borrow a saw, so that I could rebuild a window sill. He responded with directly telling me that I had to do his garden for him because he always made sure he got something in return. I then remembered how his idea of a great night out was getting free meals and drinks from people. When I questioned his policy he got aggressive. I decided to cut him out of my life then and there. Unpleasant man.
Transactional friendship is the sort of thing you see in play at networking events, at work and (in some cases) in online communities. The whole point is to get something in exchange. This has been going on for ever; the big difference is that with social media, friendship and potential for material gain have morphed as people become more and more okay with ‘likes for likes’ and other transactional bargaining ploys.
It’s so confusing. Just as you convince yourself that you ‘know who your friends are’ – someone proves you wrong and each time, perhaps a little faith in humanity if eroded. Today, we should be aware of the flexible interpretation of friendship. Genuine friendship is such a complex area that I’m stopping this post here and I’ll be back with more insight about friendship after talking things over with friends.
Keep in touch!