If not our friends then who?
I have few friends. This is not entirely by design. I have always had difficulty creating and maintaining relationships. The few friends I do have are very important to me. This is not an attempt to gain sympathy, but rather stage setting for discussion.
While they are important, this is not to say that the relationship is without conflict and confliction. I do not treat my friendship lightly and do not give it easily or ever really renounce it. There have been very few cases where I’ve drawn the line and killed a friendship. I’ve let many die of their own devices. I am not proud of this, but I am honest. That I do not take friendship for granted is more than just saying it. A relationship is more than words, which is part of the problem.
Part of the reason I have few friends is my own abrasiveness. I pride myself on not saying things about people I would not say to their face (perhaps not word for word, but the content would be the same). But sometimes I don’t know where to draw the line between honesty and frivolous opinion. But truth is truth, right?
If we cannot be truthful about our friends then who can be? If the closeness of a relationship only affords one the ability to lie then is the relationship worth keeping? Anyone can say good things, saying good things is easy. It’s saying the hard things that is, in my opinion, the duty of ones friends. It is unfortunate that the hard things are often the bad things, the mean things, the critical things.
It is easy for me to say these things, because I am naturally judgmental. Judgmental and often holding people to unrealistic expectations of behavior and life (including myself). Lovers and therapists have tried to help me with this little problem for years.
This is something I struggle with every day. Success, and success at any cost is not success. Life is not war and (perhaps more importantly) war is not life.
I have a point.
The point is that as I get older I come to realize that sometimes you have to say something. Sometimes people you care about do things you’d rather they not have done. It’s OK to be angry at them. Sometimes the relationship cannot survive. Sometimes it can. You cannot know until afterwards, and even then sometimes you can’t really know.
But you can hope. And you can be truthful, most of the time. And for me especially, you can forgive and allow
yourself to be forgiven. It’s near the end of the year, and this next year I am going to endevor to be a better friend and a better person. I am going to hope that the costs are not too high.
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Part of the reason I have few friends is my own abrasiveness. I pride myself on not saying things about people I would not say to their face (perhaps not word for word, but the content would be the same). But sometimes I don’t know where to draw the line between honesty and frivolous opinion. But truth is truth, right?
Yes, truth is truth. And some of us out there appreciate when it’s said to us, to our faces. I happen to think it’s one of the author’s most endearing qualities.
That, and he likes “The Simpsons” a lot.
Comment by el jefe — December 26, 2003 @ 10:07 pm
The difficulty in how people regard friendship depends on what is meant by that word. At one time, there was a clear distinction between friends, and what I shall call for lack of a better word “acquaintances,” which these days seems to mean a situation like forced-proximity, adjoining airplane seats, someone you never saw before and expect never to see again.
My view of friendship is the older one. I will be 60 this coming April, and I have had friends in my life to the number five. Two of those are a brother and my wife of 35 years. I have been extremely fortunate particularly in this latter case, as I have had the great good fortune to be married to someone with whom I can actually be friends.
The one who was the friend of my youth, and the closest to me in the old sense of tamquam alter idem (”as if another self”), died in May ‘02, the week I retired from teaching….and recollecting him after reading the original post is what prompted me to write this comment.
He was a friend I somehow intuitively knew could never be replaced, even many years before his death. And the year and a half since he was found dead on his kitchen floor has only served to confirm this opinion in me. He also is the example of the old saying that “You don’t choose your friends, they are chosen for you.” Whether by some cosmic clearing house or some other unfathomable mechanism all the ups, downs, arguments and confrontations over the years were insufficient to ever end it….even though we could not have gone more separate in our ways, and even though the friendship was not what it had been in our salad days. Forty-three years as his friend make me realize the truth of Tennyson’s line from Ulysses, “I am a part of all that I have met.”
I find that the words above are still inadequate to what I mean, and will refer anyone desiring to investigate the phenomenon further to Allan Bloom’s Love and Friendship.
Comment by John Avelis Jr. — December 27, 2003 @ 2:24 pm