Friendship

We had the occasion to spend an evening with some dear friends, and I reflected on what constitutes a friend. We have many acquaintances. We have co-workers that we are friendly with. We associate with folks with whom we share a common interest, and we might deem all of these friends. Yet some relationships that we have had the good fortune to make seem to be a degree closer; some immeasurable quantity finer.

I remember observing my children and watching them form friendships. As 4 year olds, they had no fear in sharing with a peer and, the formation of a friendship seemed instantaneous. They would come home from kindergarten telling us about their new friend that they had just met, and while they might have some playmates that they preferred over others, they seemed to be a friend to everyone in their class.

As they grew, their friendships became a rarer quantity. There were friends they would play with after school, those they might have on the same sports team, friends in the same Sunday School class, and those that just lived in the neighborhood. As parents, we also began to spot the kids who were not friends; the bullies and those who would only talk to our children when there was no one around who was a more desirable associate.

We would occasionally find our children sad or even crying over the real or imagined affront from a friend. As their wounded hearts and feelings healed, they were, perhaps, more reluctant to enter into friendships for fear of being hurt by someone they trusted.

Teenage years were full of the cliques of the cool kids whose self-importance seemed to center more around whom they could exclude from their groups than the common interests the members of the groups might hold. At times, the gossip and the put-downs that were inflicted on the vulnerable caused wounds that were as real, and at least as painful, as if they had been physical ones. Maybe the common interest they shared was in whom could they belittle or shame or insult or hold themselves forth as superior to.  

That isn’t to say that teenagers weren’t friendly to each other. As an outside observer, the cliques weren’t always exclusive. Many times they just weren’t inclusive enough to welcome others into a group and thereby hurt the tender adolescent feelings of those around them through their virtual exclusion. Kids on the same sports team or in the same drama production or even in the same class in school might still be seen as friends, but not as close friends, and a social interaction in one group didn’t translate into the invitation to join another.

I’ve witnessed a group of girls in a Sunday School class talking among themselves with a new girl sitting among them, completely ignored. Any one of the girls could have easily introduced herself to the new girl and welcomed her into the group, but by mutual consent they failed to do so in what should be one of the most welcoming of associations. I don’t believe the girls would have thought of themselves as being rude, but were not willing to take the non-existent risk of inclusion. What might any of the other girls in the class have thought if one had made the invitation?

These situations have almost completely neglected the neurosis-inducing complexity of boy-girl relationships. Intersex pairings can create a cause for purposeful exclusion of individuals from one group or another as jealousy and competition for attention are introduced into the relationship game. The human insecurities we all share translate into the creation of enemies and frenemies where they need never exist.

We prefer to think that, as adults, we have matured beyond the seemingly petty insecurities of the teen years, but it is not universally so. I have seen workplace drama whose participants would feel right at home in the cliques of high school. It does appear that as we enter into the 3^rd and 4^th decades of life, that interpersonal cruelty becomes much less common. Perhaps the experience of living through those years has allowed us to see beyond the folly of treating others as less than ourselves.

 I believe we do see past the folly, but that we do so at the cost of forming close friendships. There are many that I count as friends that I would be willing to help, and who would unreservedly help me were the need to arise, and yet they are not ones I would comfortably share my hopes and dreams with.

In that group I count my spouse, my children, and only a few others. I might define the others as friends that, though I haven’t seen them for years, our closeness endures as though no interval existed.