A love letter to friendship

Friends: why they deserve more – Part 2

When I am gone, either to death or to live at the edge of the Arctic Circle, it is my friends who will remember me as I am. And more than that, wherever I go, I know they will be happy for me.

I also know that most would rather join me in the beyond than in the tundra.

Last week I missed something important in pontificating about the importance of friendship – the why of friends.

It’s easy and ostensibly big-hearted to say you don’t know why someone is your friend.

“I just like him/her/it,” you say. (Nothing wrong with having an “it” friend. Judge not.)

Your friend should be offended. Your friend should defriend you.

You don’t have one good thing to say about them? Not one thing you esteem?

Last week I also promised not to mention Aristotle, but there is something to the whole appreciation-of-fine-qualities schtick that still makes sense today.

We may have many relationships Ari would describe as accidental friendships: the ones of mutual benefit, such as with business colleagues; or those of pleasure, in which at some point we happen to enjoy the same things as some other people, like being on a football team together.

But the friendship Aristotle found most desirable and sustainable was the intentional kind. It is based on admiration for the innate qualities of the person. This is a growable, foreverable kind of connection. It ages well as you get older, spend more time together, share more.

How is this not what most of us are looking for?

A fridge magnet once said to me: a good friend tells you the bad things to your face and the good things to everyone else. If that describes a friend of yours, what you have there is honesty and admiration.

Don’t undervalue their honesty, but do learn the difference between there’s-spinach-in-your-teeth and must-you-always-be-so-serious?

One is telling you the thing no one else wants to say for fear of embarrassing you; the other is squashing something intrinsic to you that happens not to square with what they want at the time.

Truth in friendship is like truth in advertising: as rare and as slippery. But when we find the real thing it grounds us and holds up reality. Some of us spend years in therapy looking for that.

Good friends can give us that because of years of trust. If we are lucky enough to acquire new friends, they can show us ways we’ve changed when we weren’t looking.

With old friends we can look at our pasts and paths, and reconnect with old joys and coping mechanisms we forgot along the way.

And reconnecting the often scattered parts of our lives is important because we are not only who we are now. No matter how much living in the moment is achieved, we are the whole line from the distant past to what we imagine as our future.

Trust and truth are big, but they are not the only things that friendship has in common with our therapy goals.

Having good friends makes us want to be better at being a friend. They inspire us. This thought is getting a bit too Jerry Maguire, but it’s still true. The mistake we keep making is we take the best of us and give it to every other kind of relationship. But not the friendships.

It’s been tough going for my friends. They have had to world-train me. In spite of my family’s best efforts, I know I am largely feral. So, the usual balance of poised-for-attack and hiding-in-the-shrubbery. Like a manicou.

It did not please my friends to spend their time like possums. What to do?

They took me out and made me talk to other humans. They let me stand at the back of the crowd until I got braver and made my way forward, always holding my hand.

And because we all grew up differently, what I have been able to learn from them surpasses anything an anthropology or sociology course could have offered.

I do not know everything about different cultures or religions. My grasp on economics and social work are slim. But acceptance, acceptance I get.

Our friends and a certain amount of tea will take us far. In the end, as in the beginning, all we really wanted was to feel we were safe in someone’s company. That we were safe.

Friendship – working for your better mental health. Contact a friend near you today.