What Is Friendship?

 

Give me your answer, fill in a form

Mine for evermore

Will you still need me, will you still feed me

When I'm sixty-four

(When I'm Sixty-Four by The Beatles)

Yesterday in church we were discussing friendship and how to maintain and grow new friendships in the time of COVID. This got me thinking about my own relationship with friends and I made a few realizations about myself. 

• I tend to have friends in real life find/pick me, instead of me going out to find/pick friends. Even going back to school generally it has been the other person who made the first move. Typically it follows a similar path of someone going I see you have been around a lot and you seem like a cool/interesting/creative person we should be friends/we should talk more/tell me more about your story.

• In addition the majority of my friendships are actually unilateral. Many of my friends are fictional characters, inspirational actors or writer, or historical figures who I will never meet in person and who beyond my daydreams will never know I exist. I think part of this is people are often too "people" for me and with these unilateral friendships I have more control over when and how I want to interact. Plus they are available at any time day or night, no matter if I want to process something significant, share something silly and random, or just want to watch the inspiration talk they gave that is up on YouTube over and over again.

• Also many of friendships are context bound. Once someone has moved on/or I have moved on from the context we were friends in they slip into another category. They will remain on my send cards to list, and I will like some of their Facebook posts etc. but our friendship is on another level compared to when we were within the same contextual bubble. And I do not reconnect over those bubble too often. Just because we shared a context 5 or 10 or 15 years ago does not mean we can just pick up where we left off.

Now as Wentworth Miller said in his talk/interview at oxford:

I’ve had friendships (chuckles), I’ve been a good friend to people, and when a friend is in crisis, I know how to be there for them, I know how to hold space that looks like listening, it looks like support, it looks like back and forth, maybe it just looks like a hug, maybe it looks like being silent and just holding their hand. I know how to do that for a friend.

I too have had friendships and have friendships today and I think I am at least pretty decent at being a good friend to others. In some ways I think I may be better at being a good friend to others than accepting others being a good friend to me. I find personally giving to others is easier than accepting from others.  

So going back to the title of this post if you are not clear about what friendship is, it is ok since I am really not sure myself. Instead of pretending I have answers I will leave you with a few questions instead. And if you know a solution beyond "42" please share :) 

• What does friendship mean when it is Unilateral?  Bilateral? Multilateral?
• What people, things, ideas, dreams can be our friends?
• How do we maintain context bound friendships when outside that context?
• How do we balance letting others befriend us and going out to befriend others?
• What can we learn from this time of COVID about friendship?