On The Quality, Cultivation & Sustenance of Friendship

“If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.”
E. M. Forster 

I've been thinking a lot about friendship recently, especially close friendship. Close friendship is one of the most wonderful of earthly qualities – alongside romantic love and familial bonds, it is the third part of the trinity of essential inter-relational human connections. A great friend acts like a mirror into our soul - through them our world becomes even more interesting and rewarding, and we can see more clearly inside ourselves and become better than we would have been without them. I'd say there are six key elements to a great friendship; you need mutual effort, you need trust, you need honesty, you need dependability, you need solicitude and you need truth.

Mutual effort: You both need to make the effort to sustain the friendship at a high level - you have to take an interest in each other, and that interest has to be two ways.

Trust: You must be able to trust each other; with your secrets and your lives if necessary.

Honesty: You should know each other deeply, openly and sincerely enough to be yourself, and not be unfairly judged.

Dependability: You need to be there for each other through thick and thin, be reliable, and be willing to take the weight of your friend when you are needed.

Solicitude: Like above, you should both care deeply about each other, where putting your friend’s needs first (when appropriate) doesn’t feel like a cost.

Truth: You need your combined realities to be anchored in truth, so you can be the truest version of yourselves with each other, otherwise the rest of the qualities remain filtered and suppressed.

It’s great to have lots of friends in a wide and diverse circle, but I don’t think we need dozens of very close friends – around five is sufficient. It’s difficult to feed and sustain any more than about five or six high quality, close affinity friendships. In fact, to nourish the most important and mutually beneficial friendships, you have to guard against expending too many emotional and intellectual resources on friendships that are only superficially of a good quality, or on friendships that have (often for good reason) undergone a natural declension over time. Three things can expose a friendship as being shallower than you envisaged:

1} When you wake up one day and it dawns on you that the friendship is largely being sustained by your efforts (to make contact, to take an interest, to initiate social contact, you’re the only listener in a one-way conversation, etc)

2} When something difficult happens in your life, and all your fair-weather friends disappear, or fail to do the right thing in standing up with you against suffering, an injustice or in opposition to poor treatment.

3} When certain friendships exist not in a high quality 121 capacity, but merely as part of a larger social circle. Sometimes you just realise about a person that there is an inverse correlation between the quality of friendship between you and x, and the number of other friends in the circle that contains you and x. 

It’s absolutely essential that close friendships must be two-way – you must give your all in caring about each other, and being there for each other. But you must be capable enough to not burden a friend with an over-abundance of issues – especially issues it behoves you to address more competently yourself. A highly unsymmetrical friendship is burdensome for the person carrying the bigger weight. You ought to find you're giving about as much as you're receiving. That’s why the relationship between a psychologist and patient is quite unlike friendship – it can never satisfy the deepest needs for both parties, because therein lies the lack of reciprocity.

A friend who chooses you for the sake of utility is dodgy - which can be a tricky assessment to make, because we all have utility in friendships. Therefore, I suggest a good way to measure a healthy level of utility is to determine to what extent your friend is interested in you, in the core essence of you. Those that are, you’ll know – you’ll really know. Those who are with you only for the superficial rewards can very easily be without you when the rewards dry up, or when they find bigger rewards elsewhere. High quality friends don’t do this, because from the start they are in it for more than rewards.

It's interesting too how, for most things we achieve in life, we require patient searching and probing – but in the best friendships, the strong depth of connection is largely unsought. We don’t have to artificially over-indulge our exploratory efforts in order for the greatest friendships to blossom - fantastic friends are like two jigsaw pieces that fit neatly into the same puzzle. That is one of the senses in which friendship and love with a beloved differ. And those differences can be subtle, and not as obvious as you think, because in friendship there is also love. If you created a Venn diagram, the intersecting circle that contains the qualities that pertain to both friends and beloveds would take up the majority of the diagram. Friendships don’t have the Eros type of love, but they have philia, pragma and agape.

Another big practical difference between friendship and relationship with a beloved is that relationships are built on continually seeing each other, whereas friendships can stay stronger for longer without regular contact. The qualities of friendship can be magnified in absence in a way that the qualities of love will not be. An absence of your beloved is going to frustrate and starve the organism of oxygen. Given that friendship is absent of Eros, it lacks some of the pleasure-seeking sensations that marriage does, and could be argued to have a virtue that even marital love doesn’t have. However, that thought can be subdued by the notion that within the intimate relationship with your beloved there should exist a depth of friendship unequalled in any other external friendship.

Another strange and unique thing about friendship is that it requires active involvement between both agents to sustain its very existence, in a way that most other relationships or connections do not. You can buy a precious gemstone from a jeweller you’ve never met; you can admire someone famous who is never likely to meet you and know that admiration; you may have a father who knows nothing of your existence; you may even have the deepest unrequited love for someone who has no awareness of such a powerful feeling. But friendship is different – one can’t have a friendship unless both parties are actively involved in building and sustaining the organism.

Finally, an amusing thought on which to end. If you're new to a city, and you're looking to make new friends, you have the following hurdle to negotiate. The best people to be good friends with are likely to be the smartest, wittiest, kindest and most generous-hearted people you could get to know. But the smartest, wittiest, kindest and most generous-hearted people are likely to be the busiest, most popular and most in-demand people too. The best chance of breaking in is if you happen to be even smarter, wittier, kinder and more generous-hearted than the smartest, wittiest, kindest and most generous-hearted people you could get to know.