What makes a Friend? Rhetorical question, you might say. Everyone knows that a Friend is someone who is there for you when you need him or her. But if it’s really so simple, why does it seem so complicated to make new friends? Why does it require so much effort to keep your friends? Why do we see friendships drift away or evaporate? How can we feel a strong connection with someone we just met, without asking for anything in return? How can we talk to a Friend we haven’t seen in many years and feel like it’s only been days. I don’t have any universal truth to offer, only a few thoughts to share, based on the oh-so-extensive life experience of a 36-year old male who was moving to a new town every 1 or 2 years as a kid, and who as an adult chose to expatriate himself and live 5,500 miles away from his birth country. This makes me an expert on friendships… or at least on how to lose them.
If friendship is based on helping each other out, we should make friends mostly in time of need. But I can’t remember any example of friendship being created that way. For sure a relationship grows stronger in such sad times when a friend is supportive, but friendship does not seem to be created this way. The friend as the ‘helper in time of need’ now seems like a cliché.
There must be something else that sparks the friendship. Here is another widespread belief: friends have a lot in common. In the world of social media, computer algorithms can suggest which people would be good friends for you: aren’t you bound to get along if you like the same books, movies, TV shows, and you are both into hiking, traveling, and drinking Margaritas on the beach? This seems so obviously right in my head and yet it feels so wrong in my heart. Why would you want a carbon copy of yourself as a friend? This seems like a sure path to avoiding new experiences and beliefs. There is another name for this: death of the soul. A friend is someone who can show me his own perspective on the world and enrich my universe. Well that’s helpful: I have about 6.7 billion potential friends. Who do I call first? Wait a minute: a friend should also respect my own perspective of the world, so this reduces the list a lot. Only 2 billion left, we are making progress.
I have a different theory to offer: a Friend is a person who sees me for what I am, without judging me, without trying to change me. Around a Friend I can be myself because there are no expectations of what I should be, how I should behave, what I should say or do. Around a Friend, the words “should” does not exist. We connect at a different level – call it the soul? This connection cannot be explained or intellectualized: it can only be lived. You just know when you experience it. That is how you can talk to an old Friend for the first time in many years, and feel that your connection is just as strong as it was then. As if you two had not changed… but the truth is that you both have changed. We all keep changing, that is the nature of life. However our connection to each other can remain the same if it is based on a total acceptance of each other. Time elapsed doesn’t matter, nor do things that happened to either of us. What matters is the present. That is where friendship lives.
Such a friendship is so pure and delicate that it can easily be broken. The moment a Friend believes that you should behave in a certain way, this deep connection is gone: judgment and expectations take over. Your Friend’s focus has shifted from accepting you to expecting a certain idea of you that is no longer you. When this happens your Friend doesn’t see your true essence anymore: you become in his or her eyes the sum of your past experiences, a predictable creature. “That’s how Cedric is, I’ve known him for so long”: death of a friendship. I am not defined by my past; I only exist in the present. I must be true to myself, and I cannot let anyone else define me, even with good intentions, even based on who I once was.
If friendship is killed by expectations, then calling someone your ‘Friend’ or your ‘best Friend’ could destroy the pure and fragile connection you just labeled so innocently. Friendship is like silence: speak its name and it is no longer here. But we all love labels, and society puts pressure on us to label and classify everything around us, especially people. So we call them our friends, and with this word we put on their shoulders the weight of our expectations. Now that we are friends they should be there for us when we need them. They may have to do things for us in the name of our friendship, even if they do not want to. Now they have to act consistently with how they used to act, be the same person we’ve befriended. Their soul dies, they stop being a genuine human being – constantly evolving – and they start being who they are expected to be. How ironic that someone calling you ‘Friend’ could be asking you to betray yourself.
‘If you love somebody set them free’ goes the song. Maybe the way to keep our friends is to set them free. Free of expectations, labels and judgments. Free to be seen for what they are, not for what they once were. Free to be true to themselves.
Cedric, 4/10/2011
with special thanks to RevZo for her spiritual guidance
Wonderful!!