About friendship
Leonard: You don’t have any friends!
Sheldon: On the contrary. I have 120 friends on Facebook.
Leonard (exasperated): That isn’t real friendship.
Sheldon (surprised): What other kind is there?
(Loosely and probably inaccurately remembered from an episode of ‘The Big Bang Theory’.)
Friendship is one of the connections between people. Other types of connections are those with family members, work colleagues, team-mates, neighbours and companions/comrades.
Friendship is different from each of these, though. Each of those connections is externally-caused. We can’t choose our neighbours, colleagues or family members. Our friends come from one of those groups, because these are the people we come into contact with. Within those pools we choose our friends, or the friendships form up. (The other selected connection is with our sexual partner — or at least I hope it is.)
What makes a colleague into a friend? First, there is that ‘click’ of mutual recognition. The trigger can be a shared sense of humour, or values or interests held in common. You find that you get on well together. In other words, a connection forms up that is above and beyond the circumstances that brought you together. As the friendship grows, there are other clues. One is that your friend’s idiosyncracies don’t bother you too much, while similar traits in other people you meet can drive you up the wall. Another is that there is an ease between you. When you go for a walk together you fall into step with each other. You can pick up on their rhythms. You have a lot to talk about — or are happy to be silent in each other’s company.
An important ingredient is reciprocity. You will be there for them, and you know that they will be there for you in times of difficulty or stress. This quality of being there for another can sometimes be misunderstood in professional situations. People fall for their therapist, or teacher, and mistake the relationship for friendship or something even more. But they aren’t giving anything back to the therapist or teacher that would come within the realm of friendship. A friendship can’t be one-way. It has to be mutual. Otherwise it leads to neediness on one hand and a tricky management problem on the other.
When the circumstances that brought you together come to an end, then you move on. If, while you were living near each other, a friendship built up with your neighbour then the connection will continue. For companions/comrades there is a particular mission, or project that you wanted to see through to fruition. When that task is achieved, the connection may fall away in the absence of anything else to keep you together.
Some friendships last a lifetime, and some come to an end. People change. Our priorities shift as we go through our lives, and erstwhile friends may move in different directions from each other. A curious thing here is that sometimes, when we meet again after years of separation, the friendship can reactivate. Or not.
That’s part of what makes the connections with friends different from those with our life partner. If I am separated from my partner with no communication for more than a day or so, I feel as if I’ve lost a limb. I miss him, and I don’t think I’m unusual in that respect. With some people who I count as good friends, we can be out of contact for months or years, and then pick up the threads when we meet up again, as if the intervening period didn’t exist.
I suspect there is a befriending circuitry within us, which is more present in some than in others. It activates the ability, the proneness to form friendships. An analogy would be the mothering circuitry. I did not have children and don’t spend much time with them, so those circuits didn’t get activated in me. You can see the mothering circuitry at play in some women: a pragmatic and no-nonsense attitude with an undertone of tenderness, care and understanding. There is an episode in ‘The Simpsons’ in which Bart Simpson’s mother is away. He goes to Milhouse’s mother’s kitchen and asks if he can just sit there while she does ‘mom things’. That’s what I mean. (Note: there is also a fathering circuitry which is wonderful to witness, but as I am biologically female I referred to the mothering one. Apologies in advance if this example causes any allergies.)
The befriending circuitry is different. It looks for sympathy, shared values. It looks for what it wants to say ‘yes’ to in another. It’s not confined to a specific friendship or relationship. It is a tendency to look outside oneself, to make connections. Which means that, if you are that way inclined, you will make new friends when your circumstances change. Work on the befriending and the friendships will follow.
I don’t feel lesser than mothers because I haven’t got active mothering circuits. I’m just different. My life is filled with other things. Similarly, some people have a degree of self-containment that means they don’t look for friendships. They don’t need the befriending circuits , and so these don’t get switched on. Which might say that the opposite of friendliness is not loneliness or antipathy. It’s self-containment.
What about long-distance friendships? Can they thrive through the separation of space as they do through time? Is it possible to be friends with someone you only see in a rectangle on a screen? You never eat or drink with them, touch them or smell them. This is an experiment that many of us are participating in. So far, it has upsides and downsides that I can see.
I love the outrageousness of conducting a real-time conversation with someone in New Zealand who has just woken up to a spring morning while I am in an autumn evening in the centre of England. I love what that does to my perception: that we co-exist on a planet with a multiplicity of expressions, and I can experience some of those simultaneously. Also, this technology massively expands the pool of possible people I can make connections with. I can engage with others who are interested in what I am interested in, who care about the things I care about. Maybe your neighbours don’t see you or think you’re weird, but there is someone half a world away you can open your heart to. The downside, of course, is that you can’t hug them or dance with them. This will change us. Will it change what friendship is?
Can friendships exist between species? As a human I can more easily see relations between humans and other species, or relations that occur within human environments. And there the answer seems to be ‘yes’. A pet doesn’t choose the household it ends up in, but once there it either bonds with the humans — or it doesn’t. That is one of the indicators of friendship. There is a reciprocity when the relationship works well. Rupert Sheldrake has collected a database of incidents when dogs knew their humans were coming home. The unconditional welcome from your dog friend when you do get back home makes you feel that the day has been worthwhile, whatever else has happened since you went out in the morning. Also, within human contexts there are many stories of creatures of one species befriending another, sometimes species that would stay well away from each other in the wild.
What about wild animals? There are many stories of wild animals befriending humans, and these are enchanting to us. The Japanese diver who befriended an Asian sheepshead wrasse, and they stayed friends for nearly thirty years. Craig Foster and an octopus. Daphne Sheldrick and her many elephant friends. Each one of these stories warms the heart. When a wild creature voluntarily entrusts you with its friendship, that is a special gift.
In fact, for me any friendship is something to be treasured. That means it has to be worked on and nurtured. If and when a friendship comes to an end, I will let it go gracefully in the settled knowing that there will be others to come.
