Friendships

Loren Ford

A friend is a person whom one knows, likes, and trusts. We have best friends, close friends, good friends, and just friends. There are many types of friendships. There are friendships based on activities, social groups, and work—a category that is becoming increasingly important. There are crossroads friends that we connect with during transitional times in life, and there are the friends that come at 3:00 A.M. when you need them.

Many of us long for a broader web of friends to support us in times of need. However, unlike ties with our kin, our connections to friends can be exceedingly fragile. Friendship is an elective bond. There are no formalized rituals. According to Lillian Rubin, author of Just Friends: The Role of Friendships in Our Lives, kinship falls into the realm of the sacred while friendship remains in the secular. Even though it may be the friend, not the relative, who takes you to the airport or brings you food when you are sick, our society still seems to operate on the notion that kin is forever—but friends come and go.

Yet, the notion that family is more important than friends may be illusory. With fully a quarter of the nation's households now composed of a single person, we are fast becoming a society that is literally home alone. Even for those who enjoy or even prefer solo living, sneak attacks of loneliness can raise that panicky 3:00 A.M. question: Who really cares? When the other pillow on the bed is empty, when siblings and other kin are scattered across the continent and steeped in the minutiae of their own lives, one's best hope may be a good friend (Sandmaier, "The Gift of Friendship," Networker, July-August 1995).

Friends are especially important for children. The difference between no friends and two good friends is like the difference between a pitch-black room and one lit by birthday candles. Think back to your childhood, to the time when you first liked somebody outside your family and he or she liked you back; it was almost like a gift from heaven. It meant that somebody who was not from your family, who owed you nothing, simply cared for you. If a child doesn't have friends, he spends a huge portion of his day asking himself, "Who will I play with? Who will I sit with?" These are questions reflecting the basic desire to know "who will not leave me" (Greene, Family Life, September-October 1993).

Rubin (1985) writes that in a best friendship there is "a promise of mutual love, concern, protection, understanding and, not least of all, stability and durability." Best friendships embody the best of all the important relationships in our lives—kin, mate, and friend—along with the problems of all three. They bring us our greatest joys and our sorriest disappointments. "Do you have a best friend?" This is a question that Rubin asked three hundred men and women (age twenty-five to fifty-five, working class and middle class) whom she interviewed for her research on friendship. Over three-fourths of the single women named a best friend, and this person was almost always a woman. In sharp contrast, fewer than one-third of the single men could identify a best friend, and those who were identified were much more likely to be a woman than another man. Rubin's results showed that, at every age between twenty-five and fifty-five, women had more friendships than men did, and the differences in quality were considerable. Women's friendships with each other rested on shared intimacies and emotional support. In contrast, friendships between men were based on shared activities and were much more emotionally constrained.

As we begin to separate ourselves and grow away from our families in adolescence, friendships become even more important to us as sources of support. However, in late adolescence and early adulthood, friendships can take a back seat to romantic relationships. Marriage can disrupt friendships: Our interests change, and we begin to form relationships with other couples. In the same way, divorce can disrupt the friendships we formed as couples.

By the time people reach adulthood, most have learned the rudiments of friend-making: how to ask somebody to lunch, share a more or less retouched version of their life story, woo a new pal with humor or intellect or a talent for listening. After the initial connection is made, however, people often turn their attention elsewhere. Many of us still buy into the fiction that friendship simply happens; it requires no special effort or consciousness to keep it alive and whole. There is also the embarrassment factor: Because friendship is not deemed a primary relationship in our culture and the expectations friends hold for each other are so rarely voiced, we may feel uncertain of our rights to go deeper, to make our needs known, even to directly express our feelings for our friends.

Like all important relationships, intimate friendships take work. They require us to open ourselves up, to trust, to share, to compromise, even to sacrifice. They involve caring enough for another person so that her or his welfare becomes as important to us as our own, and caring enough to go far out of our way to render help when it is needed.

Friendships also take time. Some friendships can be measured in how much coffee (or other beverage) has been shared together. Time and opportunity to truly communicate are necessary ingredients in a friendship. Some conversations only take place when there are just the two of you and there isn't a clock running. Priority needs to be given to the contact that is necessary to sustain the relationship. The effort is usually rewarded and well-worthwhile in an era when it is more important than ever to have those connections (Arkhoff 1995).

Abridged from Game Plan, Prentice Hall, New Jersey, 1997.