Post #36: Real Friendship

9 June 2023

“Over a period of forty years, he and I have been fast friends. There have been hot words between us, but perfect friendship bears and allows hot words.”

—Anthony Trollope, Autobiography

Nietzsche, in the tribute to Schopenhauer that I discuss in Post #16, declared that there is an infinite distance between one and zero. He wasn’t making a mathematical point or anticipating the digital revolution; he meant that there is a world of difference between having even a single real friend and true confidant, and having none.

We are sociable creatures in the extreme, even those of us who are perhaps comparatively reticent in our relations with others. Thus it is a commonplace of prison life (no great repository, typically, of the community-minded) that prolonged solitary confinement is the worst punishment of all. Even those who have been subjected to regular torture—James Stockdale, for example—insist that isolation is more agonizing and damaging in the long run.

But wait a minute, you may say: who could ever be so wretched as not to have a single friend? Ah, but what I am referring to, and what Nietzsche also meant, was not any old casual buddy of the all-too familiar sunshine variety; what we are talking about here is a real friend, which is also what the Buddha meant, albeit along somewhat different parameters, when he celebrated “good friendship” as practically tantamount to the Path (Post #6).

Whoever has had such a friend before and lost him or her to death, distance, or the everyday estrangement that time and circumstance can bring about too easily, knows what a void it leaves. The pain may not be quite as acute as with our passions gone wrong, but it can be even more lingering and haunting, a kind of phantom limb of the soul. Passions can be substituted, friendships cannot; though a new one can take the place of the old, it is never the same. (Montaigne is especially eloquent on this theme—see Essay I.28—and his meditations on the loss of his best friend, Etienne de la Boétie, are among the most heart-rending I know: “Only half of me seems to be alive now.”)

The ancient Greeks took the value of friendship as axiomatic and added, according to Aristotle (who called it the ultimate point of perfection in any society and a concern more pressing than even justice itself), that it could reach its proper potential only between equals. Blatant inferiority on the one side or condescension on the other makes it unsustainable, which is why we get made so uneasy even by the friendliest overtures and favors if we have no hope of ever reciprocating and repaying them.

Anyone who ever made close friends with an approximate equal at the time, only to see him soar off to dimensions of accomplishment or recognition one could never hope to match, will know what strains and limitations can come from things that one is sincerely happy to see a friend attaining—that is to say, with no question of envy intervening. Many a best man at a wedding has felt more than a tinge of nostalgia at the occasion, knowing full well that he was not gaining a new best friend (as we may pretend to protect our feelings) so much as losing an old one. We may not admit it, but we know it in our bones.

It’s an ancient debate whether men and women can ever really be friends. It’s not a matter of inequality, I don’t think; that they are equals I take to be self-evident, as I’ve made clear before (Post #27), without thereby prejudging the separate question of how different they may nonetheless be. Some of my very best friends have been women, but there’s usually a different kind of glue that comes in. And that’s as much as I am comfortable saying in an area where it has become too easy to invite scorn by well-meaning reflection alone (Post #28).

I once proposed the following test: “A truly good friend,” I said to someone who was a prime candidate for the distinction, “is someone you would be comfortable calling, if you were ever ready to reach for the rope, as a last resort before checking out.” My friend rejected that test, and thereby failed it, not because he was wrong (he had his good reasons), but because he reminded me of how little we see eye to eye on many essentials despite knowing each other for very nearly all our lives. (He remains, despite our differences and occasional frustrations, a very dear and special friend.)

He also has five kids (to my blank slate), and I harbor doubts about how far friendships can go between the decidedly child-rich and the deliberately child-poor. It’s not that I begrudge parents the respect that is their societal due; my own disinclination is not a negative judgment on the bearing and raising of children, only a personal expression of discomfort. Parenting may be the most likable and nuanced way of showing off your resources and making yourself feel important, and it performs a vital service to society and mankind (who that was born to parents could deny it). Yet, no matter how lovingly and beautifully it is done, it shifts the focus in life dramatically and introduces a peculiar blend of manifest sacrifice and latent genetic selfishness that is not to everyone’s taste. Not for nothing did Jesus and the Buddha exhort their more committed followers to leave all this behind if they were serious about the Teaching. (Jesus minced no words and called his disciplines unworthy of following him if they loved their parents or their children more (Matthew 10:37), and when his mom came looking for him, confronted her with perhaps the most pointed question a son ever asked his mother: “Woman, what have I to do with you?” (John 2:4). But enough, and back to the main theme.)

Even the very best of friends cannot always be there for you—by reading all you write, say. Some things are just too much to ask. But with a real friend, you know and understand the reasons, and they are good enough.

Any real friend will return your emails and remember your birthday, not perhaps every year, but more often than not. (Provided you do the same, of course.) And another one bites, another one bites, another one bites the dust…

Best friends too can be annoying (can they ever!), sometimes especially so on account of all that caring and the inescapable dynamics of ambivalence expose us to (Post #33); but with them, if they really are the best kind, you can have your fights, even fierce ones, and make it to the other end without any irreparable damage being done.

A real friend sees you more clearly than you can see yourself—not always but sometimes—and helps you find your way in life. If the trust goes further still and you might be willing to submit yourself as readily to a friend’s judgment as to your own, then you have a special friend indeed. His or her guidance, advice, or judgment on your behalf may still be wrong, of course, however well-meaning, but he or she will never lead you astray deliberately. Boon companions have their place; but they are not real friends.

A real friend knows the ways in which you are cracked and does not think less of you on their account. It’s not that he will downplay the depth or significance of the damage; he will merely take such wear and tear as part of the human condition (Post #9).

A real friend is someone you can ask for help without mortification, and with reasonable confidence that it will not damage the friendship. It seems that I’ve been unusually rich in such friends, but they appear, from what I hear, to be more rare and precious in the world than they should be.

A real friend does not need to share your politics, a point on which our age has some learning to do—or your religion, on which all ages do. But some agreement on the fundamentals still helps.

A real friend not only makes your life better, he (or she) makes you a better person. At crunch-time, he may even be able to give you a reason for going on, as I already said, and perhaps a way forward as well.

It’s a lot to ask, admittedly. That is why finding even one is a big deal, and why the difference between zero and one is so very great.

(To all my real friends. You know who you are.)