friendship should be one of the high
points of existence and yet it's also
the most routinely disappointing thing
we have to deal with. Too often you're at
supper at someone's house, there's an
impressive spread and the hosts have
evidently gone to a lot of trouble.
But the conversation is meandering and
devoid of any real interest it flits
from an overlong description of the
failings of the in-flight service on a
particular airline to a strangely heated
discussion about the tax code. The
intentions of the hosts are hugely
touching, but as so often we go home
wondering what on earth the whole
performance was really about. The key to
the problem of friendship is to be found
in an odd sounding place: a lack of a
sense of purpose. Our attempts at
friendship tend to go adrift because we
collectively resist the task of
developing a clear picture of what
friendship might really be for.
The problem is that we're unfairly
uncomfortable with the idea of
friendship having any declared purpose,
because we associate purpose with the
least attractive and most cynical of
motives. Yet purpose doesn't have to ruin
friendship and in fact the more we
define what a friendship might be for
the more we can focus in on what we
should be doing with every person in our
lives, or indeed the more we can
helpfully conclude that we shouldn't be
with them at all.
There are at least four things we might
be trying to do with the people we know.
Firstly, networking. It's an unfairly
maligned idea. We're small, fragile
creatures in a vast world. Our individual
capacities are entirely insufficient to
realize the demands of our imaginations.
So of course we need collaborators,
accomplices who can align their
abilities and energies with ours.
This idea of friendship was given a lot
of space in classical literature.
Take the Argonauts, the legendary ancient
Greek tale, which traced how a heroic
captain called Jason networked in order to
assemble a band of friends to sail on
the Arkham, in search of the Golden
Fleece. Later, the same idea emerged when
Jesus networked, to put together a band of
twelve disciples with whom he could
spread one or two world-changing ideas
about forgiveness and compassion. Rather
than diminish our own efforts as we hand
out our business cards, such prestigious
examples can show how elevated an
ambitious networking friendships could
ideally be. Secondly, reassurance. The
human condition is full of terror. We're
always on the verge of disgrace, danger
and disappointment and yet, such are the
rules of polite conduct that we're
permanently in danger of imagining that
we are the only ones to be as crazy as
we know we are. We badly need friends
because with the people we know only
superficially, there are few
confessions of sexual compulsion or of
regret, rage and confusion. These
superficial acquaintances refuse to
admit that they, too, are going slightly
out of their minds. Yet the reassuring
true friend gives us access to a very
necessary and accurate sense of their
own humiliations and follies, insights
with which we can begin to judge
ourselves and our sad and compulsive
lives slightly more compassionately.
Thirdly, fun. Despite talk of hedonism and
immediate gratification, life gives us
constant lessons in the need to be
serious.
We have to guard our dignity, avoid
looking like a fool and pass as a mature
adult. The pressure can become onerous
and in the end even dangerous. That's why
we constantly need access to people we
can trust enough to be silly with them.
They might most of the time be training
to be a neurosurgeon or advising middle
sized companies about their tax
liabilities, but when we're together we
can be therapeutically daft. We can put
on accents, share lewd fantasies or doodle
on the newspaper, adding a huge nose and
a missing front tooth to the President
or giving the fashion model distended
ears and masses of
curly hair. The fun friend solves the
problem of shame around important but
unprestigious sides of ourselves.
Fourthly, clarifying our minds. To a
surprising degree it's very hard to
think on our own.
The mind is skittish and squeamish. As a
result, many issues lie confused within
us. We feel angry but are not sure why.
Something is wrong with our job but we
can't pin it down. The thinking friend
holds us to the task. They ask gentle
but probing questions which act as a
mirror that assist us with the task of
knowing ourselves. One side effect of
getting a bit more precise about what
we're trying to do with our social lives,
is that we're likely to conclude that in
many cases, we're spending time with
people for no truly identifiable good
reason. These proto friends share none of
our professional ambitions or interests,
they aren't reassuring and may indeed be
secretly really very excited by the
possibility of failure. We can't be
catharticly silly around them and they
aren't the least bit interested in
furthering our or their path to self
knowledge. They are, like so many of the
people in our social lives, simply in our
orbit as a result of some unhappy
accident that we've been too sentimental
to correct. We should dare to be a little
ruthless in this area. Culling
acquaintances isn't a sign that we've
lost belief in friendship, it's evidence
that we're starting to get clearer and
therefore more demanding about what a
friendship could really be. In the best
way the price of knowing what friendship
is for may be a few more evenings at home
in our own company