Friendship

It’s a human universal that we need someone to implicitly trust.

Broadly, favor is when a person like someone else, and it’s usually for a clear and specific reason. A friendship is when two people like each other, or at least perceive it to be that way, in a way that transcends anything particularly reasonable.

Friendships aren’t always a two-way experience, but a person can only have a friend if they expect it’s two-way.

As human beings, we crave positive interaction with other humans, but we don’t always experience it. Often, during our upbringing, many people conclude they can’t easily interact with other people and adapt to that expectation. When taken far enough, people develop antisocial mental disorders.

If we’re particularly lonely, we can frequently have an intimate friend-like connection with animals, objects, ideas, or even the idea of someone as our friend.

Interest

Friendships are grounded on common interests, identity, or beliefs, and people share them over many domains:

Our shared interpretation of an experience (and how we feel about it) is a far clearer determination of a likely friendship than simply a shared experience:

  • Two people who were former military won’t bond nearly as much as two people recovering from trauma in the same way, irrespective of military.
  • An accountant and an insurance agent who love their job will find more friendship than two accountants with different opinions about their work.
  • A Muslim and a Christian who both share devotion to God can get along more than two Muslims or two Christians with differing devotion to God.

Legitimate friendships are grounded in love for one another’s soul. It unifies two people into a shared experience, at least for that moment.

The degree that each friend changes comes from their openness to the other friend’s points of view. Stronger people have stronger convictions and understanding, and a weaker friend will always conform to the stronger one’s standards (at least partially).

As we mature, our friendships transition from the pool of children we spent time with into the specializations we’ve established for ourselves. It’s not uncommon for adults to be so preoccupied with the requirements to work that they have very few friends.

How

It takes about 34 minutes before we’ve decided if we want to be friends with someone. By that time, we’ve verified that we’re perceiving with relatively accurate certainty who they really are.

We start a friendship when we’ve communicated a value the other person agrees with. The other person doesn’t have to identify with it, but they must believe it.

We frequently form our beliefs from the purposes we’ve recently aspired to or wish to do soon, so we tend to find friends around our same state of maturity and success.

As we change, our friendships will change as well. Unless our friends are changing at the same speed as us, we’ll slowly drift away from them. Either we’ll leave them behind or they’ll leave us behind. We can also sometimes cut down on our friendships simply because we got bored with them.

We tend to build trust with our friends, which is often connected with the groups we share with them. That trust creates a profound influence that affects our large-scale beliefs in many unseen ways. Our identity is frequently intertwined with our friendships.

Unfortunately, finding and building friendships takes time. For that reason, most people who mature enough to build careers tend to become less effective at making friends.

Genders

The best form of friendship comes through marriage between both genders. This is for several reasons beyond any religious or cultural basis:

This doesn’t always happen, though, and people regularly violate their moral standards and the relationship itself by having trysts with others.


Application

We gain massive understanding from friendships because we’re experiencing our lives through both ours and that other person’s points of view.

If there are two friends with an unequal power dynamic (wealth difference, age difference, difference of religious beliefs, etc.) the friend with more power will influence the weaker. It may take a few years, but that weaker person will start looking a lot like their stronger friend.

We must be careful about how much we invest into each friendship we have. We tend to change to become like the people we’re trying to influence, and the people we spend time with will naturally change as we change!

People group us by the friends we make, so be careful who you associate with (and how much) if those people aren’t representing traits you wish to see in yourself.

Unless we’re really close to a friend, leaving a group we share with that friend will also harm that friendship.

Once we start getting busy with life later on, it’s important to purpose ourselves to maintain and build new friendships.

Given enough time, the friendship between two people can create an exclusive culture, with unique language, customs, and beliefs. If those two people either have children or draw in new people, they’ve created a small society.