Friendships

Most of us, if not all, believe that no one can survive without others. We all need someone who cares for us, help us, sees our needs and do all these things to others. We need others in our lives for emotional closeness, intellectual simulation, and personal and social connectedness. Or else we may never reach our fullness as human beings. We need friends.


Friendship is a very familiar word. Even a young kid can relate with it. In defining friendship, Aristotle cited three ways why people make friends: for pleasure, for usefulness, and for good. In the first, we say, we find some quality in the person like wit which give some pleasure; in the second, the other person will somehow benefit from me; in the third, it is good in the other person and therefore the other person himself or herself, which I love.


Plato on the other hand, stated the principle of friendship as a principle in congeniality and reciprocity of goods. To explain it in a simple way, he believed that friendship is based on the good in friends. No person can be good in everything but only in some things. Persons need the good of others that are different form their own and hence congenial to them. Good persons admire, rather than envy, the good in others just as they cultivate the good in themselves for the benefit of others. This mutual admiration and valuation of personal goods, and of one another is called friendship.


For me, a friend can be trusted, honest, respectful, committed, safe, supportive, generous, loyal, mutual, constant, understanding, and he or she can accept you just the way you are.


From these qualities, we can just pick two that will clearly show the goods which we admire, value and seek in friendship.


The first quality is trust. A friend is someone who will consistently accept my faults, weaknesses, and surprises. Someone who can be patient, sustain me, and never judge and condemn me for my failures. He or she is someone to whom I can bare my thoughts and soul; someone with whom I can confide my deepest secrets. Likewise, trust is something men and women must learn to become friends. Trust is the basic foundation of friendship; friendship is nominal without it.


Another quality is security especially from emotional dangers, self-doubt, shame, fear, and anxiety. We live in a very competitive world in which we must forever follow established standards and demands. We need a friend with whom we do not have to measure up, with whom we can be ourselves. We need a trusted someone, a friend, to bring out the better if not the best in us.


But to keep the friendship alive, friends must work increasingly together for it will not sustain itself. They must grow with it. Friendships are not heaven made, we need to work for it and not simply let it happen. We give time for friendships to grow. In some instances, long-standing, trusted and secure friendships blossom into love.