What exactly is friendship?

((No Man's Land—"now we're gonna get the whole story"))

I'm listening to an old favorite: Billy Joel's "River of Dreams" CD. I'm also increasingly frustrated with technology. I can seem to get Blogger to publish things properly, and my Launchcast player won't...well...launch. And trying to use Haloscan comments today is hit-or-miss at best.

But mostly, I'm pondering the concept of friendship. Billy Joel always reminds me of high school--although this disc came out the year Sparky was born. In high school, friendships were the most important part of life, and yet so easy to come by. Most of the time. Except when they weren't.

((The Great Wall of China—"your soul was too defective"))

I just went to thesaurus.com and scanned the list of synonyms for “Friend.” Here’s the list:

acquaintance, ally, alter ego, amigo, associate, bedfellow, blocker, boon companion, bosom buddy*, brother, buddy, chum*, classmate, cohort, colleague, companion*, compatriot, comrade, confrere, consort, countryman, cousin, crony, familiar, fellow, intimate, kissing cousin, little brother, main man, main squeeze, mate, other self, pal, partner, playmate, roommate, schoolmate, sidekick, sister, soul mate*, spare*, well-wisher

My, but don’t those seem a little sexist? My slang doesn’t include “spare” either; a hint of what that means would be appreciated if anyone uses it. And it doesn't help me sort out what's on my mind at all, either.

There are certain levels of friendship for me. All friends are not created equal. Not that this is necessarily a bad thing. I’ve reminded myself a lot lately about the saying about three kinds of friends: those you have for a reason, those you have for a season, and those you have for a lifetime. I’ve discovered over and over, sometimes people you think are one kind of friend are actually another.

((Blonde Over Blue—"the TV works but the clicker is broken" ... "there is no faith ‘cause there’s nothing to believe in"))

There are people in my life to whom I connect on a level that is almost umbilical. We can pick up our conversation after months or years of silence. We finish each others' thoughts, we communicate non-verbally, and at times almost extra-sensorily across whatever distance is between us. When I stop and think about this, it’s totally freaky, not to mention how hard to believe it is. All I can say is that it’s true.

((A Minor Variation—"when troubles want to find me, I ain’t hard to find"))

Then there are people I’d call acquaintances who suddenly “pop.” It’s like our relationship had to reach a level of germination before we suddenly feel like we are actually true friends. This takes a level of patience I don’t always have, but it also takes kindness and acceptance and commitment from both sides. It also may take some fertilizer before things really get going. Sometimes that fertilizer is internal to the relationship; often it’s external.

((Shades of Grey—"my faith is falling away/I’m not that sure anymore"…"I’m old and tired of war"… "the only people I fear are those who never have doubts"…"there ain’t no rainbow shinin’ on me"))

However, there is also that level of a relationship for which I’d use words like “acquaintance,” “associate,” “cohort,” or “colleague.”

((All About Soul—"you’ve got to get tough, but that ain’t enough"))

That’s a confusing place for me. I sometimes feel very close to people, but when I’m separated from them, I forget what the attraction was. Or rather, I can’t step back into that relationship after time has passed. If I see them, we’re cordial and all, but not what I would call friendly. A lot of the people at my workplace fall in this never-neverland of relationships.

This is a place of ebb and flow, of trust and distrust, of belief and betrayal. And that kind of shifting sand, the not-knowing, tends to eat at my soul. At heart, I tend to believe the best about most individuals (no Thomas Hobbes I!). And over the years I’ve grown a bit of a tougher exterior, but it is still so very easy to shock me with poor behavior and nastiness.

((Lullabye [Goodnight, My Angel]—"if you sing this lullabye/then in your heart/there will always be a part of me"))

I’m very much like my father that way: he always wanted people to live up to the best people they could be. And when they failed to do so, he was surprised. And I loved that about him, but hated what it did to him.

((The River of Dreams—"from the mountains of faith/to the river so deep"))

One variety of friendship that I haven’t touched on is one-sided friendship, when one person feels a much stronger connection than the other. This just sucks. There is no way to manufacture close feelings you don’t have. And there’s the inevitable letdown when the more-heavily invested friend realizes that there is a mismatch, and guilt from the less-invested one.

((Two Thousand Years—"we hope our children carry our dreams down the line/they are the vintage"…"without compassion, there can be no end to hate, no end to sorrow"…"science and poetry rule in the new world to come"…"time is relentless…we’re on the verge of all things new"))

On the other hand, I can handle this if it’s obvious. What has prompted this post is that, apparently, some other people’s definitions of friendship are less…hierarchical than mine. Everyone they talk to is a true friend, and there’s no work involved in keeping a friendship healthy. It’s just expected to be healthy with no attention to the “niceties” of kindness or reciprocation.

By that, I mean that sometimes staying friends takes some work, some stepping out of the comfort zone, some things that hurt on one level or another: making phone calls that are unpleasant (because of the subject or the timing), dropping your fun plans for something NOT fun (like a funeral), listening when you really want to tell them what to do (or talk about your own ‘stuff’), traveling halfway across the universe for one look at your friend’s face to be sure she’s really ok.

((Famous Last Words—"Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn anymore"…"it’s always hard to say goodbye"))

True friends do those things without thinking about them…without having to be asked, without having to be told, without a thought of the “right” thing to do…because they know that helping their friend increases the beauty of the cosmos, because they aren’t living in a vacuum. Without deeply-felt and deeply-lived friendship, the world would stop.