On Friendship

If man likes all he has no enemy, but neither does he have a friend. For to like all is to be indifferent to all.

In the ancient world friendship was viewed as the highest form of love, the most important relationship. A man could live without sex, for what good is sex is something that even beasts share with men. But friendship is something typically human. Think of Socrates: at his death he sends his wife and children away so that he may end his life with his friends. Likewise, Jonathon and King David were said to be closer than brothers.

These examples stand in clear contrast with friendship in our time and culture. Here sex is valued far more highly than culture. There is plenty of evidence of this ranging from the commonality of sleeping with a friend’s spouse to the places we spend social time (generally noisy bar type areas designed to meet potential mates rather than quite places to cultivate friendship.

This is not to say that friendship should be valued more highly than the marital relationship (indeed it should not), but rather only to point out the fact that friendship within our culture is very cheep. Friendship is cheap: we only keep a friend so long as they benefit us in the sense that we enjoy their company or they make us happy, but the second they fail to meet our perceived needs we accuse them of changing and drop them like last week’s mail. They are boring, they make us uncomfortable, we are no longer happy when we are around them—whatever it is, we no longer want to be around them.

In fact in our culture friendship is loosely defined as merely knowing someone. You can have met someone a week ago, but when you introduce them to others you introduce them as your friend. A friendship so easily formed will be just as easily discarded.

Further, our friendships have no obligations. But a relationship without obligation is one without depth or real benefit. This tends to confuse foreigners who believe that friendship entails responsibility and requires time to form. They tend to think that Americans make bad friends simply because we define the term too broadly and loosely.

In focusing in on sex (where a true ‘friend’ is but a wing man) and the perceived meeting of our needs we have lost one of the greatest gifts God: a friend.