.....only lonely in a crowd

.....when's the last time you had a look at the people around you?
How many of those people are ones that you met at work?
How many are random encounters?
How many have you known for years?

Something came up in discussion a couple of days ago that went a little like this:
"adults have no friends".

How true is that?

Me in my almighty non-commited wisdom said that it is when you are an adult with proper work and proper responsibilties that you know who your friends really are. I followed this with saying that when you are young, the people you hang out with when you have nothing to do, are just people you hang out because you have nothing to do.

How correct was I then?

The real question behind all this is:
what is a friend?
If we don't first define what "friend" means then we can't even begin to have answer for the questions about friends.

So where do we begin?
How about with what friends are when we are young? This seems like a good starting point as it is after all, the point in our lives when we first learn about friendship and when we first use it for our own (evil) means. We are without doubt, simpler creatures when we are children and so what we think of as friends then is naturally going to be the most basic definition.

To a child, a friend is someone who you can play with; playing being the most important thing when you are small and without any true responsibilities. Having fun is the reason for waking up early and sleeping as late as you can and having people to play with makes playing even better. So a friend is someone who you can play with? That by itself suggests that by the nature of playing, you and those you play with share a liking for something; after all, if you don't like Star Wars, you aint going to want to join in as Luke Skywalker #3 come playtime. So are friends those you have something in common with? But eck.... that means that technically we can be friends with half the people in the world if all it was about was commonality.

So does mean it's all down to fun and who you can have fun with?
Superficially, this is not much more than an extension of "commonality" but dig a little bit deeper and taken in a more adult context, this takes a definitely different path. Commonality does not automatically mean you can have fun together. A love of detective stories can mean a love of Frost as opposed to a love of Morse. A common liking for cars can be divided into fans of brands as in the real world, people's likes and dislikes fall into very specific sets. Again, this can be taken as simply a more in depth expansion of commonality which is indeed true were it not for one thing. People can have fun together even if they have nothing in common; hence opposites attract. How many tales have you heard of two people who get together simply for a bit of fun and don't let things progress beyond the bedroom? Of course, a little part of me thinks that this may just be another of those indicators of the state of modern society, when people find ways to get what they need without getting what they don't need or perhaps, want.

And there's the other point; are friends people we want one way or another? Are they people like us, people we want to be like or people we want?
How about all three?
Maybe.

What you want from a friend depends on many things and what those things are, like most things, depends on how honest you are.
I am perhaps, a little bit of a despot but paradoxically, I don't like to be seen to be so. In that respect, I am perhaps a bit of a Machievelli type who perfers to be behind the scenes. If that smells a bit too much like me being manipulative; I can't say that isn't true. In my defence though, it's not as if I am forever making or planning on making people do what I want; it is more like I like things done in a certain way and if at all possible, I would like you to do it , how I would like it to be done...
What that equates to, is that I like to have someone around who is louder, ruder and more arrogant than I am to well, distract from my own failings. At the same time, I also have a tendency to have people who are easy to manipulate.
What I mean is, people who are easy to guess their next move. In truth, I know that it is their predictability that I need because uncertainty is something I have a very hard time dealing with. Knowing how someone is going to react/behave is a comforting safety blanket.

So does that make them friends of mine or tools for my own gain?

But isn't that what friends are on one level? Simple tools to fulfil a need of ours? We are a social creature, so much so that those who are not social are termed "outcasts" so the basic most fundemental function of a friend is to be a companion; be it a companion to watch a film with, or have a drink with or in today's world, a companion who you only ever just talk to.
But this sort of companion does not need to be someone like us, someone we want or someone we want to be like.

Doesn't help, does it?

Logic dictates that when you have a thing that consists of variable interactions between different individuals that are dependent on even more variables, no single definition of "friend" is going to fit all friends.
It seems the best we can do is to identify what it is we like or perhaps more importantly don't like about any individual we call a friend and understand what it says about ourselves.


Titled: 3rd January 2008
Published: 12th October 2008