Hezo Kittie

Friendship as a Battle or: IDK, my BFF Jill?

Friendship has been the hot topic these days among various unrelated parties that I have encountered, and the heart of the matter ultimately becomes: What defines (true/best/closest) friendship itself?

I've always had an implicit understanding or "feeling" of who my friends are. I never questioned it or
tried to rationalize it. But it didn't take much studying to find out exactly what friendship meant to me.

First, I hit up my two go-to guys, Emerson and Aristotle. The two of them seem to have written about every scientific, social, and political topic known to man, and even though most of the science has become moot, human nature has been staying the course.

Friendship by Ralph Waldo Emerson

http://rwe.org/?option=com_content&task=view&id=129&Itemid=42

Friendship from the Stanford Encyclopeia of Philosophy

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/friendship/

The SEP page is an evaluation of friendship, mostly regarding Aristotle's friendship chapter in Nicomachean Ethics but includes others.

I honestly didn't read much of either because they went into too many different perspectives and minute details when the truth, at least for me, was painfully obvious.

"It is not the sharing of private information nor even of very personal information, as such, that contributes to the bonds of trust and intimacy between companion friends. At best it is the sharing of what friends care about that is relevant here." - Cocking & Kennett (1998)

Nice. It's not necessarily the secrets of your friend's personal life, although that is usually the main indicator because, frankly, one's personal life is pretty much one of the most important things in his or her life. Having concern over our personal lives is not a vice in any way, but what I like about the previous quotation is that it's not the only thing that defines the strongest friendships.

Hannah is one of my closest friends, but we pretty much don't see eye to eye on anything. How our friendship not only endured but actually flourished can be summed up in a singular episode towards the end of the year.

A mutual friend of ours threw a party at a bar in Little Tokyo, and our underage asses were able to attend by slipping past a large but lenient bouncer. There was early live music and a couple of DJ sets; the place appeared occupied but not overcrowded.

I started talking to a girl who was a freshman at Orange County Community College (the bouncer must've been easily persuaded) and came with a lady friend of hers. She was very forward and charming; we ordered drinks, we danced, it was a good time.

Afterward, Hannah and I got a ride back to the dorms and we stopped for some late night hamburgers on the way. As we sat in the lounge of her building and drunkenly devoured our meals, she noted, "Y'know, I successfully diverted that cock block friend of hers. I slipped in and came up with ridiculous bullshit small talk while y'all were handling business."

And, instead of the "You fucking owe me a bag of cookies for covering your dumb ass" that I expected, she simply smiled. It was ironically poignant.

And she probably wouldn't admit to doing it the next morning, and it probably won't ever happen again, but right then I knew where we stood.

Was my cause noble? Not in the least. But the girl from the bar initiated our conversation anyway, and I wasn't (and am not) deceptive.

Did Hannah agree with my cause? Maybe, but probably not. The stupid college shenanigan surface is irrelevant. The fact that she saw past our differences and supported me without expecting anything in return was everything.

I think there's two aspects to the strongest friendships, which are empathy and experience. Whether or not they go hand in hand, or whether need to follow a certain order, or even whether either both or just one of them are necessary is beyond me. The typical empathy is the shared personal information, the "I'm revealing something to you because I trust that you accept me and my flaws", and the typical friendship experience is what Dan would call "Good trip", which is fairly self-explanatory. But I believe there is a point, always when you least expect it, when you just know. Smiling is universal.