On friendship

“Let’s just be friends,” lovers proverbially say when breaking up, even if their empathy is shredding and they mainly mean to try not to sabotage each other by blabbing their secrets wholesale. Friends spread their arms, not their legs, but otherwise move in the opposite direction from sundered lovers, becoming unreserved. ..Like calories, friendships keep us warm, and serve as a badge of normality." says Edward Hoagland in this provocative article.

According to him our earliest friendships are coed, then imprecisely homoerotic, as we reach the age at which tribal peoples form cadres of hunter-warriors to protect and feed the clan, then homophobic for the sake of family life, and at last relaxed and coed again. The buddy system still underpins modern infantry warfare, and young women employ it every day on city playgrounds to keep their children safe. It’s second nature there, as on the veldt. Indeed second nature is the key to friendship. It means reading other people’s thoughts even when they are silent, and acting frequently and anonymously on charitable impulses with no quid pro quo. But it remains a mystery how we choose friends of miscellaneous ages or handicaps, or why we show idiosyncratic solicitude for one poor soul but not another.

Lending an ear is essential in mainline friendships. “I’m always here for you” is the desired pledge (like the colloquial promise “I have your back”) of best-friendship, a category often lasting at least until marriage, if not beyond. The personalities that occupy the niche—nerd or happy-go-lucky—might change according to the phases of life, but draw a nostalgic smile in our mind’s eye when we remember them. How our words waft from tongue to eardrum is not a riddle of acoustic science, but what accounts for the electricity of humor and sympathy, the flaring of angry laughter, the filling of tear ducts—all those flickering nuances that precede any riposte in the most humdrum of conversations? Friendship is one glimpse since we all know how to respond without needing to hear a single word.

The mind’s impromptu likes or dislikes, its eccentric detours, are the quirks that cement friendship, and friendship provides a stem for flowering. How, though, do neurons of the eye and ear, in practically a flash, stir what we call the heart? Love for mate, offspring, parents seems as natural as leaves sprouting; how else could humans have survived? Yet the luxuriance of love continues where no lust for self-replication is involved, no guardianship of clan. Bare survival defers to whimsy, grace, and élan where civilization takes hold. 

"We like personality, ethics, poignancy, quixotic courage" he says . "We yearn for anchorage. In adulthood, friendships originate adventitiously: at the water cooler or neighborhood association. We need roommates to get through college and afterward somebody to leave our keys and goldfish with. Friends may indulge us a little because they know our soft spots—the son in limbo after a meth arrest, the mortgage underwater, the trial separation, the cancer scare. We’ll tug a restaurant check away from a friend and bump shoulders in the parking lot, but when in love our eyes fix unqualifiedly upon the other person’s, wide open for inspection, not veiling hurt, confusion, or longing. A current flows, impulses are telegraphed, a flutter of distress crimps the mouth even before we know why. By middle age, our countenances contain a toolkit of engraved expressions, from deadpan stoicism to blithe equanimity." 

Friendship is protean. Your children, foodstuffs, and weak points are safe with me, and I’ll keep watch while you sleep, was how it all began; and primeval wellsprings of suspicion are still aroused when people lack friends. It’s why we brag about how many friends we have on Facebook, or how many people might put us up all over the world. Allies are necessary in early jobs to speak up for you, explain the ropes, and then it’s a leisurely, exploratory process where you lay your cards on the table, gradually seeing if they complement the other bloke’s. We need confidants—attention must be paid—and generally reciprocate with a core of friends whose own balance of good fortune with misfortune we can keep track of. Are the youngsters’ leaps of faith paying off, and the aging ones on an even keel? Equanimity is at first a bore, then a blessing. Most of us sculpt the modest proportions of our lives, eventually becoming responsible for them. 

“Know who your friends are” is a double-edged adage because we can take our friends for granted, hurting their feelings because of not being afraid of them, whereupon repairs are more urgent than when offending a foe. Friends change venue, blow hot or cold, but we must unburden ourselves, if only in a bar, touching base on the fly. It eases the heart, not simply as a metaphor—which is another mystery: why a high-five matters to one’s very health. Offloading grievances or grief is like conscripting an extra pair of arms to lift a sack of stones. 

We come to trust in the validity of telepathic promptings without wishing to peel back the anatomy of the riddle, as if that might possibly queer the deal. When faced with a thyroid biopsy or an exasperatingly interminable divorce, it’s essential to have friends to call upon to squawk, Do you know what’s happened?And we triage or triangulate them accordingly into good-news guys, bad-news guys, and others whose experiences somehow parallel ours. Intimates can be like money in the bank or names to drop, tipsters or bosom buddies of the sort you spout off to as a test audience before making a fool of yourself in front of a less charitable crowd. A caring soul to unstopper our disappointments with—childhood and evolution have seeded that yearning or throwback imperative in us. Even when fibbing, it’s a blessing to unburden oneself. 

The pep of a smile is communicable, and a reliable temper will serve for a flood of words, particularly at a kitchen table, with mugs of the milk of human kindness served. Life is potentially centrifugal; what we want is an anchor chain. We “lean on” friends as a form of gravity, yet at other times ask their help in flotation. And our pity extends to other species, rooting for birds nesting under the eaves or a limping dog whose lifespan is so regrettably briefer than ours. 

Cyberspace spins the compass. Distances contract, numbers expand, with banter the coin of the realm, and better than talking to yourself. Information substitutes for gesture, facial expression, and body language, and close-quarters telepathic communications are being superseded by the new technology, whereby people email each other from adjoining cubicles or cell-phone third parties while strolling side by side with their dearest friend. 

We want to feel twinned for a while with people of the same age and preoccupations, facing the enigmas of adolescence, marriage, children, the rat race, until the disquiet of aging sets in. But friendship is a facet of love, which means that scientists, who are devotees of the bias that “I think, therefore I am,” have not been much intrigued by it, just as, without appropriate outcry, they’ve let so many species vanish from the earth.

We don’t cogitate in friendship. Smiles of recognition spring from mouth to mouth with wandlike exactitude. Life is impromptu: the toothache that precedes bridgework; the colonel who chose not to court-martial us; the bewilderment when a job or spouse dissolves. As nature is dissolved, people foster unusual intimacies with pets also, hugging their dogs more and more, breeding them into toys, talking to a cockatiel caged in the living room, flying to a climate where they can swim with a dolphin or snorkel over coral reefs before these have bleached into skeletons. 

Friendship provokes us to pause a moment, shrug off our workaday carapace, and just be flesh and blood. Like a guardian spirit, a friend may ask and then reorient us a bit, a leverage like New Year’s Eve. Traction, context: to remain among the living, hugged and germane, is the idea. 

Indeed friendship  the nectar of life.