It’s often said, “You can do nothing about your relations, but at least you can choose your friends.”
Outside the family bond, friendships contribute greatly to the enhancement of our quality of life. With the advent of technology, the terms ‘friend’ and ‘friendship’ have acquired an alarming degree of elasticity, stretching all the way from approval of your posts on Facebook, through likeable casual acquaintance to the close confidante who knows all your faults but loves you despite them.
In early years, ‘friends’ are people whose company you’re catapulted into and urged to get on with. Thirty-five years of close observation of reception classes and the burgeoning relationships that either flourish or fail, is excellent social training for later life. School is the first forum where you find your feet socially and discover the bitter truth that not everyone finds you universally fascinating or charming.
This startling blow to one’s self-esteem is a valuable lesson in life skills, underpinned by the fluctuating allegiances further up the school, where matching Best Friend Forever pencil-cases count for little compared to the lure of the cosy cliques formed in Key Stage Two that you long to be part of.
The truth is, we grow out of friends. Few primary school friendships survive the parting of the ways at eleven plus. Adolescence and secondary school bring more serious challenges and much more intensity to relationships, where to ‘belong’ really matters. (see ‘Derry Girls’.) These too tend to evaporate in third level education or the workplace as we discover people from other places and cultures and the heady freedom of making our own decisions.
Singledom is a testing-ground for friendships. Who has not had their eye wiped by a smiling Judas flatmate who’s nicked the fellow you fancy at the college hop? And who hasn’t done it oneself under the influence of two Bacardi-and-cokes and braved the blazing row and sobfest back at the student digs? All is fair in love and war and integrity’s lost in the battle, encapsulated in the pithy phrase, “She’s my best friend – and I hate her.”
Some people have the happy knack of making friends easily. Keeping them’s another matter. Friendship has to be reciprocal. To be honest, most friends have (in your eyes at least) one or two things lacking, which you’re willing to put up with because the rest of their character passes muster. Their feelings towards you are probably reciprocal. It’s all a matter of degree. The litmus test of a true friend is if you arrive in a state on their doorstep at two in the morning, they take you in without question.
If there’s a recipe for friendship, I suppose empathy, affinity, mutual supportiveness and convivial company are key components. Trust, discretion and honesty are in there too. Balancing the ingredients is a business delicate as baking a Victoria sponge. Too little of one, too much of another and the friendship falls flat.
Statistics reveal that technologically – obsessed youngsters are our loneliest generation in history. They have numberless ‘virtual’ friends online, but few real ones. So much for the ersatz intimacy of the internet. Patterns of living have changed. Once we lived at home till we married and set up on our own, often still part of the community or creating new friendships in another.
Now, in the political paralysis of this pathetic little statelet we’re rearing our young for export – haemorrhaging graduates and 20-somethings to big cities in order to earn a living in one-bed flats at extortionate rent, existing on one portion ready-meals. At the other end of the scale are the inconsiderate longer-living elderly, their children scattered, their contemporaries, like themselves constrained from visiting by illness or immobility. All the lonely people…
The gift of friendship is no small thing. It can create a lifelong bond closer than any sibling, with a person whose wisdom, kindness, empathy, understanding and generosity of spirit is life-enhancing – and who sees, mirrored in you, the same traits. If you’re fortunate enough to find even one such, you are blest indeed.
