Friendship

Ok, I’ve just replaced my poll with something else, but recently there has been a interesting question up on the site “Does friendship exist anymore?”. Considering the ill thought-out nature of the question I was pleased to see that the majority of voters said yes. If I had worded it better however by saying “Does true friendship exist anymore?” I would have expected much more people selecting the “I want to debate this!” option.

Well, without everyone getting a downer on this and thinking friends are meaningless, allow me to explain. I believe that most of the people we call friends are more mates than friends. They are people we hang out with, drink with, joke with etc. While they are more than casual aquaintainces, do they really qualify as friends?

To try and answer this question I will take my favorite definition of a friend; “A friend is someone you can fully trust”. Think about that carefully. How many of your friends couldn’t keep that secret you keep without telling anyone? How many friends are you scared to tell about something personal you need advice about because you are not sure what they would think/say/do? The bottom line is that if you fully trust someone then you wouldn’t have a problem sharing these things with that person.

I don’t want to suddenly cause you to “downgrade” all your friends to something lesser than they are, because people we have an affinity with and enjoy spending time with should be valued and appreciated irrespective of anything else. What I’m saying though is do we have any special friends, best friends if you like, true friends who we fully trust? In my humble opinion to know a friend like this is to know the true meaning of friendship. So I guess what I was asking in my poll was not if people have friends, but if there exists the environment in this day and age where there is a place for true friendships – are we trusting enough of the people we should fully trust or has the culture of blame, mistrust and back-stabbing over-taken us to the extent where we have lost the ability to readily form true friendships.

Its not a question I can answer in the context of the world as a whole, but I feel for me that while it is more diffcicult to form true friendships than it might be were people more trusting it is most certainly still possible. Feel free to debate these rather incoherent ramblings using comments if you wish 😉

 

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2 Comments

  1. Chris Worfolk Said,

    August 28, 2006 @ 4:05 am

    To be honest I think everyone has something that they wouldn’t tell to anyone else. I don’t think there is anyone I feel completely uninhibited to tell everything to though drawing the line between a friend and a mate there are a select few people I would tell most things to.

  2. Kieran Said,

    August 28, 2006 @ 6:51 pm

    Ah see thats the subtlety. I said someone you would tell anything to that you wanted to tell someone. Not someone you would tell everything to irrespective of if you really wanted someone to know or not. By your last sentence though, assuming it fits in with what I’ve just clarified I would say those people are your “true” friends if we can call them that and continue to draw lines as I said in my posting.

    Still, as I said in the post, I’m not taking this one too seriously 😉

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