When was the last time you are struggling with making a friendship work?
(hopefully it’s not yesterday… but … maybe?)
I’ve been struggling with two different friendships lately.
After months of journaling, self-introspection and reading unnecessary amount of wikipedia pages in psychology and philosophy, I finally gave in and confessed to an outsider friend.
In our hour long conversation, he shared several his own experience that were enlightening to me and my situations.
But, I didn’t quite remember what he said. More precisely, I didn’t quite care. My entire mind was on “I wish I talked to him earlier, I wish other friendships are as easy as this one”.
I wish.
As you know, that’s not how human works. If we don’t stumble, there is no reason to pause, look, and even dig.
Sigh~
If you also happen to be a nerd, a friendship problem can easily turn into this intellectualization game where you easily ran out of memory or enter a deadlock. This symptom is coined as nerd snipping by xkcd.
After calming down myself from the astonishment about my unbelievable stupidity (how is it possible to make the same mistakes so many times?!?!), I decided … for lack of better word, to become a more loving person…
eww~
OK, it’s not that bad, it’s just love, love is acceptable and love is normal….
Is There A Friendship Rulebook?
I think the reason people read rule book is beyond to play the game — it’s to know when and where to break it.
(The problem is that it would take too much efforts to create a game from scratch where others would want to play with me, given my flaw-ridden personality. You know, designing is harder than following.)
So, what does our rulebook say?
Ah ….
There isn’t one, or, I should say there are too many. So, let’s check out the principles.
Aristotle thinks of friendship in 3 levels: utility, pleasure, and virtue. To reach the friendship of virtue, we first have to spend enough time to intimately know this person which is not seen as affordable to many people. It also takes honesty, acceptance, and selflessness from both sides to to forge that bond.
Aristotle thinks a close friendship is more about “loving” than “being loved”, like a delight mom feels for her child, wishing the best for someone else for their sake. Mothers hand over their children to be brought up, and so long as they know their fate they love them and do not seek to be loved in return if they are conflicting. They can be satisfied if their children are prospering.
Loving seems to be the characteristic virtue of friends and it’s the only friendship that endures.
“roger roger”
Why A Friendship Must Be Romantic?
Idk about you. I’m addicted to thrills, especially there is a real risk. If something I know it’s possible to achieve from the beginning, I wouldn’t have the motivation to do it. That’s the exact reason I signed up for my entrepreneur life.
I realized that I’m at my best I’m forced to the corner, there is no another way, I run out of excuse, and sometimes, hope. I also don’t experience reality as any sort of religion, so the only option left is to change myself.
And that’s the exciting part. I choose to think I have full control over myself even though I know I don’t because I value intention over the mechanism.
A friendship is more addicting when we sense there is something to lose as the relationship progress, it provides us this psychological thrill needed to poke holes in our heart.
We sacrifice our original trajectories of future reality in exchange of that tinder. It does feel like the past, present and future collapse at that moment. We give up all other potentially better possibilities for this stupid loyalty. We murder one part of ourselves, to allow the rebirth of the other parts.
Poking a hole is how we loosen a space, so that we can insert ourselves into it and start the exploration and creation. It’s painful, but … you can get used to it if you want to~ thanks to our desensitized sensors.
A great friendship will fundamentally change who you are, where you are heading towards, and how you experience the reality today. Yeah, it can be dangerous, yet extremely rewarding if done correctly.
Lessons Learned
Very similar to the pursuit of a career, if whenever I started hiding my real thoughts and feelings, the friendship gets undermined. Instead, the real options are
- gathering the courage to correct myself (decision to fix the problem in business),
- clarifying why I’m exiting a friendship (decision to end an investment in business),
- asking for external help (decision to get experts or put in more resources), or
- simply acknowledging this work-in-progress tension (decision to de-escalate the problem in business).
Practicing being truthful is the easiest way to live a happy life because it’s much easier to fix a problem when it’s still small. For example, I try to be myself and try to present myself in a way acceptable to most people because I genuinely hope people enjoy who I am — a masculine female — but sometimes people don’t which makes my friends extra precious for me.
“Virtues are attained with practice. By stepping out into the world and habitually trying to do the right thing — by habitually trying to identify the mean between deficiency and excess in all you do”
It is by taking part in transactions with our fellow men that some of us become fair-minded and others iniquitous; by acting in dangerous situations and forming a habit of fear or of confidence we become courageous or cowardly. — The Nicomachean Ethics
