What are friends for

[charleychacko]

Friendship has been given a special status in our society. It is contrasted with all those relationships over which we have so little control, the families we can't change, the neighbours who irritate us, the colleagues we have to put up with. Friends are thought of as a joyous, freely choosen part of our lives, and it's assumed that those relationships are always pleasureable. If asked how you're spending the weekend and you say staying in or seeing your family or your colleagues, people may think you're a little sad. Say you're seeing friends and there's an assumption that you too are desirable, connectd.

On one level, friendships are very simple. They are the bonds between people who enjoy one another's company. But probe deeper and it's evident that there is no consensus about what it means. Start talking to people about friendship and it becomes clear that while people value it and seek it, there is also much confusion, hesitancy and disappointment about friends in many people's lives. Friendship is one of those areas full of hidden assumptions and unspoken rules. We only discover that our friendshio doesn't mean what we think it does when those assumptions clash.

There is no aggrement about what friendhsip involves, or what to do if it goes sour. No one would dream of suggesting to a friend that they start seeing in a friends' guidence counsellor to talk about the dynamics of their falling relationship. When things go wrong, we very rarely challenge our friends. That's because friendship is often a delicate affair and we don't want to tax it with too many demands. It's more common to absorb the hurt, and retreat. After all, there is no contract. The terms are unwritten, and nobody ever makes them explicit.

Recent research concluded that at any time we have around 30 friends, six of whom we think of as close. Over a lifetime we will make almost 400 friends, but we will keep in touch with fewer than 10 percen of them. Almost 60 per cent of us claim that our friendships are more important to us than career, money or family. Other studies shows that men have, on average, one fewer close friends than women do, that middle class men have more friends than working class men, and that both men and women find their friendhsips with women more emotionally satisfying than those with men. THose findings are fascinating, but they mask huge variations.