Thank you for being a friend

I had to write a couple short papers in philosophy about friendship. In my first one, I claimed that there were no possible objectivities about friends because each friend we have is so different. How could we possibly set criteria for who can be our friends? I thought a lot harder about the second one, though, and came up with this. It's definitely not the best thing I've ever written, but I wanted to share it with my friends.

P.S. I tried hard to add a picture of us to this post, but Blogger just wasn't having it.

A friend is someone who wants to listen to you. Thinking about friendship again, true friendship, there are certain objectivities. I know a lot of people. I’ve always been very involved in school, extra-curricular activities, church. Basically, you name it, I’ve been there. The people I’ve encountered in firefighting are extremely different than the people I’ve encountered in theater. Most of these people, I enjoy being around. I don’t mind their company, and often times I even like it. I would, in fact, deem them my friends. I think true friendship, though, is something deeper.

A true friend is someone you want to go to when you feel like the world is on your shoulders and you’re about to collapse from the pressure. But even more than that, a true friend is someone who wants you to come to them, even if they know they can’t answer your questions or alleviate your pain. A true friend is willing to accept that sometimes all they can do is listen. They don’t feel the need to offer advice because they know sometimes we need to work things out on our own.

As we discussed with Plato and Socrates, we can’t just be handed all the answers on a silver platter, especially if the person we’re trying to get the answers from doesn’t have any idea what they are either. Maybe I haven’t answered “the existential question”: the meaning of life. But my true friends will assure me that there’s nothing wrong with that; they love me all the same.

If I think I’ve found an answer and begin to change, for better or worse, they are with me. If I change for the better, they encourage me. If I change for the worse, they aren’t afraid to point it out because we trust each other’s judgments (while keeping in mind that they aren’t necessarily always right). True friends aren’t perfect; that’s not the point. But true friends admit it when they realize they are wrong and mean it when they are sorry.

To address my own question about true friendship and liking someone in earnest, both people have to be committed to the friendship for it to be true. If Susie likes me, but I don’t care for Susie, we’re not true friends. I might accept if she “friended me on Facebook” because Facebook is basically shallow and fickle, but I would not go to her with a problem, or with exciting news, and I would not share in her laughter and tears either. A true friend wants to be with you through it all, rain or shine. Maybe that’s cheesy. But I think some of the truths in life are cheesy and cliché. Walter Winchell once said, “A real friend is someone who walks in when the rest of the world walks out.” An unknown person said something like, “A good friend will bail you out of jail, but a true friend will be sitting right next to you saying, ‘Damn, that was fun!’” And certainly there are hundreds of other friendship quotes. These two illustrate the two ends of the spectrum when it comes to true friendship, however. A true friend will be there, and most importantly, wants to be there, when you need them, whether you need a good laugh or a good cry.

It’s not complicated and it’s not profound. It’s a simple truth. As Christi Mary Warner said, “A [true] friend is one who knows all about you and likes you anyway.” The true friend just brings out the best in you whenever they can.