The basic definition of “friend” (I like to start with the definition of a word J) in the Oxford dictionary is “a person you know well and like, and who is not usually member of your family”. If you ask me, that is too lame to define what a true, close to heart, friend is. Everyone knows well and likes many people, not all will be counted even as a “friend”. So maybe the dictionary gives the original meaning and its come to mean something a lot more now.
Wiktionary (Wikipedia’s sister org – http://en.wiktionary.org) , I think does better, defining friend as “A person other than a family member, spouse or lover whose company one enjoys and towards whom one feels affection.” This definition at least mentions the feeling of affection. But even this seems insufficient to really define what a true, close to heart friend is. Or I would say, bot these definitions define 2 different levels or degrees of friendship, but there are many more…. I have been told that French language has some twenty-four different words or phrases to describe love, based on the degree of love you feel for the person. When I first heard this, I found it really funny. But maybe its needed. And I think maybe the same is true to some extent about friendship.
One can have many friends at the level at which Oxford seems to define it. Many people who we know well and like. We also enjoy company of many people and have fun doing things together. But we don’t share our secrets and deep feelings with them. That we do with very, very few people. And then there are others who can be a lot more than that too – people who we look to for guidance, for their thoughts – people who would be in the category of, I guess, “friend, philosopher, guide”.
Both these definitions also seem to exclude family members from “friends”. But it is possible that a family member can be a very dear friend with whom you share your deepest secrets. So I would actually make that another category of friends – people who are family as well as friends.
Having friends is, I think a very basic need. WE need friends to share things with – success and failures, to tell us the right from the wrong and to basically make us feel that we “belong” here.
And so, children start making friends from a very early age. As we grow up, our friends change – due to various factors – change of school, location, the activities we pursue change, our interests change. And in some way always but especially in the growing up years, what we do and how we think is very strongly influenced by people and happenings around us. And so when things like school and location change, our thinking or activities too are likely to change. And so not just specific friends will change but even the type of people we make friends with could change.
Of course there are other reasons why our friends change.
Sometimes we lose respect or the regard we had for our friend and somehow then its difficult to continue that friendship. Friendship has to have respect/regard for it to continue or to grow.
Some friendships die overnight due to some specific event or incident. Some others just fade away with time….
Then there are childhood friends that you meet after a long, long time – after may be many, many years. And sometimes you connect like you have never been apart. You can still chat as easily, you can still have same kind of fun together and you feel quite comfortable sharing your deepest thoughts with them. These kinds of friends are a real treasure and getting back in touch with them is one of the best things in life.
But there are some others, that when you meet after a long period, seem very different from what you remember them as. Maybe they have changed a lot. May be you have and maybe you are seeing the same person with different eyes now. But it seems difficult to connect to these people again at the same level. You wonder how you were such good friends all those years ago. This kind of encounters can be painful, especially if you have remembered that person very fondly for all those years and have really looked forward to getting in touch again.
Of course there are times when you meet new people and have such a wonderful “connect”. You seem to have similar thinking, liking, and interests. And though sometimes it does not go anywhere from here, some other times, this ends up being the beginning of a new, meaningful friendship.
Sometimes you also become close friends with someone in a short period of time after being acquainted with that person for many years. Maybe you get thrown together in a situation or go someplace together and suddenly discover each other all over again.
Strangely, there are friends, even real close friends (and maybe this is true especially about real close friends), that there is some habit of theirs or some behavioral trait that you find extremely annoying or irritating, but you are willing to let it go or live with it. Or you really like this person except for this one thing….
