Friendship

The nature of it changes through the years

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This morning, I got to thinking - don’t ask me why; if there’s a pattern beyond randomness to my thought patterns, I haven’t discerned it - about who the people in my life at this point are whom I’d consider close friends.

That in turn spurred my consideration of the question of how one establishes qualifications for an inner circle.

Does that process look different when we’re ten, seventeen, twenty-seven, forty-five, sixty-eight? I daresay it does.

While we’re, hopefully, always growing, at least in the most meaningful sense, we’re growing in more ways as children, adolescents and young adults than we are at later stages. Shared curiosities, for instance, have a lot to do with the formation of childhood friendships. That’s also true of adolescent friendships, but they have the added component of hormonal awakening, which can up the potential for mischief, as well as tawdry frames of mind such as jealousy. A bit later, common ambitions bond us to others.

Much has been written over the centuries about what distinguishes friendship among human relations. Trust, loyalty, listening, humor and and having shared profound experiences, taken in sum, get a lot of mentions.

I think friendships have gradations. There are some people who are your friends and you know it through and through, but you weren’t there - usually because you hadn’t met them yet - for some moments in their lives that are key to understanding them at the deepest level. You still relish getting together with them and you’d go to the wall for them, but there’s only so much you can know about them.

I think the sweetest friendships of all are those that go back decades and include the fullest panoply of shared experiences. Certainly there have to be laughter and tears, but there ought to be a few awkward moments, either between friends or witnessed by one of them, a tight fix that either luck or ingenuity pulled you out of, and at least one opportunity on each side to see the other side embarrass himself or herself.

In one of these old, old friendships, something to be savored is the considerable volume of stuff that doesn’t need to be talked about. There’s this sense of resolution that clears the way for a fertile present. Reminiscences become more selective. They generally need to pass a test for eliciting a chuckle, or leading to some line of conversation tethered to the present.

We know each other so well, we can’t help but afford each other recognized dignity. We were there when many of the battle scars were achieved. We know what our friend is made of.

A phrase one frequently finds in conversations with friends of that deepest kind is “I know.”