WHY HAVE FRIENDS
What is a friend, anyway? Unlike the Inuit and Yupik peoples with their many words for different kinds of snow, we have only four loosely defined categories of friendship: intimate friends, close friends, casual friends, and acquaintances. And there is also the ex-friend. The categorical distinctions are arbitrary and fluid. A casual friend today could become an intimate friend tomorrow or even an ex-friend on the same day. So, what are friends and why do we have them?
And what are we missing when we say we miss a friend, or any friend at all.
From sociological and anthropological perspectives, we can conclude that we, as a species, have a predilection to create a boundary around people that we affiliate with and those that we exclude. Within that loose and mutable boundary we collect friends, acquaintances and people, often nameless and unidentified, with whom we have no direct contact but define as network-worthy. These could be people in our political party, our school alumni, our neighborhood, our religion, our national identity, are variously defined cohorts.
Friends, though, are people we care somewhat about, miss when they are gone, grieve for when they die, and protect when they are endangered or in our need. The vast numbers of other people in the world may evoke sympathy when in crisis or they may arouse animosity when they appear aggressive. Or they may be ignored or evoke only indifference. And this would be the vast majority of other persons inhabiting our planet
It can be no surprise to learn that our mental apparatus is shaped genetically to provide us with a basis for all these levels of social connectiveness, social distinctions and social exclusions.
We come armed with innate instruments for love, affection, affiliation, and attachment as well as for reactions to the loss of those people associated with these feeling states. Grief and bereavement surround intimate and close connections always at the ready. Fear and anxiety are also mixed into the pathways around friendship and its boundaries. For loss is partially comprised of anxiety when important things go missing including people we rely on, need, depend on, and expect the attachment to endure and remain meaningful. Through all this runs thne ever present anxiety that all this may vanish. We stay in touch not only to enjoy the positive feelings of friendships but also to ward off the loss. Fear, too, slides into that mix: fear of abandonment even small ones. The neuronal pathways around friendship is subtle and complex, just as are the categories of friendship and how we regard and respond to them in the day-to-day course of our lives.
Is that good for us? From socio-biological perspective friends provide support emotionally and function to define our existence even as we tend to pay little attention to the stark definition of friendship. Friends are smoothly or abrasively factored into our general sense of ourselves without necessitating factoring out who are friends are or what we make of people who happen to be our friends.
We are like dumb machines about friends. We have them and interact with them, think about them when we do, wonder about them, discuss them — all without raising ourselves to a meta position: aware of categorizing them, assigning neuro pathways to define what mental operatives they evoke, isolating how effect much their loss or absence arouses which blend of emotions.
But what we realize, trying to understand all this, is that friends constitute a fundamental aspect of our existence, our identity, and our reason for living.
Friendship is just that simple.
