On the Nature of Friendship

Written by: Jorinde Berben
Image credit: Jorinde Berben

Friendship. Friends.
For a long time, those words, though often used, were quite mysterious to me. They seemed to have a quality others could grasp so easily, but that my overthinking mind couldn’t clearly define. Despite effort. Lots of effort. Lying-in-bed-awake-for-hours-trying-to-figure-this-out-effort.

I’ve never been without people I could call friends. As kids, we played together, there were birthday parties, and rope skipping, and games of tag. It was easy to follow along, to go with the flow of my friends. Just do what they do, and you’ll be fine.

It wasn’t until I got older that having friends, keeping friends, nurturing friendships, became something I did more deliberately. Not necessarily with the awareness of why I was doing it, but with attention to how I was expected to show up.

Fast forward a few decades, and I have made friends in many different places, from many different walks of life and from different generations. Some friends I see often, some only every few years. Many I’ve known for a long time, and a few are more recent.

And then, last year, one of my oldest friendships went through a crisis. Circumstances in my friend’s life were similar to circumstances in mine, and the trigger was so strong that this friendship of nearly 20 years was put on hold. Indefinitely.

It made me question everything I thought I’d known about the nature of friendship and it forced me to take a different perspective. I couldn’t rely on a bond that had seemed to be so certain for so long. Instead of debating what friendship meant to me, or to this person, or to my other friends, and what rules there were and what I should do and could expect, I could fall back on only one question. One factor I could control:

‘Who do I want to be in this friendship?’

What does it mean to be a friend to someone who doesn’t want you around for a while? How do I give space to that whilst also nurturing myself?
How can I be a friend to someone who’s absent in any way?
To someone who disagrees with me?
To someone who lives half a world away?
To someone who I know is struggling? With things I can’t help with. Or with things I could help with but that they don’t want to be helped with?

Instead of wondering why my friends didn’t respond a certain way, it freed my mind to consider where my priorities lay. Who did I want to see more of? Where did I feel I could contribute? Not playing the role of ‘friend’ but just as myself. Without shapeshifting in between moments with different friends and showing up as different versions yet never truly whole.

You see, friendships might be one of the few places where we can be fully ourselves. A romantic partner has expectations and investments in your relationship that require compromise. Our parents are our parents, first. Our kids shouldn’t be our friends. Our siblings can become our friends, if we’re lucky. (I am lucky.)

But friends don’t need you to play a major role in their lives. Those positions are reserved for other actors. They just want to spend time with you. They want to talk to you, dance with you, play a game, go for a walk. And a good friend never requires you to be anyone but yourself. On te contrary: They want you to only be yourself. The most yourself YOU could possibly be. After all, they are YOUR friend.

Children, up to a certain age, generally do this well because they haven’t learned yet to be anyone else.
Animals work the same way.
It just us (young) adults that seem to find this tricky. And those kids who are different and can’t pick up the unwritten rules quite as quickly. For them it might as well be rocket science (that would probably be easier, actually).

This past week, when my children weren’t staying with me, could’ve been filled with lonely days as I’m still readjusting to planning time alone after my partner and I split up. Instead, however, the days were filled with friends who came to visit or whom I visited. We talked, we walked, we watched cats, and chickens, and babies, and had coffee and tea and cocktails, and shared music and movies and books. I could be myself, and it wasn’t just enough, it was actually helpful.

One of the visits was to the friend I hadn’t seen in over a year. We said a few sentences about the situation, and that was that. The rest of the time we got caught up on how our lives have changed over the past year and a half, and it soon felt like no time had passed at all. We had both changed, and yet, as friends, are still very much the same.

My friends (and family) are now the anchors in my life.
Because of who they are, and, maybe even more so, because of who I am when I’m with them: Unapologetically myself.

Jorinde

P.S. Want to dive deeper into the subject of Friendship, its challenges and its rewards? This interview with Simon Sinek on Diary of a CEO is beautiful and insightful.