What's in a Friend?

Events in my life of late have caused me to ponder friendship and what it really means...

What does it mean to call someone friend or to be called friend?

Perhaps it means something different to all of us, but if we aren't working off the same definitions, then that is going to cause problems when conflict arises.

I learned recently that the word friend didn't mean the same thing to me that it did to the person on the other end. Then I learned it again, and again. I think it's beginning to stick.

Three times, apparently, is my price for a lesson.

Here is what I thought it meant.

A friend is someone who has a claim on me. Not a legal one — a moral one. If a friend calls at eleven at night, I answer. If a friend is wrong, I tell him, and I tell him first, before I tell anybody else. If a friend and I disagree about money, we work out the money, and the friendship is not the thing being negotiated. That last part is the whole of it, I think. I assumed the friendship was the floor. Everything else got settled on top of it.

What I found out is that for some people the friendship isn't the floor. It's the roof. It's the nice thing sitting on top of everything else being agreeable, and when the weather turns, it's the first thing to come off.

I don't write that bitterly. I write it as a man who had the definitions wrong and paid the difference.

Because there's a version of friend that means we enjoy each other. There's a version that means we are useful to each other. There's one that means we've known each other a long time, which is really just a fact about calendars. And there's the one I meant: I am for you, and my being for you does not depend on you being easy.

All four of those men will use the same word. Not one of them is lying.

The trouble is you can't tell them apart on a good day. On a good day every one of those definitions produces the same behavior — a text back, a laugh, a favor that costs nothing. The definitions only separate under load. Conflict doesn't ruin a friendship. Conflict reveals what the friendship has been the whole time. Money does it. Illness does it. Death does it — bury someone you love and watch the list sort itself without any help from you. So does being wrong in public. So does being right in public at an inconvenient moment.

Conflict doesn't ruin a friendship. Conflict reveals what the friendship has been the whole time.

The proverb says a friend loves at all times, and a brother is born for adversity. I always took that as sentiment. It isn't sentiment. It's a specification.

That's why it took me three passes to learn. On a good day I couldn't see it. I had to be under load.

Now the part I'd rather not write.

I have been on the other end of this. Somebody out there has a paragraph like the one above and I am the man in it. There's a name I haven't said in a while, a call I meant to return, a hard stretch of somebody else's life that I sat out because I was busy — and busy is the most respectable way there is to not show up. I'd like to believe those were oversights. Some of them were. Some of them were a definition I was using without ever admitting I had it.

So I don't get to publish a grievance. What I get to publish is a definition, and then go live somewhere it can be checked.

Here's mine, as near as I can say it:

A friend is someone whose good I want even when it costs me something, and even when he isn't making it easy. A friend gets my honesty before he gets my agreement. A friend can be wrong with me and still be in. And if it ends, it ends because something died — not because something got expensive.

What I can't do is require that of anybody else. That's the piece I've been slow to understand. I can't hand a man my definition and hold him to it. He never signed it. Most likely he never read it. And a fair share of the hurt I've carried came from grading people against a standard I never bothered to say out loud. If the word means something different to you, the honest move is for me to find that out early, in daylight, rather than discover it in the middle of a fight.

Which means the work isn't finding better friends. The work is being clearer, sooner — and then being the thing I've described whether or not it comes back to me.

I still use the word. I use it slower now. And when I use it I try to mean the whole weight of it, because the older I get the shorter the list gets, and the shorter it gets the more it turns out to be worth.