On Friendship II.

My previous blog was about friendship and it seems that I’m not the only one thinking about this at present. In a recent article (The Times February 7), Cosmo Landesman reflects on the fragility of friendship. Is this due to our friendships becoming more and more “virtual” due to social networking sites and less “real”? Is it the pressures and pace of contemporary living that make giving time to friends increasingly difficult? Landesman writes:

The sad truth is that my friends and I are seeing less of each other than ever before. I wonder: do my friends notice this change? Do they care? Do I?

Much has been written about the shallow and ephemeral nature of online friendships found through social network sites such as Facebook. But back in the real, offline world friendships – at least mine – are changing for the worse. Once, there was a clear division between on and offline friendships. Not now.

The great paradox of our time is that today we’ve never had so much technology – the Internet, e-mails, tweets, texts – to bring us closer to our friends. And yet we have been so distant from them. We can all stay in touch all the time – but we never seem to have the time to actually see each other.

...I believe that friendship has an etiquette of its own, and it has cost me dearly. I once had a beautiful, super-smart, sexy girlfriend – but she would never return my phone calls. It drove me nuts and so I had to end our relationship.

Friends like to tell you: I’ll be there for you. But I don’t want them to be there for me, I want them to return my phone calls and respond to invites to dinner! In other words, I want to feel that our friendship is important, and that it is shown in small acts of thoughtfulness.

I sometimes wonder, if I didn’t make the effort to see certain friends, would they make the effort to see me? So I called one of my oldest and dearest friends to ask him that question for this piece. He hasn’t returned my call – that was two days ago – so I don’t know the answer.

Friends! Who needs them?

Unfortunately, I do.

Is all this just the whimpering cry of some middle-aged neurotic? Or, the rose tinted longing for some golden age of friendship that may or may not have existed? Is friendship possible in our crooked times?

Landesman’s anxieties have been shared by everyone who takes friendship seriously. Friendships are fragile and complex ways of relating. This is, in part, because the desire “to become one instead of two” in friendship is not the same as the unity that lovers seek. Whereas lovers strive to obliterate the distance that separates them by fusing themselves one to another, friendship cherishes the distance that exists between two individuals. What unifies friends is the discipline and effort of maintaining their mutual distance in love. If that distance is threatened by desire, domination or possessiveness then the friendship will begin to corrode and disintegrate.

“The simple fact of having pleasure in thinking in the same way as the beloved being, or in any case the fact of desiring such an agreement of opinion, “ writes the French thinker, Simone Weill, “attacks the purity of friendship at the same time as its intellectual integrity. It is very frequent. But at the same time pure friendship is rare.”

Friendship delights in the fact that there are two distinct persons involved in a loving relationship. The two friends consent to remain two and to celebrate not only the things they share in common, but above all their differences. Friendships are possibly the only relationships where individuals do not have to disguise or compromise their differences. They have the rare liberty of being themselves. It is the difference and space that exists between them that gives them the freedom to hide nothing and fear nothing. Friendship is, in the words of St Augustine, "sweet beyond all the sweetness of life that I had experienced." That is why they are important, precious and very rare.

Bromance, friendship and The King's Speech

Some critics have described The King’s Speech as the first “bromance” of 2011. They are right and they are wrong in equal measures. The hybrid term “bromance” indicates the friendship between two men. In cultural terms it is a street recognition of the value and importance of men having male friends. This is the secure environment where a man can reveal or articulate things about himself in a way that is different to the way he would do so to his wife, girlfriend, work colleagues or gang of mates down the pub. Unfortunately, the term “bromance” brings with it associations of juvenile puerility. The central relationship in The King’s Speech between Bertie, the future King George VI, and his speech therapist, Lionel Logue, has no trace of such associations and thus makes for a more profound and moving depiction of their friendship.

Friendships can be based on interests, experiences and personality traits shared in common. However, The King’s Speech is a reminder that deep friendships can occur between seemingly mismatched characters. In this case, royalty and a commoner, an English monarch and an Australian speech therapist, a man straight-jacketed by convention and a man who explodes conventional practices, one trapped by the wounds of the past and one uncertain about the possibilities of the future. Yet, these combinations work because each man sees in the other something that has a healing quality and is life-affirming. In this friendship both men discover a masculine idiom with which to communicate their fears and longings.



Aristotle devoted two chapters of his Ethics to friendship and all future reflections on friendship have, to a greater or lesser extent, been influenced by his thought. Aristotle believed that friendship

is almost necessary for living. Nobody would choose to live without friends even if he had all the other good things. Indeed those who hold wealth and office and power are thought to stand in special need of friends; for what is the use of prosperity to them if they are denied the opportunity for beneficence. In poverty too and all the other misfortunes of life people regard their friends as their only refuge. We praise those who love their friends, and the possession of many friends is held to be one of the fine things of life. What is more, people think that good men and friends are the same.

So, for Aristotle, friendship is a kind of virtue, not only because it can potentially bind together the divisions of class, age and social rank, but because deep within it incubates the germ of goodness. The highest form of friendship will involve the reciprocal recognition of goodness, its nurture and unhindered growth.
Aristotle hewed three broad categories of friendship. The first two he considered inferior to the third; nonetheless all had some claim to be properly described as “friendship”. The categories were:

(i) Friendship based on utility. This would include the friends we intermittently call upon to fill vacant evenings and help keep at bay the bruised clouds of loneliness – friends who will amuse us, flatter us and distract us from ourselves.

(ii) Friendship based on pleasure. This type of friendship often comes as a powerful twister of looks, feelings and passion which eventually blows itself out, leaving varying degrees of emotional destruction. Once the feelings have been stripped bare and the passion exhausted, so this friendship lacking real foundations, subsides and eventually collapses.

(iii) Friendship based on goodness. These friendships are stable, possess athletic stamina and can weather the fickleness of human emotions and motives because they are based on goodness. Aristotle writes that

Only the friendship of those who are good, and similar in their goodness, is perfect. For these people each alike wish good for the other qua good, and they are good in themselves. And it is those who desire the good of their friends for their friends’ sake that are most truly friends, because each loves the other for what he is, and not for any incidental quality.

Aristotle suggests that without this pure form of friendship our lives would be incomplete and we would remain partially lost to ourselves. Tempering his natural idealism he candidly admits that “such friendships are rare...because men of this kind are few...The wish for friendship develops rapidly, but friendship does not” or as the poet, Elizabeth Jennings puts it, “they (friendships) are not claimed but courted, honoured, considered.”

The friendship between Bertie and Lionel Logue appears to have possessed these qualities. After a slow, stammering gestation period, their lifelong friendship was courted, honoured, considered. They were able to penetrate their character differences, idiosyncrasies and failings and see within each other the treasure of goodness. “Easy at first,” writes W.H.Auden, “the language of friendship/Is, as we soon discover,/Very difficult to speak well...” In The King’s Speech we meet two men who found their voices and learnt to speak the language of friendship well.