The idea of friendship is a misunderstood one. Confusion starts when affection is credited to be its foundation. It is not. Friendship is always founded on convenience. Though not just in the narrow sense of the word, limited to only physical world, but encompassing emotional convenience as well, and significantly so. In fact, this emotional convenience is the basis of beginning of strongest bonding of people into friends. A friend is one whose presence imposes minimum inhibitions-a big convenience.
A mild form of friendship may develop when there is tolerance towards each other's behaviour, where people feel free to be themselves. This, however, can be achieved through a rule based gathering, say a club. An example of purest form of convenience. However, this alone may not develop in a deep friendship and may remain a just a convenience. Deep friendship cuts much deeper. Someone who cuts through the frivolity of public persona that we maintain and looks at the key component of our emotional core with a belief that in the end this component is us, and he or she is ok with it.....once that happens he or she ignore all our quirks, whims, oddities and accepts us, tolerates us.
Knowing the key component of our core gives them comfort, a peg to hang their trust on, trust that our core will lead us to be considerate, generous, and selfless when they are at their most vulnerable. Highest freedom from inhibition that anyone seeks is to be oneself when one is most vulnerable. And by definition a true friend needs to provide that. Truest friendship is in part a kind of deal with the devil, in the sense that you promise to look at the darkness in your friend's soul without flinching.
But, to know this core takes time and an initial exposure is necessary condition. This exposure is normally forced and circumstantial, and thus all friendship begin by chance. In a particular situation, when people are forced together, out of many one is chosen because one was perceived as best option.
True friendship does not begin as dependence but as a convenience, but ends up in dependence. Dependence created by tested and verified trust. Friendship is not like romantic love, which is much more biological and much less selective (sexual impulse is biological and ignores behavioural aspects of the partner when at peak), or a love that is mutual in generations linked by a gene, which also is biological and not selective at all (Brother loves brother, father loves son etc). In these cases affection precedes knowing the person, and always is cause of knowing; however, all the affection that we feel for a friend is not the cause of the friendship but a result of it...
-Pulastya
A mild form of friendship may develop when there is tolerance towards each other's behaviour, where people feel free to be themselves. This, however, can be achieved through a rule based gathering, say a club. An example of purest form of convenience. However, this alone may not develop in a deep friendship and may remain a just a convenience. Deep friendship cuts much deeper. Someone who cuts through the frivolity of public persona that we maintain and looks at the key component of our emotional core with a belief that in the end this component is us, and he or she is ok with it.....once that happens he or she ignore all our quirks, whims, oddities and accepts us, tolerates us.
Knowing the key component of our core gives them comfort, a peg to hang their trust on, trust that our core will lead us to be considerate, generous, and selfless when they are at their most vulnerable. Highest freedom from inhibition that anyone seeks is to be oneself when one is most vulnerable. And by definition a true friend needs to provide that. Truest friendship is in part a kind of deal with the devil, in the sense that you promise to look at the darkness in your friend's soul without flinching.
But, to know this core takes time and an initial exposure is necessary condition. This exposure is normally forced and circumstantial, and thus all friendship begin by chance. In a particular situation, when people are forced together, out of many one is chosen because one was perceived as best option.
True friendship does not begin as dependence but as a convenience, but ends up in dependence. Dependence created by tested and verified trust. Friendship is not like romantic love, which is much more biological and much less selective (sexual impulse is biological and ignores behavioural aspects of the partner when at peak), or a love that is mutual in generations linked by a gene, which also is biological and not selective at all (Brother loves brother, father loves son etc). In these cases affection precedes knowing the person, and always is cause of knowing; however, all the affection that we feel for a friend is not the cause of the friendship but a result of it...
-Pulastya
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