Definition
Friendship is a stable close relationship based on mutual respect, trust and openness, sincerity and warmth of feelings, personal commitment to each other, sympathy, common interests, the need for communication, and willingness to provide selfless help to each other.
Very important:
- Friendly feelings arise in contact, in interaction, in relationships. They cannot arise in a vacuum. Europeans cannot be friends with the indigenous inhabitants of the island of Madagascar without correspondence or telephone calls. Contact is absolutely necessary.
- Friendly feelings are tested and strengthened in practice, in the practice of life. Very often this occurs after a completely unique situation of rescue from trouble, during inhuman hardships or trials, or during the exchange of gifts of exceptional importance, or in exceptional circumstances. As the Little Humpbacked Horse said: “Now all friendship is needed...” He whispered something over the boiling water, and Ivan not only did not get boiled in a boiling cauldron, but turned into the handsome Ivan Tsarevich.
- Friendly feelings arise spontaneously. Their appearance cannot be predicted in advance, ordered “at the behest of a pike, at my will.” You can’t set a certain number in your plan for the year: “Get five reliable friends within a year, so that they won’t spill water.” Therefore, there is always a share of mysticism and miracle in friendship. Appreciate her! Take care of her!
- Friendly feelings are feelings between people of equal status. At least the differences in status that exist between them are not emphasized in communication. Metaphorically, one can imagine that friends, at the moment of entering the space of friendly communication, take off their shoulder straps and become equal to each other.
- It is understood that friendly mutual assistance is disinterested and is provided free of charge, that is, for nothing. Just like Winnie the Pooh gives a pot without honey to his friend Eeyore. But I insist on a different formulation. Friendly mutual assistance is possible only on conditions of mutual benefit. The currency conversion of this exchange can be any. In one direction - practical help in action, in the other - expert advice. There - recommendation and patronage, back - psychological support and wasted time. Long-term friendly interaction is possible only when the internal subjective barometer-user shows: “I need this friendly exchange, it is beneficial, it is necessary.” As the cat Matroskin said: “Working together for my benefit is ennobling.” It is precisely this subjectively perceived predominance of benefits from friendly relations over costs, subjectively perceived by each participant in friendly communication, that creates the basis for the desire for regular contact, trust, mutual interest, and a tolerant or condescending attitude towards each other’s shortcomings. Whether friends realize it or not, the benefits of communication are always greater than the disadvantages.
To summarize, the main thing a person needs friendship for is protection and support. A friend is someone you can lean on through thick and thin and rely on in times of success and failure. Sometimes a friend's individual success is the real test of friendship, much more serious than grief or misfortune. One of the most significant indicators of true friendship for me is the ability to sincerely rejoice in a friend’s success. But the willingness to help is above all!
What is true friendship?
Some people use the term “friendship” to designate friendly relationships that were formed as a result of a common cause, work, or neighborhood. In life, we are all surrounded by friends and acquaintances, some come, some go. True friendship - what is it, what is it like, how is it different from friendly relationships? True friendship remains between people, despite time and distance, it has been tested over the years and is based on trust, respect and help.
True friendship is when there is mutual understanding and mutual assistance between people. Mutual understanding sometimes arises at the first acquaintance and remains for life, and sometimes it is developed over a long time during close communication and then they say - “he and I have eaten a ton of salt” or “I understand him perfectly.” When people are truly friends, they inevitably become emotionally close “in spirit.”
Mutual assistance is a necessary quality in friendship. As Vizbor sang in the song - “if I get sick, I won’t go to the doctors, I’ll turn to my friends”... Willingness to share joys and sorrows and support in difficult times are indicators that there is real friendship between people. Determining how strong and sincere your friendships are often occurs not in a joyful and serene time for everyone, but in a difficult period, when “a friend is known in trouble.” At the same time, an important indicator of a true friend is the ability to rejoice in the successes and achievements of another.
So why do many people’s attitudes towards friendship change as they age?
The answer, in my opinion, is obvious. In youth, a person is less confident in his own abilities, he is just learning, just mastering this world, trying to find his place in it. He really needs friends at this stage of his life. After all, psychologically he must leave his parental family and face all the trials and challenges of the outside world alone, and become a hero. In these trials, he must harden himself, gain an independent adult position, become successful in his business, find a spouse, and give birth to children. The tasks, you see, are not simple.
And friends play the role of a support group for any person. If in childhood, when faced with fears or powerlessness, he resorted to his parents and sought consolation from them, then at the stage of growing up, the role of psychological support and safety net is played by friends and girlfriends.
Friends improve our quality of life
Friends can change our value system so that we can give more meaning to our lives.
Spending time with friends fills our lives with great conversation, heartfelt care and support, and laughs out loud. When we go through difficult times, friends are always ready to help us. When we succeed, they smile at our good fortune. With practical, positive people in our lives, we will be more mindful of gratitude and doing good deeds for others. We don't just thrive when we have healthy friendships, we thrive.
Men and women have different friendships
Women organize friendly get-togethers - bachelorette parties - with the goal of speaking out and receiving emotional support, exchanging psychological strokes and signs of attention, sympathy and empathy. Such sharing with friends of the details of one’s life drama is sometimes very, very expressive and even theatrical. But no solutions are developed in the process. The sympathy of friends is almost always enough to literally revive the sufferer from the ashes, improve her mood and well-being, and guide her, radiant and renewed, to a new happy life with an easy step.
For men, friendly communication is either common interests, a joint business, or mutual assistance in solving current problems. Men come to each other for specific advice or necessary help. “I tried to get a bear from a den. Nothing works. Help me, friends!
Although there are exceptions to every rule.
Friendship or love: relationships between a man and a woman
In my opinion, it is very important not to confuse these concepts.
Unlike friendship, love relationships are based on the sexual attraction of partners. In its extreme form, pure romance looks like this: “I’m damn attractive, you’re damn attractive. So why waste time? Come to the hayloft at midnight. You will not regret…"
I believe that friendship between a man and a woman is very possible. The options here are:
- Impotence or complete lack of sexual attraction to each other.
- One partner loves, but the other does not (pseudo-friendship).
- One partner has forbidden himself to love (taboo: for example, the beloved is the girlfriend of his best friend, and the thought of a romantic relationship with her is perceived as absolutely unacceptable), and the other simply does not love.
- Both partners sublimated sexual energy (for example, into creativity) and completely excluded the sexual context from the relationship.
- Both partners are friends, receive mutual benefits from the fact that they train, develop communication skills with the opposite sex before meeting a real lover.
- Both partners have a homosexual orientation.
- Both friendship partners are monogamous (totally faithful at the level of romantic feelings to their husbands and wives).
- Former partners and spouses can maintain relationships after a divorce at the level of friendship if the passion has faded, but they managed to maintain respect for each other, and concerns about joint children oblige them to maintain contact.
- Both partners consider a close, trusting relationship without sex possible.
- Both partners are too young or too old for sexual and romantic relationships.
Dear reader, I think that this modest list does not exhaust the variety of options. You can add your opinion in the comments.
Conflict provides a chance to transform relationships
Do quarrels and conflicts between loved ones destroy relationships or only strengthen them?
Elena Stankovskaya: Both. There are quarrels that strengthen relationships. Because in conflict we finally tell each other the truth, declare our needs, present our desires. And in this sense, conflict provides a chance to transform relationships. But this chance is not always realized. My colleague Vadim Petrovsky calls this “inability to negotiate in relationships.” In this case, conflicts are dead-end, they lead nowhere. Psychology has many views on why and how we fight. For example, there are conflicts that occur as an attempt to maintain intimacy and security in a relationship. Conflict is a cry that I want more affection from you, I wish there was more energy in our relationship. But there are conflicts that are completely destructive. If we attack another, if we use power, if we go into conflict to suppress someone’s will, then such an attempt is obviously fruitless. Sometimes we conflict because our parents did it that way and we learned the same thing. And this is where a psychologist is needed. It can help a person see this repetition and stop it.
Systemic reasons and solutions in the case of strange friendships
From the point of view of systemic family therapy, very often friendship between a man and a woman, devoid of sexual overtones, is a consequence of role confusion. A partner of the opposite sex in such friendly relationships can replace (represent) for another a deceased or unborn sister or brother, a son or daughter, a disappeared twin, or an early deceased mother or father.
In this case, sexual relations with such a partner are taboo and nipped in the bud as incestuous. Friends-partners can chat with each other for hours, share the most intimate information, as if in confession, admire each other and experience the warmest, most beautiful, pure feelings for each other, a strong need to see each other, date and do something together, but They don’t even get to the point of sexual interaction. They simply experience, on a symbolic level, those feelings with close relatives that they were not able to fully enjoy within the family.
And it also happens that the confusion concerns the fate and feelings of such a person from the family system, in whose fate there was no happy marriage, sex, family, children, but instead there was loneliness, fulfillment of a monastic vow or military duty, widowhood, marriage without love or death in childbirth.
The confusion of roles, intertwining with the destinies and feelings of such people results in a paralyzing unconscious fear of sexual relationships, and partners are stuck for a long time at the level of friendship. Their relationship does not develop, does not become closer and deeper. They religiously keep their distance. Often, a partner is selected for this from another city or country. And this lasts for years.
The solution to problems of this kind is quite simple in form, but very complex in content. We need to clear up the confusion. Stop playing other people's roles yourself and stop putting on your friend a role that is alien to him. To do this, you must first understand these roles, and then firmly and decisively turn to your life and your relationships without confusion. Accompanying this process of awareness by an experienced professional psychologist is very, very desirable.
The biggest difficulty in this work is the presence of so-called “secondary benefits” from the presence of the problem.
The pain of sexual unfulfillment, constant longing for intimacy, separation and distance in such friendships very often become the exposed nerve of poetic or artistic creativity. Poems flow in a stream, full of aching sadness, unquenched passion... I warn such friends: “After therapy, you may find yourself a mate, a spouse, a sexual partner, but perhaps you will stop writing poetry.” In response I hear: “What are you doing?! How is this possible! I will never give up poetry! I was almost accepted into the union of poets! I have a name in the poetry community.”
Attachment can be insecure
What is dangerous attachment? The heartfelt affection of two people for each other looks idyllic from the outside, but in reality it can be selfish, demanding, on the verge of emotional terror. And then this attachment becomes burdensome for both parties, doesn't it?
Survey: About 60% of couples break up due to different levels of culture
Elena Stankovskaya: This is one of the options for what is an insecure attachment. Most often, this is due to an anxious type of attachment. This is when I feel that I cannot survive without another, and therefore I allow him to abuse me. There are also mutually destructive relationships where partners cause a lot of pain to each other, experiment with each other's boundaries and destroy intimacy. This suggests that a secure attachment has not been formed. But if it exists, then close relationships are always beneficial. They relieve many psychological problems. In addition, there is an “avoidant” type of attachment, when people avoid relationships and live alone. And they try not to allow another to be significant to them. Some people feel fine, while others develop symptoms of anxiety and depression. Even if you are an avoidantly attached person, what you really need is attachment. You need a relationship, you need someone to whom you will tell about how you don’t need a relationship.
Friendship is a very important help in business
If you're doing business or a project with a good friend you've known since childhood, you're in a situation of greater predictability. After all, you have experience of quarrels and mistakes, grievances and reconciliations, shared emotional experiences. You remained friends, because you found solutions in a wide variety of situations.
You know what to expect from such a business partner. This reduces your risks. This allows you to quickly distribute responsibilities according to each other's strengths and weaknesses. You know them well too. And most importantly, if you are old friends, you always have a common base of values, similarity in life goals and guidelines. It will be easier for you to come to agreements in business.
Universal rules for safety in friendship
1. The first idea is a pilot project
Remember, there are no one hundred percent guarantees of success either in love, friendship, or joint business. Each of these projects could become a lifelong project. A mistake can be very costly and the experience can be very painful.
Therefore, start testing your friendships with a small “pilot project” with the person. Hang wallpaper in your or his apartment, do it together and see how it turns out. The slightest suspicion that you are alone with a fry, and your partner is like seven with a spoon - and there is no point in continuing a further relationship with this person, or rather, deepening it.
Each person is only ready for a certain depth of relationship. Don’t rush your partner to dive headlong into the pool of friendship. Maybe it will grow together and get used to it, or maybe not! Maybe you are destined to remain friends, but never become friends!
Remember that any serious friendship requires some grinding. Remember how D'Artagnan met his friends. They were rude to each other, challenged each other to a duel, intending to kill each other no less. And only the experience of a joint feat - together they repelled the attack of the cardinal's guards - made them look at each other in a new way, see the benefits of cooperation and become friends. It turned out that it was very beneficial to have such a daring and insolent young man as a friend. He fences like a god!
Quick acquaintances occur on the basis of similar interests and values: “Great! I love Mozart’s music too!” But long-term friendships are possible with mutual complementarity and the ability to help. Therefore, the minimum program: do not step on each other’s sore calluses! Don't laugh at his weaknesses! Maximum program: confidently help your partner, using your strengths as a counterbalance to his weaknesses.
2. Idea two - negotiate through dialogue
I never tire of telling all my clients and students: frank and honest dialogue is the best, most reliable foundation of any healthy relationship. This is very difficult work - to speak about your truth openly and sincerely, at the same time not offending your partner, respecting his own truth.
It is very difficult to convey your point of view calmly, structuredly, in the “language of benefit” of your partner, taking into account his interests and values. It is very difficult to listen carefully and respectfully to his point of view and integrate it into your picture of the world. This is a joint work that friends and partners are capable of.
It is important not to turn communication into pure flattery, as in Schwartz’s play “The Naked King”: “Your Majesty! You know that I am an honest old man, a straight old man. I tell the truth straight to the face, even if it is unpleasant... Let me tell you directly, rudely, like an old man: you are a great man, sir! Forgive me my unbridledness - you are a giant! Light!"
3. Idea three - do not abuse your attention and time
Yes, a friend is a person who completes you, adds something very valuable to your life. Helps in trouble, sympathizes in defeat, rejoices at your successes, admires your achievements. But it cannot remain a container for your negative feelings indefinitely. You shouldn’t endlessly exploit his patience and play with one goal.
Please measure the load. He's not the only one who cares about you. Take care of him too. Otherwise, sooner or later the Rabbit will ask Winnie the Pooh and Piglet: “Why is your corporate party always held in my house and at my expense?!”
4. Idea four - don’t live in the cemetery of dead relationships
Yes, at a certain stage of your life you were close friends, helped each other, helped each other out of a variety of situations, saved you from troubles... But sooner or later, the personal development trajectory of each of you can change and everyone can go their own way.
Agree, the friendship of girlfriends changes a lot when one of them gets married and gives birth to children. For many, the death of their only friend becomes an even stronger test. And if he occupied a very important place in your life, made a significant contribution to your mental well-being, and suddenly he is gone - this can become a real life drama.
Each person has his own cemetery of relationships - a mournful list of people whose friendship was interrupted for various reasons. Sometimes he literally lives in this cemetery, lives in the past. Angry that he was abandoned, crying, whining, sad. Often this happens completely unconsciously.
The solution here is simple and complex at the same time. You should not dwell on the feeling of grief and loss, you should not bury yourself and your life along with the death of your only friend or because of separation from him. Look for new acquaintances. I'm sure there are plenty of opportunities for varied communication these days. Interest clubs, yoga, dancing, vocals, painting schools, education and training, summer cottages, sports clubs, volunteer projects - all this helps to unwind and switch gears, to find new friends.
The easiest way to help yourself is to start helping others. If you can establish contact in small things, you will have a chance to establish contact in large things.
Summarize
There is no friendship - look for it! If you find friendship, appreciate it! But remember: nothing is stable in this world. Everything changes: you develop and change, your partner develops and changes, your relationship also changes. And that's okay. Develop and renew relationships to everyone's joy!
From the editor
Both friendship and love are relationships with people. If you can't keep friends, it's unlikely that you'll be able to create a long-term alliance. Often the reason for pathological “bad luck” with people is that you yourself are building destructive relationships. Alexandru Banarescu will tell you how to understand whether you have such a problem :
Solitude is a human necessity, and loneliness is his choice. Indeed, if you think about it, we choose to be alone, consciously or not. Psychologist Olga Khodaeva explains how we strive for loneliness without realizing it ourselves: .
Happiness, both in friendship and in love, is work. To achieve it, you need to avoid the main mistakes in relationships that Olga Spiridonova talks about: .
Why are we friends?
Friendship affects the quality and duration of our lives. Research shows that female baboons who form strong bonds with their peers or immediate family live longer and have more offspring. Apparently, in them, like in humans, in this case adrenocortical activity decreases, the level of short-term stress drops and anabolic processes accelerate, which allows the body to grow and develop better.
Friendship increases your chances of living a long life while maintaining enviable health: the more support a person receives, the lower the risk of viral and heart disease. But the absence of friends is fraught with serious mental problems: self-esteem and self-confidence decrease, anxiety levels increase, and an acute lack of strong social connections can lead to depression.
