Friendship

Friendship is a relationship between 2 /or more than 2/ people. But of course relation can only be established if both parties have that wish.

Friendship has as many definitions as there are personalities. So I guess it doesn’t have a specific definition, like “love”.

For me friendship is a relation: a very deep, trustworthy, important, long-lasting, intimate, beautiful relation. Thus I cannot call everyone I know a friend. I can call them acquaintances but not friends, because for me a friend is someone who knows me. And for knowing each other people must communicate with each other, spend time together, do some stuff together and thus they’ll get to know each other. So I call a friend only the person whom I’ve known for quite a long time.

Friends demonstrate some things during their relation and consequently the value of their friendship is being built. Some of those things are the followings: to desire what’s best for your friend, empathy, mutual understanding and compassion, the ability to understand the condition and feelings of the friend and help him/her, deep mutuality, the feasibility to be oneself in front of the friend without the fear of judgment and so on.

Along the progress of the relation between humans friendship has undergone many changes too and each culture has gained and maintained its own peculiarities of friendship. For example the people of the USA use the word friend very widely and they can consider the person they’ve known for a week a friend. I guess they mean a state between “more than an acquaintance and less than a friend”. In Islamic culture the friendship between a girl and a boy is kept to the minimum as they consider the friendship as a companionship and different genders may have a prudent friendship only if they’ve got a plan for a future marriage. In Germany a person can have a few friends but those friendships last for a lifetime as loyalty is at a very high degree among them. They may appear aloof to strangers as they keep a distance when they meet new people. In Ancient Greece friendship was a theme for moral philosophy and in Ancient Greek the same word was used for “lover” and “friend”.

There are different types of friendships: pen-pals, mates, agentic friendship, internet relationships, imaginary friends, blood brother, buddy, acquaintance etc. And if we compare the modern times and the ancient times, we’ll see that to the Ancients friendship was more important and they considered it a serious thing. But nowadays we see things like “open relationships, cross-sex friendships, homosexual relations” and these things spoil the beautiful and pure idea that friendship holds within it.

Friendship is a wonderful thing that gives us an opportunity to know ourselves, to explore our personality and make us a better person, gain some things, discover new worlds… We must use that opportunity but at the same time we must be cautious not to make friends with wrong people because they’ll hurt us afterwards.

 

I hope I’m a good friend and want to say thanks to all of my friends!!!!

 

Here you go, some quotes about friendship.

Be courteous to all, but intimate with few, and let those few be well tried before you give them your confidence.

―George Washington 

“A friend is someone who knows all about you and still loves you.”
― Elbert Hubbard

“It is not a lack of love, but a lack of friendship that makes unhappy marriages.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

                “If you live to be a hundred, I want to live to be a hundred minus one day so I never have to live without you.”
― A.A. Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh

                “A friend is one that knows you as you are, understands where you have been, accepts what you have become, and still, gently allows you to grow.”
― William Shakespeare

“You are my best friend as well as my lover, and I do not know which side of you I enjoy the most. I treasure each side, just as I have treasured our life together.”
― Nicholas Sparks, The Notebook

“Do I not destroy my enemies when I make them my friends?”
― Abraham Lincoln

“The best mirror is an old friend.”
― George Herbert

 

Some sources of information-http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/topics/topic_friendship.html

http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/tag/friendship

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Friendship&printable=yes

 

Emma Kirakossyan