On Friendship

I have had occasion to ponder the meaning and shades of friendship a number of times over the past few weeks. Whether nurturing fledgling friends, working out how to convert friends into client, while staying friends, or mourning the dying days of an old friendship that has run its course, it seems to me that mariam salzman is right in her assesment of friends as the new family to our generation, complete with the heartaches and politics that our parents' generation experienced in relationships.

I think I have a fair few friends. I have a number of different groups of people that I call friends, who differ wildly from each other, and recently I've realized that perhaps I'm a different person to each of these groups. Perhaps this means I'm as guilty of selective disclosure as anyone else, testing different people out to explore elements of my own personality. Drinking friends, talking friends, sailing friends, old friends, work friends, coffee friends, and a load of aquaintance type friends. Perhaps this makes me schizophrenic. Hmm. Discuss.

Last night I had dinner with K&H, and the three of us late twentysomething early thirtysomething chiqas decided that the pressures we are putting on ourselves to be in THE relationship with THE one, was faintly ridiculous, and actually, we're doing pretty well ourselves. Recently we've had a great run of dinner parties with the same six singletons, equal M&F, and it has been fantastic. Now, one of them has gone slightly OTT in his approach, accosting someone else's boss (who is also a friend) for a job, with the subtlety of a steamroller. I think this is what got me thinking - what is the level of my friendship with him, and am I being more of a friend by saying, mate, you need to apologise about your onslaught, and maybe tone it down a bit as people are starting to back off, or more of a mate by defending him when they criticise and just trying to manage him when he's out. Having experienced both approaches myself, as I'm hardly blameless in the outrageous behaviour category, I think that the success of either approach is 100% down to how the receiver categorizes your friendship. So either you are confident in your heart of hearts how valuable your friendship is to the receiver of said difficult message, or you end up backing off, and arguably, not really be a friend at all.

So tricky.

Still, what with a long conversation on tues night to an old friend, and an out of the blue mail today, coupled with the fact that on Friday I'm having dinner with the parents of a school friend who we lost to a car crash ten years ago, joined by F, who was at school with me, comforts me that the old friendships are still there. Political manoevreing with the likes of NE and H are what makes life interesting, and keep me waking up in the morning. And when friends could become friends, through me, like the lovely bloggers PK and L, it adds a warm glow to the outer regions of the friend web.

I'm going to ponder more, and may update this post, as I come to wider and deeper conclusions than those postured in the stolen seconds of my working day, but peace out to all my friends, wherever and whoever they may be. xx