“What is a friend? A single soul dwelling in two bodies.”

Aristotle

When people think of a friend, it may be simple as someone giving you a smile every time they see you. However, when you think of the philosophy of friendship, who are your real friends? Do you have any? If you do, why are you friends? If not, how do you make friends (assuming you want them)?

What is a Friend?

A friend is someone that you have at least one common interest with, and grow together through a mutual bond. Friendships are exclusive from sexual activity and family relationships. This means that friends are within a special categorization, different from acquaintances, family, lovers, and best friends.

Two people become acquainted around one central thing that they are involved in, whether that may be sports or gossip. People that meet each other and are friendly towards each other will not become friends unless they firstly have something in common.

Assume there are two new, introverted coworkers that come into the place you work. Both coworkers share mutual respect with you, and you are all friendly towards them. The first coworker is from your hometown that you’ve lived most of your life, and likes the same home-town sports teams. The second coworker is from a different part of the country and lived a completely different lifestyle that you cannot relate to at all. The first coworker is much more likely to become friends compared to the second coworker, in fact, the second coworker’s chances in itself are very slim.

So from that analogy we can conclude that within friendship, there is similarity.

What else? What if there is minimal similarity, what keeps a friendship strong?

Beyond Similarity: Scenario

You move to a new town, possibly due to school or work, and you come across three people moving into your new living situation. One is a new co-worker at a job that you enjoy, one is a classmate in a humanities class you don’t necessarily enjoy, and the other is a person you met in a coffee shop before you started your first day.

In this scenario, you can find similarity in two of the three people: the co-worker and the classmate.

The co-worker has a common interest in the job that both of you perform, and can converse about the topic to get along well at the job during your shift. The classmate and yourself find that you both don’t enjoy the class that you are in, and find ways to humor yourselves through the class and help each other with studying in the future.

You’ll find that the difference between the two is that the classmate created deeper levels in thought in you compared to the co-worker, in which conversation is limited to merely one topic for the purpose of decreasing social tension within a closed environment. The classmate and yourself create humor over the duration of the semester, which relies on an understanding of irony, creating complex thought patterns. These thought patterns are what create a bond between the two of you, as if two minds are thinking at the same time. Over the course of the semester, personal stories are shared that result in emotional reactions, whether that be humor, despair, or joy. This is now your friend, someone who is a part of who you are.

Analysis of Scenario

What could you see in that classmate? Not only did you see similarity, but also passion, openness, and vulnerability.

This is what distinguishes a friend from an acquaintance, or someone you’ve only seen.

A friend should be special and within a circle of yours, because if too many people are a part of you, you have no opportunity to be a part of you.

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This concludes this post on the basis of friendship, if you’re new to the page and you liked what you read, I suggest you check out the other posts on the home page and subscribe to be on the email notification list. Doing that will give you every blog post in its entirety right in your email so you don’t have to read it in another format. You can subscribe by putting your email into the box below or visiting the Subscribe tab linked at the top of every page. Feel free to leave a comment on the page, but if you’d like to reach out to me privately, shoot me a DM on Twitter @BPlim2.

Take care of yourself and someone else.

-Brandon