Quantizing friendship
I have a promise I make to good friends: "My ears, my shoulder, and my arms are always open to you." This is something I take very seriously.
Recently I got to thinking about this kind of threshold. I've heard of a couple different ones. E.g. "I consider as good friends the people who I would tell anything, without dissembling, unless for reasons of someone else's privacy". That's a higher threshold than my "always open", but naturally what's meant by "good friend" will vary accordingly.
(I wonder whether it's significant that "always open" is centered around empathizing and comforting, and "tell anything" is centered around trust and openness? Certainly both are valuable, but it's interesting to look at which ones people codify.)
One wonders, though, where it's appropriate to put such thresholds. It overlaps rather interestingly with the question of where to put LJ privacy filters (although they probably won't coincide because the goal is rather different -- friendslove is different from "trusting people enough to tell them X").
It also kind of makes me sad that the bar for friendship on, say, Facebook is set so low. I have Facebook friends I've never met or spoken a word to (on the internet or in real life). Hell, I'm Facebook friends with a number of fictional characters and at least one cat, and I know them better than I know a good number of my human Facebook friends. The threshold of Facebook friendhood seems so arbitrary and low (although, to be fair, here again the goal differs -- Facebook is mostly for keeping in touch with people who aren't immediately available).
Recently I got to thinking about this kind of threshold. I've heard of a couple different ones. E.g. "I consider as good friends the people who I would tell anything, without dissembling, unless for reasons of someone else's privacy". That's a higher threshold than my "always open", but naturally what's meant by "good friend" will vary accordingly.
(I wonder whether it's significant that "always open" is centered around empathizing and comforting, and "tell anything" is centered around trust and openness? Certainly both are valuable, but it's interesting to look at which ones people codify.)
One wonders, though, where it's appropriate to put such thresholds. It overlaps rather interestingly with the question of where to put LJ privacy filters (although they probably won't coincide because the goal is rather different -- friendslove is different from "trusting people enough to tell them X").
It also kind of makes me sad that the bar for friendship on, say, Facebook is set so low. I have Facebook friends I've never met or spoken a word to (on the internet or in real life). Hell, I'm Facebook friends with a number of fictional characters and at least one cat, and I know them better than I know a good number of my human Facebook friends. The threshold of Facebook friendhood seems so arbitrary and low (although, to be fair, here again the goal differs -- Facebook is mostly for keeping in touch with people who aren't immediately available).