Love and Friendship
What is friendship?
Modern day’s answer: a cool buddy to hang out with (someone to laugh at our petty jokes, get drunk with, to acknowledge the sound of our own voice via the self-interested stories we tell about ourselves) or someone who is “there for us” (less frequent, and more personally connected here, through the sharing of more intimate details of oneself with another or the mutual experience of a deep, impactful event; this type will function as the confidant, the teddy bear with which we confess our insecurities and sorrows from that which gets in the way of our personal conveniences, someone we can be unafraid of open judgment from, someone with whom we feel comfortable with sharing our pitiful materialistic hopes and dreams); it seems to not acknowledge any other definition.
It’s rare that I am exposed to honesty from those close to me; pretense rules their actions, as well as the thoughts that direct these actions - they are social creatures, who only understand reality through the perceptual filter of “social etiquette”, as to deviate from this etiquette creates a tension that conflicts with the pacified sense of reality that comes through adherence to social platitudes - and when confronted by pretense, I often feel closed off from ever truly knowing that person. It’s as if a wall immediately erects itself between us, one that obstructs open communication so much so that we are reduced to tapping out some bizarre morse code of approved lingo on it’s expanse in order to understand one another; this behaviour strikes me as totally irreal, yet I am the one thought crazy for thinking this to be crazy.
Honest communication to me entails a dissolution of personal borders, and a realization that there exists a world beyond the front of our noses. Individualism has blinded us to this obvious truth, and made us comfortable in such an insane assertion, so when we interact with our “friends”, it becomes nothing more that a tennis match of self-interested sound bites between the two, with no actual listening occurring. Each is more interested in what they will say about themselves next, instead of hearing what the other person even said; they might pick up a word or two in the others anecdote that brings about a sudden connection to something else that’s personally relevant to their own selfish worldview, and spout this babble off - initially, this would strike most as behaviour characteristic of listening, but really is anything but, as listening implies caring. Caring implies giving a shit about the other person beyond how they directly benefit or hinder you.
Within the dissolution of the personal boundaries, there arises the potential to actually connect with that person above and beyond the arbitrary, contentless contracts that constitute normal social interactions. There occurs the possibility of it becoming something more than itself, instead of cheapening itself into little more than a mutual backscratching partnership with both parties agreeing to tolerate the other so that they have someone to get drunk with on the weekends, and raise themselves up another step on the social ladder of Perceived Success In Life Through The Eyes Of Your Peers. There arises the opportunity to learn more about someone, to learn what motivates them, to celebrate what makes them different from yourself, and to learn what makes them who they are - and through this, you learn infinitely more about yourself in the process.
Some might see this description and think “well wait a minute - he’s describing falling in love.” In a sense I am, but not in the sense that Hollywood tells us to conceive of the word in. We can flatter ourselves into grandly declaring I love my friends but if all that is communicated by such a statement is that I love them for how they each make my own life easier to deal with through the sheer amount of them and the social stature and exterior self-validation that gives me, that I love them for helping me not think about my own mortality, and the pointlessness of my life’s decisions, that I love them for listening to me babble on about my cheap, tin-plated dreams and for not saying directly to my face how much my idiosyncrasies annoy them behind my back, then one can only wonder what the hell they think LOVE actually means in the first place.
Love has a multiplicity of dimension and definition, but understood in the lexicon of the current time, it seems to only allow strict definitions such as platonic, romantic, and familial. Specifically within the context of romantic love, it becomes more of what is conventionally taken to imply love through the addition of sexual union into the contract. This is Cosmopolitan talking, not reason. You can only love and intimately share with they whom you fuck?
This is not to say that such intimacy does not occur within life; merely that our ability to understand love and friendship to be has been corrupted by worthless social customs and expectations. I’m sure that most people have at least one “best friend” in their lives that bears the weight of our turmoils and sentimentalized emotional stresses, reactions and jubilations; realistically, these “best friends” serve not as a healing balm for the wound, but as a cathartic sponge with which to lap up our tears and blood, as we hate the taste of our own blood - we cannot abide the thought of licking our own wounds. Self-reliance is in terrifyingly short supply in the modern era, as a gigantic social support-system exists that removes the onus from the self to fix what is wrong by dwelling more upon the pity you yourself evoke from others to temporarily distract you from the problem: “don’t worry, I’m here for you.” So what? Now that you’ve got the problem off your chest onto the oftentimes uncaring shoulders of another individualist who cares more for their own problems, does this make the problem go away, or does it just make you feel better because someone pities you?
Our emotions tend to cloud our ability to rationally observe a situation; shortly after something happens, it affects you intellectually immediately, and then emotionally afterwards - you have a couple of seconds to question “why did this happen” before the reality (self-imagined and over-inflated) of your emotions takes over your mind, as we experience them more directly than that which has caused the stress in the first place. We thus look for emotional solutions to what are physical reality problems, and wonder why it never works out. While the emotions may cause pain, it isn’t a pain that will kill you - that will only occur if the emotions are more real to you than reality - thus it should be relatively easy to set them aside for a moment to use your intellect to work out the problem; the answers found in this instance tend to directly solve the problem, but they typically are emotionally harder to cope with. Again, your emotions will shy away from consideration of these thoughts, but you must understand that the feelings provoked by the solution will most likely affect you emotionally harder immediately, but will actually correct what’s wrong, and allow you to gain the most insight and lessons from the situation that will prevent the problem from arising again. Short-term solutions only provide short-term relief, which is all that emotional reactions to a problem amount to.
In the Hollywood-ized charade of the social game we all participate in, relationships and friendships have undergone a stultifying metamorphosis into something overtly emotionally-biased, that functions through masks, that rewards you for having more than less, that can never allow for depth to be sought, let alone found. I look at every friend I make as the potential for a new love for life to be found within myself and within them, and this love exists in different degrees, as those I meet possess something which sets them slightly apart from the crowd, the hint of something beneath the surface of their social facades - what is discovered in them only increases my love and respect for who they are. I thus love and value them more for what we both create out of the friendship, than for adding another notch to my social belt. It is a wholly qualitative process, unlike the quantitative methods that society endorses.
Of course, I still get into a lot of shit with my methods.
Anytime I purposefully attempt to subvert pretense through simply admitting the truth, I find newer, thicker, different walls suddenly erected around me that have the words OMG HOW COULD YOU YOU BROKE THE RULES DUMBFUCK spray-painted angrily upon them. It seems that people are universally wall-eyed when it comes to relating honestly with one another; they need the social glasses that society constructs for them to be able to see the other person at all, to actually tangibly observe what is being communicated. Anytime I try to transcend ego, I’m violently reminded that people are woefully unable to follow suit, as it conflicts with their immediate, self-interested thinking and living habits; the larger, long-term picture is completely alien territory to them.
It’s when taboo and social inculcation have been lain aside that true communication can happen, when we overleap the ego-boundaries we place on ourselves that true understanding can begin. Every person that is dear to me has my joyful love and admiration for them, to the varying degrees that have grown between us. Whether or not it fits into this or that mold or definition is irrelevant - it is a phenomenon that constantly evolves and grows, irrespective of annoyances, idiosyncrasies, and petty squabbles over nothing that inevitably arise. My love for these great souls will never die, even if they do; if nothing else, it gives me hope that in their passing, I will be able to find something analogous in the future within someone else. Within them, I realize that not everything in life is lost.