The most enduring bond is often between friends
If romance is the most familiar one-on-one, personal love story of today, albeit a limited and transient form of love, friendship follows next as the most commonly experienced, practiced and, maybe, most important expression of connection and love between two people.
Friendship is not only a required element of romance — if romance is to deepen and transform into more lasting love — friendship is also an element in every love relationship. The word, however, separates itself from sex, if not passion, and even, sometimes, from love. Often the word “like” is substituted for love in describing a friendship.
But friendship can be the most enduring connection and bond between two people in that it that arises in freedom, exists by choice and carries no involuntary burdens of duty. Indeed, friendship can be seen as both an element of love or itself, a distinct expression of another kind of love.
The concept of friendship comes to us from the earliest of times through many different cultures. The Greeks had a word for it – “philia,” meaning friendship. The word “philia” comes from another Greek word “philos,” meaning loving. Today the label “Platonic love” is commonly used to describe true friendship, referring to the ideal of non-sexual connection, deriving from the Greek philosopher Plato’s incorporeal, abstract, perfect world of ideas.
Two ancient stories of friendship hold a high place in mythology:
…Gilgamesh and Enkidu (from the myth of Gilgamesh) whose friendship is described as that of soul mates, where Gilgamesh was beautiful and strong and Enkidu, rough and savage.
…the friendship of David and Jonathan from the Old Testament “(Jonathan’s soul) was knit with the soul of David, and Jonathan loved him as his own soul.” (1 Samuel 18:1)
More recently, Tim O’Brien has written in The Things They Carried, a loosely tied together collection of vignettes about the bonding between men that occurred in “Alpha Company” during the Viet Nam war. It is O’Brien’s perception of what makes men form bonds. Unlike romantic love, trust is a key element of friendship.
Friendship appears from childhood through maturity. It can be the most enduring and deep love relationship in life, crossing boundaries of gender, age, race, religion, perhaps even species. Dogs are commonly known as “man’s best friend,” usually describing a committed, non-judgmental, trusting relationship—a loving relationship.
The concept of “brotherly love”
From the idea of family and loving one’s literal brother comes the expanded concept of loving one’s neighbor. The idea of brotherly love is an ancient one, inherent in the Talmud and explicitly stated in the New Testament and in most other religious writing. In Judaism, for instance, the family is a key element of religious life, and love among members of the community is important.
Ramakrishna, the Indian saint, was told by a woman: “I find that I do not love God. The concept does not move me.” Ramakrishna asked her, “Is there nothing in the world that you do love?” And she said, “Yes, I love my little nephew.” He said, “There He is.” |
“Be devoted to one another in brotherly love.”
— Romans 12:10 |
“Very few modern people think Friendship a love of comparable value [to Eros] or even a love at all. I cannot remember that any poem since In Memoriam, or any novel, has celebrated it. [Yet] to the Ancients, Friendship seemed the happiest and most fully human of all loves; the crown of life and the school of virtue. The modern world, in comparison, ignores it.”
— C.S. Lewis |
“Friendship marks a life even more deeply than love. Love risks degenerating into obsession, friendship is never anything but sharing.”
— Elie Wiesel |
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