I’ve been fortunate in my life to have friends, to be a friend, though I’ve also had periods of drought without the nourishing stream of friendship in my life. I’ve had friends who were my family, and family who were friends. Until my 30s my friends were mostly my own age, but then I discovered the wonder of friends older than myself, and as I grew older – younger than myself. I have long-lived friendships with the depth that comes from knowing each other over time, and some that came later in life – with the delighted surprise of discovering a now close friend at a time when I thought my time of making new friends was over. (Of course, the friendship of dogs has also been very important in my life, but that’s another story for another day.) Each friendship is unique, making writing about friendship particularly challenging. The nature of my friendships have changed over time – with friends in childhood being primarily playmates, in adolescence – friends traveling in packs – gangs of girls; in grad school — my colleagues. Then I found feminism and the world of female friendship opened in deep and rich ways.
It is the most mysterious of connections. Friends. How is it that some people attract us, some don’t? How is it that we can begin a conversation with a stranger that grows into a deep and long-lasting friendship and with others the talk quickly becomes flat and lifeless? How is that some come into our lives for a time and then fade away, and others last a lifetime?
A recent Oxford study, in which participants had their brains scanned while watching a variety of videos, found that people who become close friends are literally on the same wavelength. Particularly in the areas of the brain that light up when we find things rewarding or that gain our attention, people whose brain waves were most similar were the closest of friends, even factoring in variables of age, gender, ethnicity, and nationality.
But how do we find each other? A survey research project I did in college revealed that the main determinant as to why people in college were friends was proximity. Who they lived with or near was the most important factor in choosing friends. That’s been borne out in my life. As a child, my friends were mostly ones whose houses I could walk to, and later, bike to. At the cabin where I spent my summers, the group of us who were friends all lived within walking or canoeing distance from each other – the Wildwood Harbor gang. At work, friendships developed with people who had offices near mine. In my life, some of my dearest friendships began as neighbors. Even the grassroots feminist organizations in Duluth thrived in part due to the smaller size of the city enabling the proximity of people and organizations to each other that allowed for conversation, collaboration, cross-cultivation, and friendship.
I’ve also found friends in community -- work, school, church, kids’ activities, volunteer activities, feminist organizations, marches, and protests; gathering places, as well as the dog walking community that has grown as we walk the same trails, and now the online transplant and FAR (feminismandreligion.com blog) communities.
Community, proximity, being on the same wavelength – these account for our meeting, for our resonance. But what makes for good friends? After years of isolation due to illness, I felt awkward and needy and didn’t really know anymore how to find friends, be a friend. Then I discovered feminism. I bonded with people with whom I shared a passion, a cause, and the work to bring our vision into being. We gathered in consciousness-raising groups where, in Nelle Morton’s phrase, we heard each other into speech. We helped each other discover ourselves by sharing our truths out loud – without criticism, argument, interruption, advice – simply being heard. The self-discovery in sharing the truths we had not even been willing to tell ourselves was powerful. Most importantly for me was the feminist theorists I was reading – Adrienne Rich, Audre Lorde, Susan Griffin – who challenged me to be my authentic self, honest, open, no longer hiding behind the façade of being someone I thought others wanted me to be – but myself.[i]
Feminism takes friendship seriously, and I’ve thought often, and written about,[ii] what the requisites of being a good friend are, and wanted to take this opportunity to examine these again.
1) Love. Friend – from the Old English, Old German, and Old Dutch priy-ont (hence the strange spelling -- fr- I - end -- rather than simply “frend”) -- meaning “to love. Certainly, the first and foremost requirement of friendship is love. And I mean by this not feelings of affection, though certainly that is a part of love, but rather as bell hooks said – love as a verb, as an action which, as hooks enumerated, includes not only affection, but also care, recognition, respect, commitment, trust, and honest and open communication.
For me, one of the most important aspects of love as a verb is what Simone Weil described as “intense, pure, disinterested, gratuitous, generous attention”(333). Attention -- from the Latin ad – meaning “toward,” and tendre – meaning “to stretch.” To stretch toward. The image coming to mind is of those times I can’t quite hear what someone is saying and I lean in closer, carefully observe their face, their mouth, and their body movements.
Examining each of Weil’s descriptors takes us closer to its meaning. First, intense – coincidentally also derived from the word tendre – “to stretch.” It is to lean in even closer, not to miss a thing, the fine details, the dropped clue, the tear or slight smile that tell us so much. Pure --with the only motive being one of knowing and caring – not to sway or advise or correct or manipulate. Disinterested – far from “uninterested” – disinterested is to give attention without bringing one’s own interests to the conversation, to gain nothing but understanding and knowledge of the other person. And as Maria Lugones and Elizabeth Spelman made clear, in friendship the desire to gain knowledge is not out of self-interest -- better to dominate or for self-growth, or out of duty, or for research, but as Weil said, pure. Gratuitous – completely voluntary. I give you attention because I want to, because I care, because you are my friend. Finally, generous – liberal in the giving of one’s time, and friendship does require time. To give attentive loving is to be fully present to another, without our own interests, fears, projections, agendas getting in the way, and without concern for time.
2) Reciprocity. Reciprocity is the give and take of friendship – that as much as we want to know we also want to be known. If only one is providing attentive love and not the other, then it’s not friendship, but a different kind of relationship – a counselor perhaps, or the relationship of parent to child, or teacher to student. As Lugones and Spelman wrote, “If you enter the task out of friendship with us, then you will be moved to attain the appropriate reciprocity of care for your and our well-being as whole beings, .. . [and] to satisfy the need for reciprocity of understanding that will enable you to follow us in our experiences as we are able to follow you in yours” (24). We need balance in friendships – an evenness in what we give and receive, or the relationship will start to feel lopsided. No one’s keeping score. If we were, it would stop being a friendship but rather more of a transaction. Nor in friendship do our gifts of time, attention, objects of affection come with the expectation of being repaid in kind. Reciprocity is not the motive of friendship, but rather the mode – a recognition of mutuality and of being equally invested in the friendship.
3) Honor and Trust. In friendship, we entrust to each other our hearts and minds, our sanity, our sense of the world – our very beings. At best, we can achieve in our friendships what Adrienne Rich called an “honorable relationship” – “a process, delicate, violent, often terrifying to both persons involved, a process of refining the truths they can tell each other.” This is important, she wrote, “because it breaks down human self-delusion and isolation, . . . because in so doing we do justice to our own complexity, . . and because we can count on so few people to go that hard way with us” (188). We cannot love what we do not know. Knowledge makes love possible. Love requires both the honest sharing of our truths and the desire to know and accept deeply all that is. In truth-telling and compassionate listening, friendship is made possible.
4) World-traveling. Maria Lugones’s prescription for truly knowing and loving another is to travel with them to those places where they are most at home, most playful, most at ease. How different people can be in those places where they are most at home. This may mean knowing them in their homes, meeting their families, or literally traveling to their countries, knowing them in what may be cultures and languages different from our own. This has been especially important for me as I’ve sought friendship with those whose identities are different from mine – the lesbian community in the ‘80s, the indigenous community. It has been a vital part of my friendships to travel and be with my friends, and create friendships, in those places where they thrive, find meaning, and are most fully themselves.
5) Commitment. To be a friend is to commit to all the other elements – to care, attention, honesty, investment in their worlds, and time. It may mean making a commitment to check in every day, once a week, or once a year, to make the time to keep the connection meaningful. It means being there for your friend -- in times of need, as best you as you are able, and may sometimes mean dropping everything when the need is great, or in times of great joy and celebration.
6) Reconciliation. Friends can and do hurt each other. Part of commitment to a friendship is to stay in relation to do the work of reconciliation -- that each do what one can, in bell hooks’ words, “to restore to harmony that which has been broken, severed, and disrupted. . . . We can come together with those who have hurt us, with those whom we have caused pain” (Sisters 163). Sara Ruddick has written that reconciliation requires that we name and own the harm perpetrated, that each take responsibility for their part in it, and then and only then, to forgive appropriately – allowing each to “start over again on an equal footing, no longer separated by whatever wrong occurred” (hooks, Sisters, 173). As Carter Heyward wrote so passionately, “I care about us, whether or not I ‘feel good’ about us right now, and I do not want to leave you comfortless and without strength. . . . If I love you, I will struggle for myself/us. . . to do what is just, to make right our relation” (296).
7) Loyalty. I am wary, skeptical of a certain kind of loyalty that requires one to be disloyal to oneself, to act against one’s integrity. I don’t believe a true friend would ask that of another. But I do believe in a loyalty, a faithfulness to our friend’s well-being, to be someone they can count on – whether to have their back, to keep one’s promises to them, or to keep their confidences. It means, as Lugones and Spelman said, “having a stake in our world” – to act in ways that are supportive of their individual and collective well-being. And sometimes, it simply means showing up.
8) Fun and play. As children, friendship was almost entirely about playing together – whether games, tag, hide and seek, make-believe, dolls, dress-up, riding bikes, going swimming, sledding, or skating. As we grow up, friendships get more serious along with life – talking, supporting, sharing meals. But it’s important that we not forget to play and laugh together. Lugones advocated world-traveling as a way to know our friends where they are most playful. Such play, she wrote, is not the agonistic play of winning, losing, battling, keeping score, but rather being open to surprise, to self-construction, and, unworried about competence and following the rules, simply being open to being silly and having fun.
Feminist organizations in this town thrived for so many years because they regularly took time to play together. Especially in the serious and often traumatic work they were engaged in, it was vital to their well-being that they took time away just for fun – whether to go camping, hiking, playing poker, or singing songs around a campfire. En-joying each other was vital.
One of my favorite ways to play with friends as an adult has been playing music together. Playing duets with friends often has resulted in us collapsing in laughter.[i] It was never about perfection, just about the fun, and being able to laugh at our mistakes. The two, then three of us, who regularly made music together for forty years are bonded through song. Our best times weren’t the concerts but rather the rehearsals. I’ve never laughed so hard and so long as we did in rehearsals.
Then there’s just being kids again. In our seventies, the best times my friend and I have had together have been getting out the snowtube and saucer and sliding down snowy hillsides – laughing all the way.
9) Finally, graciousness. As I’ve grown older, being gracious with my friends has become more important and more possible. For me that means understanding their limitations, abilities, capacities and incapacities, knowing their quirks, their likes and dislikes, their routines, commitments, their lives — accepting that I may go weeks, months, years without hearing from them – and then, with gratitude, begin again right where we left off, always trusting that they are doing the best they can. I’m sure I have been given the grace of friends more times than I know.
…
As with all love, there is loss. I’ve lost friends to distance, to growing apart, to dementia, and for reasons unknown. Each loss takes a toll – a missing camaraderie, companionship, or trusted confidante. As I’ve grown older, more and more I’ve lost friends to death. It’s a loss that’s rarely acknowledged, but that cuts deep. I’ve known and been known by each friend in unique ways. With each loss, that is gone forever, and a bit of light is lost from my world. Marge Piercy describes the pain of this so well -- “When a friend dies . . . a hunger sucks at the mind for gone color . . . / a hunger drains the day . . . / a red giant gone nova, an empty place in the sky . . . .” (5).
In my hospice training we were told that death doesn’t end a relationship, just changes it. In ways I’ve found this to be true, in other ways not. Yet, years before my friend, Joan, died, she wrote to me, “I’ll always love you through this life, and after my death. J.” Her card sits on my bookshelf where I see it every day, and then I feel her love – still here, as she promised, after her death.
. . .
It is a rare gift – to have one’s words received, given back, with care and understanding; for someone to ask, “How are you?” and want to know; to ask “How can I help?” and then respond; to ask in order to know more deeply; to answer with the fullest measure of one’s honesty and be responded to in kind; to know there is someone to whom one can turn in tragedy, knowing they will mourn with you, or in excited joy, knowing they will celebrate your joys with you with a full and generous heart. I have been blessed in my life to have known all of these. I hope I have given in full measure in return.