The Friendship Factor

Make new friends, but keep the old.
One is silver and the other is gold.


What better way to articulate this epical relationship which is not of blood lineage called the bond of friendship! Everything is being defined these days including the term friendship. Many realise the significance of a long-standing friendship. Perhaps, that is why `Friendship Day’- assumes such great importance among all other west-imposed celebrations.
Even celebrities, not wanting to be left behind, are jumping onto the friendship bandwagon.
In 1935, the United States (U.S.) Congress proclaimed the first Sunday of August every year as the `Friendship Day’. While the idea of celebrating `Friendship Day’ has caught on with today’s generation, there are apprehensions about the way it has been understood by them. There seems to be a big gap between the understanding people had about friendship some years ago than the type of things that are understood as friendship today.
Even celebrities, not wanting to be left behind, are jumping onto the friendship bandwagon.

Togetherness
“We do not know if friendship helps us to party or parties bring us together as friends. The fact is our friendship offers time together to party,” says Anand who is working as a journalist in Doordarshan in Chennai. Anand has taken time off from his busy schedule to attend a party organised by his college mates to celebrate the day.
“In school, we used to exchange friendship bands. We went out as a group and enjoyed the evening, ate out and had lots of fun,” says Tanveer, a student of mass communication. This year, Tanveer wants to spend the friendship day with one of his best pals, Nithya, undergraduate student at a college in Chennai. “If possible, we will meet up somewhere and exchange friendship bands like old times,” he says.
Why women have more friends
Women are more fortunate when it comes to friendship. Women strike friendship cards easily and most often they are successful at that. The primary reason could be that they care much for persons.
Why are such friendships so rare among men? Conditioning, of course. In our society, except to shake hands, men are not even allowed to touch each other. We can attempt to explain this phenomenon in the following lines:
Most men have had no practice in the art of intimacy nor role models to point the way. Little girls can walk to school hand in hand, hold each other, hug, cry and say, “You are my best friend. I need you. I love you.” Little boys wouldn’t dare. The enormous blackening cloud of homosexuality is always present, and the devastating power of the snicker begins in playground days.
This fear haunts boys and as a result they keep away from men who might become his friends. Ultimately, it affects his behaviour toward the women he will meet.
While this is true in an Indian context, it is very much the same in America. Some of the leading psychologists and therapists were asked how many men ever have real friends. The bleak replies were “not nearly enough” and “too few.” Most guessed at 10%. Richard Farson, Professor at the Humanistic Psychology Institute in San Francisco, Says, “ Millions of people in America have never had one minute in their whole lifetime where they could ‘let down’ and share with another person their deeper feelings.”
Since so few males have been allowed the luxury of openness and vulnerability in a relationship, they are not aware of the gaping void in their emotional lives. In short, they don’t know what they’re missing.
In one of the studies made by British Sociologist Marion Crawford it was established that middle aged women and men had considerably different definitions of friendship. By an overwhelming margin, women talked about trust and confidentiality, while men described a friend as “someone I go out with” or “someone whose company I enjoy.” For the most part, men’s friendships revolve around activities while women’s revolve around sharing. A man will describe as “my very good friend” a person who is an occasional tennis partner or someone he just met five minutes ago. But are they friends? Hardly.
Young women are newly aware of these issues and increasingly selective. “ I think more women are looking for a sensitive man today, “ says Lynn Sherman, “and it really doesn’t make any difference to us if he can lift up the couch with one hand or two. I think it’s a responsive friendly person most younger women want now.”
Real issues in friendship
Real and true friendship involves freedom of choice, accountability, truth, and forgiveness. Real friendship looks at the heart, not just the “packaging.” Genuine friendship loves for love’s sake, not just for what it can get in return. True friendship is both challenging and exciting. It risks, it overlooks faults, and it loves unconditionally, but it also involves being truthful, even though it may hurt. Genuine friendship, also called “agape” love, comes from the Lord.
Relationships in real life involve different levels of friendships. Often our isolationist society offers only vague, empty relationships. One cannot deny the fact that friends do stick closer than a brothers and sisters sometimes. The question is: what type of friend do you desire to be?
We break a true friendship when we break trust. There are situations when we need to speak truth and often at the cost of losing some good friends. Those are the critical moments when we willingly risk to sacrifice our needs for those of our friend.
“We do not know if friendship helps us to party or parties bring us together as friends. The fact is our friendship offers time together to party,”

Rubbing shoulders in a relationship
Friendship has a special status. It is contrasted with all those relationships over which we have so little control: the families we can’t change, the neighbours who irritate us, the colleagues we have to put up with. Friends are thought of as free and joyous part of our lives.
There are different studies showing different facts about friendship. Recent research concluded that at any time we have around 30 friends, six of whom we think of as close. Over a lifetime we will make almost 400 friends, but we will keep in touch with fewer than 10 percent of them. Almost 60 per cent of us claim that our friendships are more important to us than career, money or family. Other studies shows that men have, on average, one fewer close friends than women do, that middle class men have more friends than working class men, and that both men and women find their friendships with women more emotionally satisfying than those with men. Those findings are fascinating, but they mask huge variations.
Most men have had no practice in the art of intimacy nor role models to point the way.

There are surprises in getting to know someone whom do not know fully. The older you become, the more “history” you will have to relate to each other. Bear in mind that it is always easy for us to handle our own “problems” emotionally, than those of others. You may have endured a bankruptcy or the death of a spouse as part of your life, and to someone else this might sound insurmountable.
Begin your friendship by showing your wonderful, positive strengths and the qualities that have allowed you to be resilient through the rough seas of life. That will help you not only to start a god relationship but sustain those you cherish most.
Too Few and Too Many Friends
Dr. Stephen Johnson suggests asking yourself the following question about your relationships:
· 1. Do you have at least one person nearby whom you can call on in times of personal distress?
· 2. Do you have several people whom you can visit with little advance warning without apology?
· 3. Do you have several people with whom you can share recreational activities?
· 4. Do you have people who will lend you money if you need it, or those who will care for you in practical ways if the need arises?
· If your response to Johnson’s questions is largely negative, it may be that your friendships are being impeded by your social life! Some people immerse themselves in such a whirl of parties and social affairs that there is no opportunity to establish a close relationship. The fact of the matter is that one cannot have a profound connection with more than a few people. Time prohibits it. Deep friendship requires cultivation over the years-evenings before the fire , long walks together, and lots of time for talk. It requires keeping the television off so that the two of you can log in with each other. IF your social calendar is too full to provide for such intimate bonding, it should be pared. “True happiness,” said Ben Johnson, “consists not in the multitude of friends, but in the worth and choice.”