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Lifelong Friends are Curiosities
By Sarah Stodola
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People who are adults and have had the same friends since childhood are amazing. As someone who doesn’t keep in contact with a single friend from elementary school or junior high, and who has kept only a handful of her high school friends, I watch in wonderment those who are not like me. I consider it a special gift, this ability with longevity of friendship.
How do they do it? People change, people do bad things, people fight, people move away, they get busy, they evolve, they grow more interested in some things and less interested in others. Sometimes they stop getting along for no discernable reason.
Perhaps some friendships are more akin to familial relationships; that mindset of “you don’t have to like me you just have to love me.” If that’s how you feel about your best friend from kindergarten, then perhaps it doesn’t matter so much when at age ten he teases you in front of a group of peers, when he steals your girlfriend in junior high, when he wrecks your car in high school, when he breaks his promise to go to the same college as you.
But even if these things didn’t matter, there are plenty of other obstacles. By my best estimation, I have had eight best friends over the course of my life. The first I lost touch with when I moved away, the second went to a different high school than me and we gradually lost touch, the third moved to Utah, the fourth was the same as the second, the fifth became a hippie in high school and I didn’t, and the sixth got a boyfriend who hated me and it put a rift in the friendship (the seventh and eighth are both still my friends, but I didn’t meet them until college). My oldest friend of any kind I’ve known for 12 years.
This all seems very natural to me. But to a lot of people, it isn’t.
In many cases, part of the reason for lifelong friendships must be permanent proximity – people grow up in the same house, in the same neighborhood, surrounded by the same neighbors. But even if I had managed to stay in the same house my whole life, I would have been (and was) redistricted into different schools, which is why I went to a different high school than many of my childhood friends. And I would have left for college, more than likely. And even if I hadn’t left for college, many of my high school buddies would have. My situation is not unique. In fact, I think it’s typical. So those friends who are just always around each other could be friends almost by default, perhaps.
It is also easy to chalk lifelong friendships up to people not really changing all that much. Maybe there is something to that. Most people do end up following a basic pattern in life, and perhaps they are the ones who find long friendships easier to maintain. But maybe not; It’s also easy to chalk such a notion up to elitism.
That old smarty Aristotle told us that there are three different kinds of friendship: one based on utility, one based on pleasure, and one based on goodness. Only this last one is “real” friendship. It’s strange but true to say that it makes sense, then, that Aristotle’s concept of friendship covered a much broader spectrum in terms of level of acquaintance than our conception of the term does today. A friend to him could be anyone a person knew, so long as that relationship, whatever its level of intimacy, was based in goodness.*
These friendships of goodness can last, because they are grounded in similar virtues. People attend the same church, don’t really mingle outside of that arena, but still consider each other friends. Such a “friendship” could last a lifetime, under the right circumstances.
Maybe Aristotle failed to consider that there would one day be a world in which transience is the norm and true friends can’t be expected to always stay close by. Or a world where moral relativity is taken to such extremes that it’s impossible to find a virtue that can’t be justified. Or perhaps he did. He probably did. He was very smart, after all. He also said that the friendships of youth don’t tend to be based in goodness, and therefore may not last.
Still,
I’m not so sure that any friendships are based on goodness as much
as they are in familiarity. You make a friend when you see something of
yourself in them. And this isn’t to say that you won’t make
friends with people who are different from you. But it is to say that
a person must reflect something that is already inherently interesting
to you, or there will likely be no point of connection. An interest can
be a virtue, of course. But it can also be a penchant for riding bikes
or reading Vonnegut or watching football. You can’t say someone
is more or less virtuous for enjoying a good football game. But you can
find them more or less interesting (or more or less familiar with regard
to your own interests) because they live for Monday Night Football.
Even though it still seems like a nice idea to keep the same friends over
the decades, I have to wonder if there isn’t something forced about
it; a relinquishing of one’s own interests. One would have to place
the friendship itself above the mutual interests that inspired it in order
for it to last so long. The thing itself has to become more important
than its foundation, until the thing itself becomes the foundation.
That’s something that many people are probably not capable of, or that they aren’t willing to do very often, at least not early in life when everything is being figured out and experimented with. This is probably sensible, even if it does mean I haven’t heard from my first best friend in nearly 14 years.
This is why these friends-for-life types are so amazing – because the idea of being sensible never came into the picture for them. They just had friends and they kept them.
But the rest of us, we snub consistency. Or, at the very least, we reserve the right to stop watching football on Sundays with that buddy from the fifth grade.
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*I referred to this page, containing an essay by David Thunder, as I was writing this essay.
Sarah Stodola is the Managing Editor of Me Three. She can be contacted at sstodola@methree.net.
© 2004 Me Three