“Dedicate yourself for a long time that you will accept the person who has been given your friendship; but if you have decided to accept him, accept him with all your heart and soul,” Seneca thinks about the word these two years before we make the word “friend” in the lonely market.
It's easy to forget now how difficult that heartbreak was, and how precious it was. “Old friends cannot be made without a hand,” A junior officer The writer Antoine de Saint-Exupéry wrote after the loss of a friend, a treasure of “a wealth of common memories, of research endured together, of conflict and reconciliation and generous feelings.” Underneath his bittersweet lament is the knowledge that wealth is not found but created – or, rather, created. It is precious and the absolute value of romantic love in our culture, because of the deep lessons of friendship in all true love, and it always lives there – true friends are some partners, usually couples, they tend to move their siblings, they tend to lower their siblings, they tend to surpass their siblings in saving the heart. Such friendships are the hard work of truth and gentleness, supported by an unwavering commitment to absolute authenticity, and a quality of presence that leaves each Aglow with a wealth of experience.
How to do that work, how to achieve the skills needed for it and bear the risks inherent in it, is what Alain de Botton takes in the Primer Primer school Secrets of Successful Friendships (public library) – A dedicated field guide, with the power to cultivate meaningful connections in a world where loneliness approaches the sea at night.
At the heart of this book is the insistence that friendship – something “basic, basic, basic” – is so important and surprising that it is twenty-two-year-old love)
This operation and disclosure of deep friendship is the turbine of our modern loneliness. A century and a half after Thereau, brilliant and lonely, we hear that “we feel that most of them return home” The definition of friendship as “the feeling that in the midst of a very special person, we will finally be able to share our most vulnerable sides and seem to be lonely and separated,” celebrating us as loneliness in the seat of feeling damaged:
Loneliness can live together next to the happiest and easiest way and – surprisingly – next to the belongings of others called “friends” … Loneliness can catch the persuasive in the event; They may be married, have children and go out more often than not.
[…]
We are lonely because we refuse to accept as truth those cheap, fake images of friendship promoted by the dominant world to hide the challenges of real communication. Those who feel the lack of friendship most deeply may just be those who stick most closely and truly to true, genuine promises.
In addition to the allowance of inherent loneliness, an important purpose of friendship is emotional growth:
When we have a true friend, we should want to be wiser, more sensitive, able to face the difficulties of existence, more resilient and more generous.
However, friendship is not a one-size-fits-all thing – there are as many types of it as there are types of loneliness. You write:
We tend to think of friendship as a unitary category, but in reality, there are many different types of friendship, each specially adapted to deal with a certain type of loneliness. We can say that there are as many types of friends as there are ways to feel alienated.
He offers a taxonomy that includes types such as emotional, emotional partner and counterport. (It's the luck of a lifetime to find a friend who can play many of these roles, and the work of a lifetime to grow that friendship.)
Deep friendships provide us with a “real and joyful encounter” that can help us to “feel our company again,” because they are often two identical falls. Such friendship is not a matter of luck – just as chance and choice evolve to make who we are, but it can put a wonderful person on our path, but it is a choice – that we try to walk together in the same way and grow in the same way.
De Botton writes:
True friendship is a skill, not a piece of divine inspiration. Those who find that it is not just luck: they understand some important ideas; They are guided by a certain understanding of themselves and other people. And these ideas and understandings can be defined and explained in specific ways. We don't have to be born with inner talents to be, or make, a good friend; Power can be gained through the right kind of education.
In the rest of the time Secrets of Successful FriendshipsDe Botton offers the rudiments of this education, from the enemies of friendship (saturation, jealousy, “the absence of shared challenges”) to its pillars (deep listening, acts of service, horizontal conversations) to the end of AI. Couple this with the best Where will we meet? An interview with Alain de Botton about quotes and the varieties of friendship, then finds an introvert's guide to friendship from Thoreau and Alain de Botton on romantic love.
