First Up is The Word

We have ourselves a semantic problem. And it involves dad.

Below, a primer. Just to get us thinking about the meaning of the word friendship. As a way into what will soon turn out to be a real puzzle.

A primer, because some of the things that are touched on here will be explored further in later posts. We’ll turn to questions that elicit responses like yes, no and duh? uttered often in quick succession by the same person. Top amongst those: can women and men really be just friends? And viewed through the lens of friendship: what’s intimacy and how can we think about its relationship to sex (doing it) gender and sexual identity (what you think you see ain’t always what you get)? What is the relationship between love and friendship? Where do the lines between colleagues and friends cross (NSFW¹)? And more. But enough promises. Let’s.

---

You know you’re in trouble the day your dad sends you a Pacefook friend request. Even though parents like to refer to their kids as their best buddies, it’s just not the same. For one, you don’t get to choose your folks, although sometimes they get to choose you. You do get to choose your friends, however. But then again, family ties are supposed to be thicker than blood. Friendship usually needs a good span of time for that to happen, but inevitably obligations are added, and they work a lot like thickening agents that can make your friendship feel a lot like family. Still. There are differences.

There is material and financial dependency on parents that might extend way into your 20s and beyond, and that’s quite apart from the fact that during the first years of life, parents — and with some good reasons, not least to do with survival — get to tell you what to do. The often maligned but little read Jean Piaget described parent-child relationships along lines of unilateral respect. It’s a one-way street for much of early life despite anecdotal evidence that the odd two-year-old has ways and means to turn that relationship on its developmental-psychological head. But generally, typically, there is a power relationship between parents and children that goes one way. It might even out later on.

It might, but most likely only kind of. Because at the same time, and as most of you will know, it makes little difference to your parents how old you are. 50, 40, 30, 20, 10 —it’s all 10 to them. (I used to call going home to visit my parents a trip to my own private Freudian purgatory. Three days love, three days taking orders, three days attempted adjustment, leave.)

Friendships on the other hand are not about power. Respect is mutual. With your parents, you might have to work on the mutuality bit your whole life. Don’t forget, there was a time when they not only had to clean up after you, but had to clean you up. Perhaps those memories are so deeply etched in parents’ psyche and then duly repressed (clearly a highly functional and under-rated coping mechanism) that they — whether they know it or not — can never really quite get over it. (Damn, there goes that old chestnut Oedipus!)

My point is: if respect is not mutual, it’s not friendship. Respect is one essential ingredient of friendship, and of course there are other necessary ingredients such as trust, care, and affection. I’ll get to these a little further on when the sentimental pathos really kicks in and I’ll invite you to ponder the notion of intimacy). For now it’s good to keep in mind that mutuality is a consequence of the voluntariness of our friend choices. We don’t tend to choose our close friends among those we don’t like and don’t respect, right?. I say tend to, because, as we know, the proof’s in the pudding and puddings take time to digest, and great friends can turn out to be real, well, let’s call them ‘fakes’ (there’s another topic to be covered. It’ll be NSFW for sure).

Back to the word. The real issue emerges when you start to put another word next to friendship: the label designating the people that make your -ship — your friends. So here’s a little word history for you.

During the time of Shakespeare, writes cultural linguist Anna Wierzbicka, a friend was considered as close as a brother (and never a sister. But we’ll get to gender another post, soon). And because a friend was like a brother, the likes of Shakespeare and presumably your run-of-the-mill English innkeeper, would only call very few people a friend. Also, the phrase my friend began to encounter competition from a friend of mine. Friend lost its meaning of relative exclusivity. Friendship has tended to cling on to that. Btw, I’m highly suspicious of people that make statements like all of my 25 friends are equally my best friends. I have heard it said, screeched actually. And I thought, I’m not sure I wanna be one of yours. Seems to me there might be a little too much cross-confiding going on here.

So, there is some indication that, as has shown, there is a long bifurcating path that leads from Elizabethan England to today's social media landscape, and it tracks something like this: gradually, over time, friend became quantitatively more inclusive while its connotations of closeness weakened. By comparison, friendship has retained has connotations of relative exclusivity and closeness (Strictly hands-off of course. Officially). You would be familiar with the fact that people can be friends with somebody with whom they don’t have a friendship. Think about Facebook friend number 456, who is a complete stranger.

That inclusivity has also made the word friend a little cannibalistic. It ate acquaintance. Especially in the English-speaking world, internecine strife, which flared up like most things some time after ‘68, virtually annihilated the it and it’s even more awkward sibling acquaintanceship. Academics tried to restore its stature. Some time in the 1970s, the sociologist Suzanne Kurth called for a social scientific parsing of friendship and friendly relations so that some merit might be restored to a reality that acquaintance signalled and friend glosses over: That there are people we are just not close too. People we don’t know all that well, don't care for all that much, but nevertheless exchange pleasantries with.

In other words: we like to be liked for who we think we are. And the word friend may shine with the glow of inferred reciprocal knowledge, especially if you add the modifier best, or close, or true, or ride the fading fad of besties. (We are blessed, for we cannot look into each others minds!) Acquaintance just doesn’t cut it. Fancy being introduced at a party thus: “Friends, everybody! Meet my a-c-q-u-a-i-n-t-a--n-c-e, Sandy!” And as for acquaintanceship? Use it in your local spelling bee. Otherwise, forget it.

You get my drift, right? There’s a word problem. But not to worry, we are not done yet — for there is love!

Ahhhhhh, love and friendship! These lovely twins, Siamese (sorry, my Thai friends, I know), and yet bound up in a struggle, but this time in a bloodless tussle incomparable to that gory war of annihilation between friends and that other unspellable lot. For, as the story goes, somewhere between the 17th and the beginnings of the 19th century — at least in the cultural spheres that used to be captured by the term Western Civilisation (WC actually meant, among other things, England, Paris, Berlin and Weimar, the United States, Florence, Rome and Athens) — friendship reigned supreme as the personification of intimacy. At least among the cultural elites of the Romantic period, a veritable cult of friendship sprang up. It was loaded with the kind of sentimentality described by the 19th century Russian literary critic Vissarion Belinsky with these charming lines: those pesky Romantics, he complained,

“are drawn to friendship because they want to be sure of someone in their vicinity whom they can ceaselessly tell about their own valuable persons. To speak in their own highfaluting jargon, the friend is for them a precious vessel for the outpouring of the most intimate and secret feelings, thoughts, hopes, dreams, etc. while in reality the friend is for them merely a toilet bowl into which they can pour the refuse of their own self-love.”

Acerbic really. But probably something my peasant forbears would have appreciated, given some translation.

But why friendship and not love, especially sexual love, which is after all what we tend to equate intimacy with, right? Because, as Niklas Luhmann tells it in Love as Passion, sexual love — and we’re clearly talking heterosexual sexual love here — was only to be had outside of marriage. See the paradox? Illicit love was the only legitimate way to get it. The wife was not supposed to be the object of the husband’s desires, and least was it to be the other way round. Husbands had mistresses for their pleasure, wives husbands, never mind pleasure. Or so it was thought, or held to be proper. Decorum and all that. Sex wasn’t considered vital to your identity when character (read: success) was supposedly key. And marriage was not about personality, but typically about status and influence (read: success). The love-marriage is a mid to late 19th-century invention. (See the Pride and Prejudice problem? Jane Austen had had enough of being locked in the economics of it all.)

But around the same time a counter-narrative emerged. Protestants had already long encouraged us to forge our own personal relationship to God. Portraiture moved from dynastic courts to the abodes of an emerging middle class. Tombstones told life stories (suitably brief for the times). The navel-gazing novel began to grace bookshelves. In other words, your own individual authenticity began to matter, as part of a general drift toward that hateful strawman invented by sociological moralists: individualism!

When your individuality becomes the focal point of life, it turns out to mean a lot more than what you present to others, how you stage yourself in the world. It’s about who you really are. And because our physical, sexual desires (or even a lack of them; nod to my asexual friends) cannot be separated from our self-conscious selves, they too were, over time, harnessed to the meaning of individuality. That individuality is especially shored up by those loved others would love you just the way you are, and you love just the same way in return. The world of the beloved takes on significance for you, just as your world — what you do as well as your dreams, your yearnings, your desires, your likes and dislikes, the view of the section of the world only you see — takes on significance for them. Call that mutual recognition, call it affirmation, whatever.

It’s in that context that gradually sexual, passionate love starts to form the centre of the love marriage. We are talking roughly about the middle to late 19th century, the heyday of romantic love. But it sure continues to be a powerful thing to have your self-perceptions validated, to feel loveable, and actually feel you are the most loveable person in the world in the eyes of an equally loved one other (unless you are polyamorous; but that’s for another time too). Now add a little sex, or as much as you like, and you get a fairly heady-hearty brew from which intimacy, the way we have come to understand it is, distilled.

It makes sense then to think that friendship lost out to love as the descriptor for intimacy. It lost out because it was described and inscribed into the culture as sexless, platonic, and straight. But it never quite left the scene because sex alone never has and never will be able to offer us all that intimacy (mutually tailored respect, trust, care, affection) has to offer. Not long after the beginning of the 20th century the companionate marriage offered itself as the best of both worlds: a fulfilling sex life guided by newly printed sex manuals, underpinned by enduring friendship. Whether it all worked is hard to say, since divorce wasn’t an option for women.

Enough history and a quick leap: What happens to friendship when marriage is no longer mandatory for legitimate cohabitation, sex and having kids, and when sex is as available as chicken burgers (at least to the young and hot)? When the link between sex and intimacy is optional and sometimes shunned like the plague? When people are scared of getting the feels. Because that might just have something to do with the requirement of having to let your guard down and, ironically, having to be the real you?

What happens to friendship now? What is its place? What does it offer?

I have a hunch I’d like to venture. I’m seriously unsure about, but I have a feeling that with the liberation of sex from convention, from the old strictures, the opening up of a vista of a sexual field of its own, there for the taking for its own sake, something else enters the bargain: a sense of a kind of intimate shortfall. A sense that intimacy too strongly tied to sex as the signifier of itself also shows up a kind of insufficiency. At worst it becomes oppressive, because the very thing we have for generations tried to liberate comes back to haunt us by dint of its sheer physicality, as a kind of tyranny of the body: self-consciousness about shapes and sizes; obsessions with dexterity and technical skill; prowess and endurance tied to self-worth; sex without eroticism. You know the spiel.

Maybe that felt gap — and I’m not suggesting everyone feels it — is one of the places where friendship can live. Perhaps outside the hetero mainstream, where the platonic, sexless version of friendship never had much of a life in the first place, that has always been better understood. At least that proposition doesn’t sound the least bit queer to me.

What do we know? Perhaps something like this: friendship describes not only a specific type of relationship, but it is also used as a metaphor we use to describe connections with close others who are not actually our friends but our partners, our wives and husbands, our siblings. And sometimes friends become our chosen families when our real ones don’t live up to expectations. Friendship does that because rather than providing us with rules to follow (unlike true love as screened, sung and printed ), but because friends who manage to construct a friendship together build something that doesn’t so much need trust, need respect, need care and affection to make it readable as friendship, but because — for all its faults, for all the ease with which friends drift apart, and for all its lack of institutional support when they call it quits (ever heard of friendship counselling?) — when it lives (and according to the stats it rarely does) it personifies trust, personifies respect, personifies care and affection. Is that not the definition of freedom?

There’s a lot in that word don’t you think? And it’s just the beginning.

Now go, call a good friend — and spare a thought for dad.

1. Unless indicated, NSFW = Not Safe FROM Work.