5 Who are our friends?

Who are our friends?

Dear Lily,

Many of your thoughts and emotions throughout life will revolve round friends. Why is friendship so important in our life? In most societies, the people we inter-act with are largely a matter of luck; they are family, neighbours, members of the same caste. They are not chosen. They are, furthermore, not our equals. If they are relations, they are senior (parents, older siblings) or junior. Likewise if they are members of another caste or of the opposite sex they are by birth superior or inferior. The idea of meeting many of our equals is out of the question. If friendship of a kind develops it is likely to be lop-sided.

What is lop-sided friendship?

Patronage is lop-sided friendship, that is to say where the two sides maintain their relationship because of their differences. One provides certain assets, the superior may provide political protection, the client flatters or supports him in his schemes. The relationship is general and long-term, not like the specific and limited transaction with a bureaucrat or shop-keeper. It has some warmth and a hope that it will last.

This system of patron-client relations is very widespread in the world. It is the main way of getting things done outside the family. It is particularly prevalent in the countries like Spain, Portugal, Italy and the middle East and in places like South America which were colonized by the Mediterranean powers. It even spreads into the relationship with God or the gods. There are patron saints or gods to whom people pray when they are trying to get benefits in certain branches of Christianity or Buddhism.

Each patron usually has a number of clients. People try to have several patrons in useful places to help them obtain favours and to protect them against other powerful individuals. The patron is often encouraged to take an honorary family position by being made a spiritual relative, a god-mother or god-father.

Do you have patrons?

Having a real friend, on the other hand, whom we must not exploit or use to further our own ends is a curious phenomenon. It tends to be found in societies where there are a lot of roughly equal people and where there is so much movement that we constantly meet potential new friends. It is predominant where most of the important things in life do not come through the manipulation of personal relationships. Almost all we need in life is provided through an impersonal bureaucracy, the relationship between buyer and seller, underpinned by the legal system. Only in such a situation, where we do not have to manipulate contacts in order to survive, can we afford the luxury of disinterested friendship.

What is peculiar about Britain for a long period is that patronage has been relatively unimportant as a way of organizing personal relationships. There have been what we call ‘patrons’ of art or learning, and others who control jobs and other benefits. But if I asked you who your patrons were and who your clients, you would look puzzled, just as many of your predecessors for hundreds of years would have been surprised at such a question.

Just as patron-client relations are weakly developed in the white, Anglo-Saxon, protestant parts of the United States, so they have been relatively weak in England for many centuries. With the exception of some ethnic groups and a few branches of politics, the arts and professions, or in some criminal organizations, the system of patronage is just a pale shadow of the world of the Godfather and mafia.

So if family and patronage do not hold people together in England, and romantic love can only glue us to one other person at a time, what can provide the link between us? The short answer is friendship. This is why so much of your time at school was devoted to the making and unmaking of friends. Throughout your life, much of your happiness and success, or loneliness and failure, will depend on your ability to make ‘friends’, momentary or long-term. So what is this peculiar thing which is described by this Anglo-Saxon word?

What is friendship?

The essence of friendship is equality. It must not develop into that inequality of power and gifts which is the essence of patronage. If it does, it will be destroyed. It must also be based on liking, mutual interest and shared feelings and thoughts. To ‘like’ someone is very different from ‘loving’ someone. I have heard people say that they love their parents (or their brothers and sisters), but do not really like them much. This is quite possible and, in the end, both are important. What is certain is that pretended friendship, where there is nothing in common and nothing to share, does not work.

Friendship is not a static thing. It is like a river, only meaningful if it is heading in some direction. It must always be developing, changing and expanding, absorbing new experiences. As someone once put it, ‘The English do not have friends; they have friends about things’. A shared activity or need is behind friendship. There are so many people in the world. Why spend time with just this one? Because one enjoys their company, they are ‘good fun’, amusing, supportive, kind. As we shall see, this often finds its strongest expression in playing games with them.

Friends must not be manipulative and calculating. Friendship abides by a central rule of ethics, namely that ‘we should treat people as ends in themselves and not as a means to an end’. If you feel a friend is ‘using you’, then the friendship ends. Just as true love and beauty cannot be bought or sold, so friendship cannot be purchased. You cannot go to an agency and buy or hire a friend, while you certainly can hire a person’s mind or body for a particular task.

So friendship is about the long-term liking of two equal people for each other. In England this can be between people of the opposite sex or of different ages. Men can be friends with women, adults with children. Even husband and wife can be ‘friends’ as well as companions and sexual partners. This is a very old pattern. The historian Eileen Power described how medieval life is ‘full of married friends’. To a certain extent, the English can even be friends with their pets. As the novelist George Eliot the novelist put it, ‘Animals are such agreeable friends – they ask no questions, they pass no criticisms’. Pets are the only kind of friend we can buy, but even they have to be respected.

We have to work at friendship; it neither comes naturally nor does it remain without constant attention. Friends can be likened to an orchard. They have to be carefully planted, pruned and protected. They cannot, however, be turned into private and exclusive property. You will find throughout your life that one of the most difficult things is to share friends and sometimes to lose them.

Friendship often clashes with other ties, especially to our family and particularly our love partner. Yet when it works, it can be one of the deepest of all relationships. As a little girl you used to listen with me to Handel’s famous aria, based on the biblical story of the lament of King David over his murdered friend Jonathan. Handel’s music captures the depth of their love.

How do friends communicate?

Often the best form of communication with friends is, surprisingly, silence. Friendship is not only about what we do say, but even more importantly about what we do not. True friendship occurs when 'information' is conveyed by absences. The striving is to convey as much as possible indirectly, ‘between the lines’.

The reason why such negative communication is important is that it requires a greater closeness than positive communication. The greater the distance between sender and receiver, the more the need for explicitness and directness. Only when two or more people share an enormous amount can the much more economical negative communication take place.

All speech is an exercise of power because there is a speaker and a listener. So the more blatant and explicit the message, the more difficult it is to exercise discrimination, that is free will, in receiving the message. An explicit order, as in the army, is the worst; it is flatly coercive, binding, demanding obedience.

On the other hand, the kind of indirect, negative, allusive communication which is a peculiar characteristic of friendship allows ideas to flow and feelings not to be bruised. He or she is presented with an opportunity to draw conclusions, "Perhaps you would like to consider..." This approach has several advantages. It avoids infringing the integrity of the other person; acts are apparently entered into with free will, as the contracts of rational actors. Thus we do not say ‘you must do this’, when asking a friend for a favour, but ‘I wonder if you could possibly…’

This strategy is necessary where free and independent individuals are inter acting. In an advanced, open and balanced society where fear is minimal, cajoling, requesting, persuading is all that can be done. People are not slaves, or even clients. They have to be enticed very gently and indirectly into proper friendship, and they cannot be forced to remain. They can refuse friendship or take their friendship elsewhere.

What is respect for other people?

Friendship is based on respect and courtesy. Courtesy and politeness mean putting ourselves into the place of the other person, to ‘see ourselves as others see us’. We practice a form of empathy or sympathy which is impossible except between people who believe themselves to be, in essence, close enough or equal enough to have some sense of the other's feelings or predicament.

Yet courtesy and politeness are also distancing mechanisms, for while they establish a certain common closeness, they then keep people at arm’s length. They can be used to emphasize the other's separate needs and wants, their personal social space. This can be a form of honouring of the other's identity. The Chinese philosopher Confucius alluded to the difficulty of the balance when he said, ‘the most difficult people are women and servants. Getting too intimate to them costs you your dignity, while distancing them causes complaints.’

This idea of the social space surrounding an individual is an important one. It is central to our individualistic concepts of who we are. The trampling on the social space of those weaker than ourselves, making another forgo his own time, space or desires to accommodate our own, is one of the chief devices, in most societies, for gaining power. Wasting another's time, as in the many occasions where people are made to hang around for hours, is just as effective as physical abuse. Yet true courtesy is just the opposite of this; it is respecting that social space, keeping our distance while showing concern.

When should we touch others?

The 'social space' is partly symbolic and invisible and hence dealt with through gestures, postures, language. But it is also partly physical, and hence can be observed in body distances. The range of body distance varies with the degree of intimacy and equality that is thought to exist in the relationship.

At one extreme is 'untouchability', whether literally (as in the caste system) or through keeping one's distance, as when a nobleman finds it distasteful to be close to a commoner. Neither of these two extreme situations are what we commonly associate with Britain, though there are some exceptions.


At the other extreme are what we find in certain tribal and peasant societies. Here there is, within the group, very little social and physical distance. So people will often stand or sit disconcertingly close for a westerner's tastes, while some Africans find westerner’s aloof and stand too far away.

In some societies there seems to be little appreciation of privacy, separateness, the need for a protected zone of intimacy into which no one intrudes. I remember vividly the shock of living in a village in Nepal where the door was open and people dropped in constantly and commented on everything I was doing. They followed us on our trips out of the village when we were trying to create a little personal space, and even going to the toilet out in the fields was an arduous exercise.

It is therefore interesting that many of the English effect a compromise, more or less the same physical distance is maintained for everybody, whether they are intimate or distant from us. Everyone stands under one law, the law of compromise, not too far apart, nor too close. They should be close enough to show engagement and involvement, but not so close as to cause embarrassment and intrusion. And, on the whole, we consider an intrusion into our personal space without an invitation odd and possibly threatening.

The questions of personal space are a delicate compromise, and as times and influences change they become confused. Twenty years ago I would have considered it very strange to kiss female friends or acquaintances on the cheek or to hug men, but now these continental customs have spread widely. I constantly find myself wondering how to behave.

It used to be so easy, a hand-shake at the start and end of a meeting with a friend. Now I often wonder when and how we should kiss or hug. The problem is even greater across cultures. To kiss on the lips in public in Japan is an obscene gesture, even when the couple are married, and even touching another in public until recently was rather indecent. A bow and a name card on first meeting; thereafter just a bow or smile.

Yet even the simple hand shake is a delicate art. It symbolizes friendship, equality, mutual grasping, in other words involvement and the taking of a calculated risk (of being rejected) by stretching out one's hand. On the other hand, the arm is extended and fends off the other, it is not a drawing together as in the embrace. It is a stiff gesture; let us be friends, but let us also keep our distance and respect our mutual independence. The hand-shake and an older form of rather restrained middle-class Englishness went together well.

Two friends are like magnets. They are mutually attracted, yet if they get too close, there is repulsion to a safer distance. Friendship is thus a balancing act, like a ballet or dance. It is both spontaneous and to be worked at, both natural and artificial. Like happiness it comes unexpectedly and cannot be forced. It is usually the side-effect of other interests.

Humans are very social animals and love to love and be loved. To be able to feel warmth in the company of good friends or mates is an unusual pleasure. It helps to overcome some of the loneliness of our rushed and individualistic lives. We are no longer islands, but part of a continent. We find mirrors for ourselves in others, support and help in difficulties, the pleasure of giving when we have too much. Some of the moments I shall always treasure are when, as true friends, you and I explored the world together, enjoying a new garden, a visit to the Natural History Museum, or discovering the fairy tales of the Grimm Brothers, with a joy which could not have come if we were on our own.