Friends

(After “Friends, Good Friends – and Such Good Friends”,

by Judith Viorst) ¹

…Friendships are conducted at many levels of intensity, serve many different functions, meet different needs and range from …those as all-the-way as the friendship of the soul sisters … to that of the most nonchalant and casual playmates.

Consider these varieties of friendship:

1.Convenience friends. These are the women with whom, if our paths weren’t crossing all the time, we’d have no particular reason to be friends: a next-door neighbor, a woman in our car pool or the mother of one of our children’s closest friends.

Convenience friends are convenient friends. They’ll lend us their cups and silverware for a party… They’ll take us to pick up our car when we need a lift to the garage. They’ll even take our cats when we go on vacation. As we will for them.

But we don’t, with convenience friends, ever come too close or tell too much; we maintain our public face and emotional distance…

2.Special-interest friends. These friendships aren’t intimate. Their value lies in some interest jointly shared. And so we may have an office friend or a yoga friend or a tennis friend…

My playmate is a shopping friend, a woman of marvelous taste, a woman who knows exactly where to buy what, and furthermore is a woman who always knows beyond a doubt what one ought to be buying. And since I care a lot about eye-shadow … and shoes I’m very glad to have a shopping friend.

3.Historical friends. We all have a friend who knew us … maybe back in our second grade…

The years have gone by and we’ve gone separate ways and we’ve little in common now, but we’re still an intimate part of each other’s past.

…What this friend means to me and what I mean to her…is having a sister without sibling rivalry. We know the texture of each other’s lives. She remembers my grandmother’s cabbage soup. I remember the way her uncle played the piano. There’s simply no other friend who remembers those things…

4.Crossroads friends. Like -historical friends, our crossroad friends are important for what was – for the friendship we shared at a crucial, now past time of life. A time, perhaps, when we roomed in college together, or worked …together …

Crossroads friends forge powerful links, links strong enough to endure with not much more contact than once-a-year letters at Christmas. And out of respect for those crossroads years, for those dramas and dreams we once shared, we will always be friends.

5.Cross-generational friends. Historical friends and crossroads friends seem to maintain a special kind of intimacy – dormant but always ready to be revived… Another kind of intimacy exists in the friendships that form across generations in what one woman calls her daughter-mother and her mother-daughter relationships.”

…what we get from cross-generational friends [who are our parent’s age] “is the benefit of their experience. What they get – and enjoy – from us is a youthful perspective. It’s a pleasure for both of us.” … they are wise, …have been where we are and can help us understand it.

In our daughter role we tend to do more than our share of self-revelation; in our mother role we tend to receive what’s revealed. It’s another kind of pleasure – playing wise mother to a questing younger person. It’s another very lovely kind of friendship.

6.Part-of-a-couple friendships. Some of the women we call our friends we never see alone – we see them as part of a couple at couples’ parties. And though we share interests in many things and respect each other’s views, we aren’t moved to deepen the relationship. Whatever the reason, a lack of time or – and this is more likely – a lack of chemistry, our friendship remains in the context of a group. But the fact that that we spend half the evening talking together counts as a friendship.

Other part-of-a-couple friends are the friends that came with the marriage, and some of these are friends we could live without… [But] we find ourselves dealing with them, somewhat against our will, in a spirit of what I’ll call reluctant friendship.)

7. Men who are friends. … I must mention man-woman friendships too. For these friendships can be just as close and as dear as those that we form with

women. Listen to Lucy’s description of one such friendship:

“We’ve found we have things to talk about that are different from what he talks about with my husband and different from what I talk about with his wife. So sometimes we call on the phone or meet for lunch. There are similar intellectual interests – we always pass on to each other the book that we love – but there’s also something tender and caring too. The flirty part of our friendship is very small – but some – just enough to make it fun and different.”

There are medium friends, and pretty good friends, and very good friends indeed, and these friendships are defined by their level of intimacy. And what we’ll reveal at each of these levels of intimacy is calibrated with care….

The best friends, I still believe, totally love and support and trust each other, and bare to each other the secrets of their souls, and run – no questions asked – to help each other, to tell harsh truths to each other when they must be told.

But we needn’t agree about everything (only 12-year-old girl friends agree about everything) to tolerate each other’s point of view. To accept without judgement. To give and take without ever keeping score. And to be there, as I am for them and as they are for me, to comfort our sorrows, to celebrate our joys.

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