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| quote: | Originally posted by SYSTEM-J
It's a Miles Davis reference, Lira. I really don't see the point in this question. It's impossibly broad and vague. There are many relationships you have with others that are called "friendship". |
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Still, it doesn't prevent us from looking for universals and simplifying these different relationships in order to define what it is that they have in common. It needn't be an exhaustive list, as you can always split hairs indefinitely until you define each and every friendly relationship on the planet.
According to Aristotle, people can be liked because their presence gives us pleasure, because they're useful, and because we just admire them for something in them. So he'd divide friendships into three main categories: pleasure-friendships, utility-friendships, and character-friendships. Modern thinkers, such as Kant and Kierkegaard don't seem to have built any sort of typology themselves (I'm still waiting for my copy of "Work of Love" to arrive), but they added an interesting twist, saying that the only moral worth in a friendship stems from a love for the friend's humanity (declaring that most other cases are just instances of self love). Helm added as characteristics of friendship the three following traits: Mutual Caring, Intimacy, and Sharing Activity. And what can we make of all these examples?
The "mutual caring" bit seems to be a point that all these definitions and examinations share in common. The prototypical friendship, therefore, seems to have this bit. I find it hard to imagine a friendship without any sort of mutual caring - if you've got a ps3 and need someone to play with you, I want to play ps3, and we can't stand each other, that's hardly an instance of friendship (though Aristotle would eagerly say this is a utility-friendship). Actually, I find it hard to believe that over the course of a few weeks, this will either lead to an actual friendship in which there's some sort of mutual caring or to an eventual split-up.
Also, friends may share some sort of intimacy after a while. I know about the feelings of most of my friends, and they know about mine as well, though we don't talk about these things with random strangers unless they graduated in psychology and are charging us a good deal of money so we can solve some issues. Of course, if you're too blokeish, you may probably refrain from talking about your life at all. How can we solve this problem? Well, if we think of the sharing of intimate feelings as an activity, we wouldn't be wrong to say that having a shared activity is also a very important part in most sort of friendships. Can you really think of a friendship in which there isn't any sort of intimate conversation and/or a shared activity both parties can engage in? Even if you do care for the other person's humanity, you're more likely to consider him to be an acquaintance than an actual friend.
Let's not get this too complicated. So far we have two necessary traits: Mutual caring and shared activity. This is probably common to most sorts of relationship, though perhaps we can find exceptions to this rule. These exceptions, I believe, can be treated as marginal cases, and the prototypical friendship is one in which the two people involved care for one another and do something in common - talking about feelings, playing football, and so on. Let's call this [+Basic], and have all traits systematised like this. If two people care for each other and do something together, they have [+Basic]. If they don't, they have [-Basic].
There can be friendships in which there's an underlying physical attraction. My fianc&eacut;e is my best friend, and among the shared activities there's a good deal of physical interaction derived from the fact that we're attracted to one another. The same may happen in couples in which there's some sort of physical attraction but nothing ever happens (see picture 1 and drop step 13), which is very common in high school, for example, but can easily happen in adult life under special circumstances. So, yeah, there's [+Fancy], as in a relationship in which one party (or both) fancies (one) another. There's also the possibility of having [+Fancy] and [-Basic], reason why I mentioned this trait: would you consider it to be a form of friendship?
Without further ado, let's just imagine one more trait (all with [+Basic] so we can imagine how necessary they are if they were [-Basic]). Let's go back to Aristotle and revamp [+Utility], which now means "there is something I need, and my friend can provide, so he's useful to me in the attainment of a goal other than the perpetuation of our friendship". We now have a few well-known possibilities, such as:
- Plain-vanilla friendship:[+Basic][-Fancy][-Utility]
- Bromance:[+Basic][?Fancy][-Utility]
- Actual couple:[+Basic][+Fancy][?Utility]
- (Something)mates:[+Basic][-Fancy][+Utility]
Here you have four different kinds of friendship that may be infinitely divided into subtypes depending on the circumstances. So, like you said, it can be used to describe a bunch of different possibilities. However, as I hope I was able to show, all these examples require mutual caring and a shared activity in particular. Otherwise you have a very strange sort of friendship. A one-night stand might be [-Basic][+Fancy][-Utility], but that ain't no friendship. If someone helps you attain a goal momentarily because it will help themselves as well, you can describe it as [-Basic][-Fancy][+Utility]. Once again I find it hard to believe most people would regard this as a friendship.
Finally, we could just say that friendship means having someone you care for and spend some time with. But, why have it? Well, because there seems to be an innate drive to associate with other people for some reason. What do these bonds mean? A safety net in our strive for survival, perhaps? An evolutionary accident, not necessarily designed for any given purpose, but that become part of our beings? A god-given tendency we engage in so we can worship His creation? You can find plenty of ideas here, though they only make sense within a given framework. And, unless you really believe Aristotle got everything right, there's no reason to believe a priori that there's just one way to interpret the world correctly.
CORe version: Friendship means having someone you care for and spend some time with. Why? It depends on your frame of reference, do you really think I'm going to tell you how to think? You're the one in charge of interpreting your world, not God, Science, or a Smart-arse poster from a South American country 
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