What differentiates, distinguishes a friend from everyone else?
What is it that matters that makes a friend different from everyone else?
Before these questions can even begin to be answered, something that I would hope would be obvious should be pointed out: there are either, or both, degrees of friendship, or kinds of friendship, such that, there must be some variation accordingly in the answers to questions like the above. [I don't actually expect to come to conclusions on these questions.]
I should also specify that it seems to me that I attribute friendship less liberally than most others. It takes quite a bit for me to consider someone a friend. I don't presume that whatever it takes for me to finally consider someone a friend is somehow what it universally takes to be a friend at all. It's just that, for me, you're either in, or out.
Well, almost.
Damn near close enough. Because there is still usually quite a distinct barrier between those who circumstantially end up falling in between and those who are in. There is still quite a distance between the former and me.
But I speak honestly when I ask the essential question - What makes a friendship? - because so often I feel utterly blank on the answer, even though I would like to think that I know that one or two people are friends, that they are genuinely set apart from the rest of people. My whole life, the notion of friendship in others has been a mystery to me, an unsolvable puzzle between persons I can't seem to understand. And yet, being the kind of creature I am, I find myself driven to seek it, find myself feeling it to be desirable. For what? A connection. But it is precisely that, that is always lacking.
Sometimes, wandering through memories is like walking along a fence, myself on one side, the world of people on the other, a permanent barrier, a permanent division. The question is, is the fence too high to be climbed? Or do we simply find that we don't want to step over to the other side? Or perhaps, the lock on the only gate, for which the key has been lost, has long since rusted shut?
I grew up watching my peers, trying to understand - what? something, I don't even know what I was looking for - what accounted for friendship, what it was that made two people real friends. I so often felt like everyone else knew, but for some reason I didn't. Maybe everyone else felt that, too, but it never seemed like it. Then again, maybe they would have said, if I had told them these feelings I had, that I never seemed like there was a problem. I don't know what I looked like to them, what I seemed like from their perspective. I couldn't see the world from their perspective at all, but it was a mystery I so longed to figure out and understand. Because I was lonely, too, and it hurt. Even though it also hurt in an entirely different way to try to interact with people, or if it didn't hurt, it just didn't work. It was like trying to solve a complicated math problem without having any of the formulas: if there was any hope of solving it, I'd have to invent my own formulas. I suppose that's what I've been doing all this time, but they don't really work: the answers are mere approximations, and not even close ones at that.
How does one know whether a person one is confronted with at any moment is a genuine friend or not? How can one even measure such a thing? But surely you must in some way, for you can make the distinction. I don't presume here that one can or should know it with certainty, for, of so many things, we cannot have certainty in our beliefs. All I inquire is a method for distinguishing, a criterion or standard against which to measure, even if our use of the instrument, or the instrument itself, is hazy and blurred.
I have a deep mistrust of people. And I didn't know that for a very long time, until quite recently, until I had the opportunity to learn that about myself because of a very special friendship - a friendship I dare say the loss of would be similar enough metaphorically to the loss of the right side of my own body. Never has my mistrust of others so terrorized a friendship, and so terrorized me, and shredded my own mind and self. The reason, I think, that I was never before aware of this mistrust is that it doesn't come into play until a person gets close enough. And almost no one ever gets that close. I can count on one hand how many people have. The mistrust stems from my inability to read people's minds, to understand what they are thinking, feeling, what their motivations are by which I might understand why they do what they do, say what they say, etc. While "mind-reading" in the science-fictional sense never occurs, there is a sense of mind-reading that really does occur on a regular basis, and it is that which allows people, and very young children, to easily understand each other to a fair degree through their body language, facial expressions, the tones and inflections of their voice while they speak, etc. If you doubt how much of other people you can understand, then you are likely thinking far too complexly. The simple act of pointing is something humans inherently understand the meaning of - not including, obviously, those who are mentally retarded to a severe enough degree, but then again, perhaps even they, too, do understand that simple act. But our closest primate cousins, on the other hand, don't get the act of pointing, without rigorous and patient training. An infant gets it nearly instantly. Consider, too, how easily you can tell whether a person approaching you is planning to attack you, or greet you. Do you think you could so easily read the approaching behavior of an unfamiliar dog? Or a bear? If you've ever had to communicate in body language with someone who speaks a language you don't know, or who is deaf, consider all the very simple and incredibly subtle behaviors that go into the simplest "conversation". This is a kind of mind-reading. But that's just the easy stuff. Human interactions are regularly far more complex than that. Consider what it would take to figure out that someone was being condescending towards you, or was hitting on you, or was distracted by something weighing heavy on his mind instead of being uncomfortable with you. It is the more complicated and more subtle sorts of things about what a person is thinking and feeling that I am very poor at reading. If it is not rather obvious, I will undoubtedly miss it. Well, even that is not quite right, because there have certainly been instances in which other people claimed a person's feeling or thought or motivation was obvious, despite that I missed it entirely. If it requires attributing more mental goings on, more cognitive action, then I am likely to miss it. Thus, the minds of other people are far more inaccessible to me than to most others, including most of you.
Most people think I am exaggerating when I say these things. I learn to read particular people well enough that it is not usually a problem - so often, they are not close enough to me for it to ever arise as a problem. But I observe them very carefully for awhile. In most social situations I come across, I have, by this time, learned enough "rules", so to speak, to get by well enough. But most of those situations are rather superficial anyway, aren't they? There are only a few people who know me well enough, and have seen me enough in the kinds of situations where it arises, who know that I really can be utterly oblivious or confused about the thoughts, feelings, and motivations of others. And even fewer know how painfully and confusingly maddening it can be for me.
But this disability in reading others has been the source, again and again, of my failures in interacting with others, and getting it, whatever it is that is supposed to be gotten for connecting with people, and building and developing and maintaining a real friendship. I couldn't tell you how it happened, for that would require me to see what it was that I had missed, that in pretty much every attempt that seemed to go well for awhile, there was a point at which it broke down, for what seemed to me, from my perspective, to happen literally for no reason at all. Whatever the reason was, I had entirely missed it. From my perspective, it was always out of the blue. I presume that for at least most of those incidents, it wasn't out of the blue, and there was a reason, just that it was undetectable by me.
Now, have this happen to you enough times your whole life, and you'll learn to over-cautiously back away at the slightest sign of the fizzle of a friendship. But that, my dear reader, is precisely where my question enters, and plagues me! How am I to read signs that are in a language unknown to me? What does it mean for someone to be a real friend, such that I can distinguish a friend from he who isn't? Unavoidably, there must be expectations - we cannot parse the world into kinds without being able to perceive some significant degree of regularity. And such regularity provides us with reasonable expectations, even if we accept some degree of error, some lack of rigor, and we allow the world to stray from the hazy lines we draw, that from far away appear bold and clear, to delineate one kind of thing from another, sets of reasonable expectations must be our guide in the conclusions we draw about kinds. What, then, is it that makes a friend?
Not just so that I can know whether he or she is a genuine friend, but so that he or she can know, too, that I am genuinely a friend.
The disability goes both ways here, for I have never met a person who can come close to accurately reading my mind, my thoughts, feelings, and motivations. But don't misunderstand me here, for I don't necessarily hold a high degree of expectation that others should be able to read much of my mind. In fact, I tend to presume they can't. I do, think, however, those who are close to me, who are supposed to be genuine friends, should have acquired some ability to read some of my mind. I don't think that is unreasonable, considering that most people seem to think this rather normal, for people so often speak of knowing someone well enough and having known them long enough to be able to read the nuances of his particular behavior and have a deeper understanding of his thoughts and feelings. But furthermore, I don't mean to imply that people just fail to accurately read me and that's that. The fact is, very often, and rather consistently, people misread me, misjudging my thoughts, feelings, or motivations for those that they are not, because they take my body language to express something that turns out to be different from what I actually think or feel. In other words, it's not as if people fail to read me and don't see anything at all, but rather, that they read me incorrectly. My mind turns out to be just as inaccessible to them as theirs is to me! And, oh, I'm sure you can imagine, with how much skepticism I am met when I attempt to assure them that they have misread me. Interestingly, then, there is a kind of mistrust on their part of me. But, I don't want to go off too far in that direction. Yet.
The point is, I have learned that I cannot trust my own judgments about the thoughts, feelings, and motivations other people have that are supposed to be detectable in their behaviors, body language, facial expressions, all the nuances of their manner of speaking, etc. But ultimately, even if I have asked the person to help me understand him, I still have only my judgments about what he says, whether he is genuine, whether I can really understand him with regards to his other behaviors, for his words are no more direct access to his mind than his facial expressions or bodily behaviors, so it makes no difference whether I speak of mistrusting myself or mistrusting others, for I cannot somehow avoid myself in this whole process. And in the end, I feel like I am an isolated island.
And I know, I know, this is a rather roundabout entry - who hath actually read it all the way through? - but forgive me, it is 5:30 in the dark morning hours and I have yet to sleep. And as always, there are so many voices swirling around inside my head.
But the question remains: What is special about another person that makes him a genuine and dear friend? Or conversely, What is different and special about one's treatment of another such that that treatment is to treat him as dear friend?
It is not just treatment, it would seem to me, but the care one feels for a dear friend, because he matters, and he makes a difference in one's life, for he is valuable, and so his own well-being is of concern, and it would make a difference to lose him. To know, feel, believe that one matters to another: could there be a genuine friendship without this on both sides? Is this not, in a sense, the nature of trust?
How does one know whether one matters to another?
How does one know that one has shown another that he matters?
