Why do people remember high school friends with special affection? One reason may be high school is a time of substantial stress--people are undergoing a visible metamorphosis, leaving childhood, discovering sex and failure and getting launched into the future or crashing and burning, with results which seem momentous at the time.
Duress, conflict, intensity of feeling all forge friendship. You don't really know someone until you've lived through some sort of conflict with him or her. You can work alongside someone in an office for years and hear about their family and their vacations, but if there is no real conflict or pressure at work, you are unlikely to develop much feeling for that person.
Soldiers say their war time friends are more than friends: They are brothers. Some of that is romanticized, but some is very real. Conflict can shred bonds, but it can forge them.
People will say you can't really become friends with someone until you've locked horns and sparred and while I'm not sure a fight is necessary, I can hardly imagine considering someone a friend until I've really challenged that person, pressed them until they have felt uncomfortable and had to fight to defend a position or a belief. Until you draw blood, a friendship is anemic.
Among some cultures, conflict is avoided and considered unfortunate, covered over. But for my money, a friend you've never tested is not yet earned.
Phantom,
ReplyDeleteI would agree that conflict can forge a tighter bond between two people. Friendship is easy when things are going swimmingly, but when the there is a bump in the road and the friendship successfully clears it, you seem to value the friend even more. I have never been a fan of friendships where the fighting is constant, I realized by junior high that life was too short for that type of drama, but even in the best of relationships disagreement is inevitable, unless one is engaged in a friendship with a tree stump. How the parties deal with the conflict determines the quality and longevity of the relationship and you learn a lot about a friend and how much they value the friendship when you are engaged in a disagreement. Never disagreeing for fear it will irreparably damage the relationship seems as unrealistic and unappealing as constant bickering. For me, when it comes to conflict between friends, it seems the best motto is "fairly but rarely"...
Maud
Maud,
ReplyDeletePersonally, I have had several felicitous long term relationships with tree stumps. In particular, a gray birch, but also one popular, and of course, the most profound, a magnolia, but that was in the South andlong ago.
Phantom