Friendship

Of all the abstract qualities and ideas that I've had to modify my notion of as I age, "friendship" is the one whose modification I most regret. Love, sex, marriage, family, children, home, community, work, money, status, religion, politics, country, sport, and so on -- the received common understandings of most of those have been out the window for me for quite some time, and good riddance in many cases. But friendship -- darn. I retain sentiment about a few things -- life just isn't bearable if you don't, although I think a mature mind should try to keep that baggage to a minimum, and to reserve the sentiment for those situations where the distance between fantasy and actuality isn't too great. The natural world really is worthy of reverence; books really are companionable; travel really is stimulating; dogs and cats really are loyal. My feelings in those directions haven't changed much since young adulthood.

I used to argue friendship into that category, but the evidence for that seems to me to steadily diminish as one ages. New friendships are harder to form, old ones are harder to maintain. The intensity of friendship that one feels in youth, really a kind of romance -- that fades. At the bottom of it is the simple, brutal fact that unrelated mature adults just don't have much time for each other outside the workplace, and work "friendships" are, as I've noted earlier, notably situational and tenuous. Without time to blossom and flourish -- the sort of time that is readily available in college, but seldom thereafter -- friendship can't develop to much of a pitch. Most of those we call friends are actually acquaintances. Good to have, but still.

Given all this, as well as ever-increasing experience with people and their behaviors, one's sense of what can realistically be expected from friendship is bound to alter over time, as Jean-Pierre Melville's did:

Commerce with men is a dangerous business. The only way I have found to avoid being betrayed is to live alone. Do you know two men who have lived and worked together as good friends and who are still on amiable speaking terms a few years later? I don't...When you are young, you think that men are interesting animals. I have no illusions any more. What is friendship? It's telephoning a friend at night to say, "Be a pal, get your gun and come on over quickly" -- and hearing the reply, "O.K., be right there." Who does that? For whom?

It is possible perhaps that friendships between women are different in this respect than male or cross-gender friendships -- I obviously can't speak to that. But in general I think Melville is quite correct.