Friends are Essential

A good friendship is good for both of the people in it. If it's one sided or mismatched, then there's bound to be conflict eventually. Sometimes it can hurt to find that out after a long time, but that risk is nowhere near as bad as the pain a life of loneliness can bring.

You can't pick your relatives, but you can and do pick your friends. That's the essence of it. Friends can become relationships deeper and more important than birth family.

To live well, a human being needs to have good relationships in all of their social zones. These zones start with the Intimate Zone, which would hopefully include your spouse and children, may include parents if you have a good relationship or siblings if you have a close relationship -- and your closest, truest friends. The ones that you'd say "I love him like a brother" or "I love her like a sister" and not get romantic with. Hopefully your significant other is also a friend that close, or at least compatible if it's a more distant relationship.

Then there's a friendship level of spending a lot of time together and being mutually supportive. This ought to be a broader circle, more people in it, and these are the friends you stay in touch with and hang out doing things with for years. Friends can be trusted, they've earned that trust over the time you took to get to know them and they like you for who you really are, not who you seem to be on a first impression.

There's an old saying -- friends help you move, real friends help you move bodies.

The next outermost circle is coworkers and acquaintances. These would include other members of communities you belong to online or offline, fellow church members or coreligionists, people you work with and see every day, people who share your passionate interests that it'd be easy to make friends with because you've got something, at least one cool thing in common. What's cool to you could be something that bores me to tears, so that's very individual. All these zones are very individual.

It's from this pool of casual friends that tighter friendships grow. The longer you work at a given job or in a particular profession, the more likely some of these coworkers and acquaintances will move into the closer Friends zone on the basis of more than casual attraction or cooperation. This large group needs to be there for you to choose friends from and them to choose you.

Then there's a very broad social zone for people whom you'd be cool with on general grounds -- like if you're patriotic, fellow Americans, or maybe just people who speak your language, the largest cultural groups you identify with. It's a broader, looser category than acquaintances and includes the people you just met and have some reason to talk to.

Then there's strangers and people in general in the outermost zone, the rest of the whole human race including the large numbers of people who are completely unintelligible by not speaking your language or understanding your culture at all.

Out beyond that zone are People To Avoid. This includes all the people who categorically don't like you or you categorically don't like them. No matter who you are, there are some people who by skin color or religion or by being bigoted or something, are people you would prefer to completely avoid. This group also encompasses broken relationships, that horrible ex, people you never want to see again after they violate your trust in some way.

Strangers can cross the gap to become acquaintances by being friendly or by taking up some of your interests. But the Avoid zone is more than just not knowing someone. Those are the people who provably did hurt you in some way or who make it clear they would if given half a chance. Even if they sort themselves out, the best way to deal with it is to treat them like a stranger for a while. Don't trust yet but at least observe to see if the reason you're avoiding them has gone away for real.

Maybe an individual changed an attitude you can't bear, or went through a complete life change that left them better people. Ex-alcoholics are wonderful to be around if they've been in AA for several years or more. It's while they're active or in early recovery that they're hard on everyone around them. But most of the people in the Avoid Them zone belong there and ought to stay there. They're not worth your time unless they demonstrate in some concrete way -- not words but behavior -- that they're not going to break your trust again.

How many social zones you divide your life into is pretty much up to you, you can be a lumper or a splitter. But if you think of the self as the center of a circle and concentric bands of connections spreading out from you, it is important to have both very deep close relationships, casual friends and good acquaintances that you'd like to make friends with.

If you're socially lacking, if you have no intimate relationships or friends, or so isolated that you can't fill those outer circles with people to make friends with, your health will literally deteriorate. Loneliness can kill, slowly and painfully. It's also very likely in the current urbanized fast-paced modern world.

Internet friends are real friends. This is the lucky break that can end a lot of people's isolation. You can get to know people over a long time on the Internet. You have to watch out for people who lie about themselves or misrepresent themselves, but generally it's harder to keep that up over a long period of time and a lot of intimate discussion. Sooner or later the truth comes out -- and may not be that bad once you know, anyway.

It helps to look for friends rather than to look for romance. Eyes across the room is a pheromonal thing, a visceral charge that can lead to a relationship with a completely incompatible person who just smells good to your genes. Might be a good genetic match but completely unlivable as a relationship. Internet friendships often become real friendships. Eventually circumstances let you or them travel, you go to an event together, meet them in person and that's another stage of deepening friendship.

In fact, Internet discussions and friendships are no different from any pen friendships that existed among literate people in the past. The biggest difference is that we're not chewing up whole forests to make pulp paper for the correspondence, we can reach more readers with a single open letter or blog entry, and it gets delivered instantly. So it's easier to socialize now than it's ever been before. In effect you get unlimited postage for documents, images and even videos.

The nature of the Internet also makes it easier to find people you're interested in by visiting sites on topics you care about, whether that's a cause or just something you enjoy doing or discussing on weekends. I tend to visit a lot of art sites and communities, so a lot of my friends are artists, so I paint more. Many of the people in all my social zones are artists because of that.

As my readership grows, some of my readers are in that outermost circle of "interesting if I meet them individually but I don't know them yet." They have to actually comment to wind up in the Acquaintances group, but I know the lurkers are there and so they sometimes know me more than I know them on the first contact. They know how I'll react if they say they always wanted to draw, that's for sure -- they can trust by reading my oil pastels site that I will on principle encourage anyone to take up art no matter how bad a beginner they think they are. No one's untalented, having the talent for art comes with being human.

Each of your social zones has social filters -- and should. It's important to try to keep your intimate zones free of destructive people -- and here is where your closest friends may be more important than birth family if you have family members who are personal enemies.

If someone says "It's love-hate" that isn't healthy. Treat it as hate, let go and move on, you don't need to subject yourself to that kind of punishment just because you couldn't avoid them as a child. Love can become hate very fast if the one that loves is a control freak or there's another deep conflict involved.

The changes in society over the past few generations have created a lot of shattered families. Some of these changes are social progress, like the breakdown of racism and homophobia. Others are just changes caused by economic forces, like the pattern of living when people move on average every five years.

Houses don't get paid up when people buy them, they're sold with most of the mortgage unpaid and get refinanced. This breaks up communities too, the constant migration for work in white collar jobs as well as blue collar work has done more to break up family relationships than even the major changes to society that came with divorce being acceptable, racism and sexism unacceptable and discrimination shot down.

What happens to kids when their families move is that they lose all their friends and have to start out as the new kid in a new school who doesn't know anything. Doesn't know the in jokes, the slang, the history, who's the worst bully or who's the most annoying jerk, these kids often become outcast or learn to make friends fast. Many, many take longer to make new friends than they have time to, before they move again and wind up back at ground zero.

The result in later life is people who force themselves to look for work, afraid of rejection, and then keep themselves very quiet without forming new friendships for fear of rejection. It may sound basic and obvious, but to make friends you have to be friendly to the people you don't know.

This is where awareness of social zones can really help.

You can afford to be generous and friendly with a total stranger who hasn't hurt you. This is one of the big gaps for people who don't have much experience in making friends -- because being generous with a smile or encouraging word doesn't cost you anything. Just say something pleasant and nice. Ask if they had a good day. Greet them.

That isn't so much of a social investment that if they're too grumpy to answer or didn't hear you, it means they hate you and are working against you in the office. If you cultivate a generally friendly attitude to the people you don't know, the process of finding the people you can trust and like enough to bring into your closer social zones gets started and moves faster.

That and if your zones are empty as they get closer to the center, you can be perceived as popular while being tremendously lonely. Some extroverted people are like this. They treat everyone with friendly good cheer but never let anyone close to them -- and then when they're sick or they need to move or something big goes wrong in their lives, no one is coming to help them because no one has that much indvidual investment of time and emotion in the friendship.

I have been blessed all my life with good friends. I've had friends give me a place to stay when I was homeless and so sick I couldn't even manage what I needed to do to get disability or welfare let alone earn a living. There are plenty of good and generous people out there in the world, they are not all greedy monsters out to get whatever they can. I've also had some heartbreaks from people I trusted, sometimes for years, who then for some reason or stress that never came up before, turned on me and backstabbed me.

It's a risk making friends. But if you don't take that risk at all, you will definitely hurt and be lonely and abandoned -- and no one will care when you finally die in that loneliness. If you do take the risk more than once and don't load all your social needs on one cherished friend or your spouse, then you won't be codependent and try to take over that person's life to ensure that you're never alone. The more support you find in the outer zones, the easier it is to find and build good relationships in the inner zones.

Your friends and closest friends are the ones who will tell you if you're in a bad relationship and putting up with unreasonable demands and bad treatment from your partner. They can see it when you can't if you're enmeshed in a codependent relationship with a user or a control freak. It's the friends who will be critical when you really need to hear it that are usually supportive and do understand your real goals in life that are your truest friends. They're not afraid you'll walk away because they said something you didn't want to hear.

Treat your friends well. That's the way to keep your intimate zones healthy. Never betray your closest friends or friends. If you're going to backstab anyone, think twice because it will set up a serious enemy out there who can make trouble later on, it's probably not worth whatever benefits you gain from it. People who contribute to their communities, workplaces, affinity groups (tropical fish fanciers, outdoor artists, bikers, etc.) and other groups they belong to are the ones those groups are first to help in need.

That is also when you'll find out who your close friends are. Don't knock all the fairweather friends though, some are good people who just don't have the resources to help -- if they at least offer some compassion that's enough to expect out of the Acquaintance-Coworker group. If they do anything more, accept with gratitude.

Most of all, with the Internet available, try to stay in touch with your closest oldest friends. You don't need to move on as totally as you did a decade or two before when communication by phone or letter was costlier or slower. You can shift previous close IRL friends into close Internet friends, comment on their blogs, participate in the same groups and keep the relationship fresh so that if you chance to get together again, it's renewed.

Friendships are essential to human beings. We are a social species and the best way to keep a good balance between all your social zones is to behave well with them to the level of intimacy each group should have. Don't confide in new-met strangers as if they were lifelong friends, they aren't yet. Give friendships time to grow and feed them with shared experiences and interests, accept that some will get deeper than others when they do.

Despite all the legends of love at first sight or the supposed excitement of romance with a stranger, I made it a personal rule not to date on appearance alone. Insntead, any possible romance is someone whom I've grown to trust through all those social zones before I bring up romance -- and that way when I do find a partner again, I'll have my best chance at a deep, happy and supportive relationship.

Friendship with your kin is to be treasured as a precious gift. If you get along with any family member in a way that if you weren't related, you'd be friends or close friends, that's fantastic. You are one of the lucky ones, really work to keep that relationship happy because it's rare and wonderful.

If not though, friends can fill your heart and make your life full and whole even if your birth family, spouse or kids break away completely.