The Courtship of Friendship

When you come into proximity with someone you think has the potential to be a friend. Someone who surprises you with nuanced similarities and enhances you with aspirational differences. Someone you’ve observed as someone you’d like to be observed like. Someone who makes you laugh. Someone you don’t need any physical intimacy with but could serve as emotional confidant. You may want to open the friend door.

That slow sometimes graceful sometimes graceless dance that tests investment opportunities and volleys proclivities. Friends sit high on the human interaction pyramid; just under partner and clearly atop casual acquaintances. Most people we know are putting on a show for us and we are doing the same for them. We do not know most of these people. Nor do we really want to. Friends we want to know and require no acting.

I have friends I’ve known since I was a child in the 1970s. I have friends I see less than once a year but require zero catch-up time. We just continue. I have friends I would go to jail for and who would reciprocate. I have friends I would bail out of jail. Friends are the family we get to select like pick-up basketball teammates. I have friends I “talk to” daily yet we live a continent apart. I have friends who wake me up with texts every Sunday at seven in the morning. I have friends who drive me nuts.

Friends happen. We don’t recruit or advertise for friends. What starts as colleague or associate or parent of some kid your kids does something with or mortal enemy can sometimes evolve if the stars align and the fires are adequately stoked. It’s a whole lot like love and mate partnering. Friendship is a relationship that requires initial capital then some actual work. And it has to happen in unison, both potentials working.

We don’t want to reveal our true selves too soon for fear of frightening off a new potential -OR- we just lay it all out and let them sort through the rubble themselves and make their own damn decisions. We hint. We offer. We compliment. We listen. We share more and more. We carefully consider. We look for signs that reciprocal friend-budding is blossoming.

When it works it’s fantastic. And there are few consequences to it not.