5 Brands of Friends

One somber evening not long ago, a husband and wife lay in bed rehearsing the many close friends of theirs who had checked out of their lives from recent years to the current. The husband said, "I have not taken anyone under my wings like I did that guy. I set aside time to meet with him once a week to chat, share laughter, sip coffee, and pray with him."

The wife said, her voice cracking, "When I say hello to her these days she acts like she doesn't hear me. In fact, she's started taking her break at a different time just to avoid seeing me at work. The other day I saw her and another lady talking, and as I approached, they stopped talking. I felt like they were talking about me. Anyway, that's OK. I will keep loving her, speaking to her even if she doesn't answer me. That's all I can do. Love her."

"Every time one more friendship hits the trash bin, I feel like one who rescues and raises a tiger only to get attacked by that tiger when it's all grown up. You know, Honey, I don't know what it will take before you and I finally learn our lesson and stop pouring so much of ourselves into friendships that go nowhere," the husband replied with much apathy in his tone. "We've been let down so many times. May be it's something with us. May be we just don't understand this culture, though we've been in this country for over a decade now."

The wife said, "Back home, once you find a friend, you've got a friend, but here it's like it's no big deal. They just cut off, and you have no idea why."

Her husband interrupts, "Honey, you know something, I'm in my mid forties, and when it comes to friends, I only have two right now: Amy and Rick."

Amy is the name of his wife, and Rick is his friend since junior high school.

After few more lines of conversation punctuated with stretches of silence, the couple took each other's hands, winding their day to a quiet close, as much-needed sleep slowly overwhelmed their tired bodies and wearied minds. Not a great way to end a day, but...

Like many people who value the human experience known as friendship, this couple needs to learn that there are two most unpredictable things in life: the stock market and people. Of the two, you can make a living forecasting the market. As for predicting people, well, it's a loser's career.

We all can take some of the sting out of dead-end relationships and trashed friendships once we understand that all friendships are not created equal. Looking back over the friendships of my own life, I can say with some degree of certainty that friends come in five basic brands: casual, temporary, seasonal, intermittent, and permanent.

1. Casual friend: That's your touch-and-go friendship. The hello-hello kind, just one step beyond stranger or acquaintance. You exchange smiles every now and then when your paths cross, but that's about it with casual friendship.

2. Temporary friend: As you will guess, this type of friendship is short-lived. It starts over nothing special, and it ends that way, in a relatively short period of time, though "temporary" could be a year or more before one or both friends call it quits.

3. Seasonal friend: This is friendship that was probably triggered by a special event, a moment of crisis, or a transition in the life of at least one of the two persons involved. It could be the birth of a child, the death of a loved one, a natural disaster, a flat tire by the road, or any other event that marks a crisis or transition in one's life. A seasonal friendship tends to come to an end when one or both persons get through that transitional period. The friendship has served its purpose, and it only makes sense to pull the curtain. If you try to force the continuation of such a friendship, you may actually strain the relationship beyond the pain of a broken friendship; you could make an enemy out of your old friend. It's better to let go.

What hurts most about temporary and seasonal friendships is how abruptly they usually end. Often the person just cuts away without warning or explanation. You ask the person, "What happened? What did I do wrong? How can we work this out?" And he or she says, "Nothing. There is nothing to talk about. You did nothing wrong. It's just time for us to go our separate ways."

And you wanna go, "Say what? After all we've been through? After all these years and all the time we've invested in this relationship? This is it? This is how it ends? Can't you remember? Have you forgotten?"

Sometimes it's far worse than that. Your once-good buddy may start to slander you, starting and spreading the nastiest kind of gossip and rumor about your character, saying crude and cruel things about you. How more bearable it would be if the ex-friend would let you know why s/he ended the relationship. But you are left to guess from hints dropped here, there and yonder. You must get used to not expecting or getting any explanations. This world can be a jungle, and people can be the beasts.

The surprising thing to me, knowing a little something about human nature, is that we are often shocked when a friendship we thought would last forever suddenly shrieks to a terminal halt. Look at it this way: if the seed of your loins, the embryo of your womb can come into this world, eat your food, sleep under your roof and in your bed, play with toys that you bought or made, go to school on your dime or in your car, accept and enjoy your birthday presents and graduation gifts over the years, etc, and grow into adulthood only to abandon you and cut out of your life, as though s/he never knew you from Adam, why be astonished at all when a friend with whom you shared no blood link, suddenly or gradually walks away from your life? Welcome to the real world. Get used to it, my right-now friend.

4. Intermittent friend: "Intermittent" describes something that starts and stops at intervals. "Intermittent" means periodic. It means "on-and-off".

Our family enjoys an intermittent friendship with one lady in particular. Let's call her Lady. She is the Godmother of our daughter. We may run into her at the store or at some community gathering. My wife and I sometimes voice our mutual guilt for not keeping in touch more frequently with this dear lady. But she rarely touches with us either. Recently, I surprised Lady with a visit to her home; we talked and laughed for hours.

There is one time in the year that our family can bet on seeing Lady at our house: the evening before our daughter's birthday (which happens to be our son's birthday too). Her tradition for the last few years has been to come with an envelope containing a birthday card, which has money tucked in, the amount equal to the age of her Goddaughter. (She brings one for our son too.) Every time we meet Lady, whether on our doorstep, at her home, or somewhere in the community, it's like we've just made friends with her all over again. This intermittent friendship is one of the most precious relationships we know of. Yes, it's on-and-off, but we know it's still there, and whenever we bump into Lady, the meeting proves that our friendship with her is still alive and well.

The really neat, or perhaps odd thing about this relationship is that neither Harriet (that's my wife) nor I can exclusively claim Lady as "my friend". Isn't that weird? Lady is a friend to both of us, to Harriet and me. She's "our friend", our intermittent friend.

5. Permanent friend: Life hardly gets any better than a lasting, lifelong relationship with a true friend, with whom you are regularly in contact, like almost on a weekly basis, if not more regularly.

A permanent friendship may start while two students are in grade school. The ride never ends. One is there when the other lands his first job. One serves as maid of honor or best man at the other's wedding. When one moves into an apartment or house of her own, the other is right there, or knows the day and time when the big move takes place. So on goes this rarest brand of friendship until the 'ship' veers by a hospital or some other sick bed, then finally reaches the harbor of a funeral home. From there, one still faithful, though frail friend, follows his buddy to say one last goodbye at a graveyard just outside of town.

Blessed is the soul which has one such jewel of a friend, a permanent friend, especially if that golden friend is someone outside of one's family circle. But if you find a family member a permanent friend, you'd better take him or her. Life doesn't churn up a whole lot of that brand anymore.

The Death of Friendship - When a Friendship Dies

When friendship ends, former friends often become disappointed, or worse. But this need not be the case. You can experience a better closure to the death of friendship, so that a little piece of your life does not die with every deceased friendship of your past. For this to happen, you need to look at the "failure" or downfall of every friendship differently. As serious as the death of a friendship is, it can be a time to refresh and regroup, without taking yourself off the shelf at Friendship Mall.

For a redemptive end to your relationship with a one-time friend, do this:

1. Reject resentment: Say, "I refuse to be bitter or resentful towards my ex-friend."

2. Regret nothing: Instead of regretting the end to your friendship, say, "I choose to savor all the good times we spent together and the good things that came from our friendship when it was alive and well." Do the same thing that bereaved people do at funerals; moan the loss but cherish and treasure the precious memories associated with the deceased.

3. Express gratitude: Say, "I am grateful and thankful that our paths crossed and our lives connected. Somehow I believe this world is a better place, because we met and shared our lives."

4. Don't feel abandoned: Tell yourself, "Just because our friendship has ended does not mean my ex-friend betrayed or abandoned me. It doesn't mean he did not appreciate all I did for him, or what we meant to each other. There may be things going on in her life that I can't or don't understand for now, but that doesn't make her a traitor."

5. Identify a purpose that the friendship served: Say, "Our friendship has served a purpose. Perhaps it was meant to be only a seasonal or temporary friendship, which is no less valuable than a permanent friendship."

6. Believe that you remain a potential friend: Speak these words to yourself, "For my part, I refuse to consider my one-time friend an enemy. My ex-friend remains a potential friend, but I will leave that to the twists and turns of life. If he comes back, I'll be here, but I won't bank on that, and I won't put my life on hold until that happens. If our friendship never makes a come back, I'm fine with that too."

7. Work on "a better me": Say, "I will work on myself, so that the next person who is fortunate to have me as a friend will have one of the best friends they ever had. Yes, I'll remain friendly and keep the entrance to friendship a double door, ready to fling wide open again if life would have it so. To the next friend, I will be a far better friend than I was to this former friend."

Being a great friend means that you understand the value of friendship. But it also means that you've learned how to bring positive closure to a fallen friendship, so that your life is not shattered or set back every time a friendship dies.

Purpose-Driven Friendship

Why do humans become friends? Unlike animals that may flock or form packs, humans choose their friends deliberately, for better or for worse.

Every real friendship has a purpose. A friendship should be active and mutual in order to fulfill its purpose. There are at least six reasons why humans choose to befriend one another.

1. Mutual assistance: friends are to help each other. A relationship in which one person serves to enable the other falls short of the meaning of friendship. Enabling someone is an abuse of friendship.

2. Motivation: friends encourage each other. They edify or build up each other. Friends inspire each other to succeed and excel beyond mediocrity, beyond average.

3. Improvement: friends make each other better; friends sharpen each other; King Solomon described it as iron sharpening iron; friends improve each other's personhood, self-esteem, confidence or performance as iron sharpens iron.

4. Advancement or Progress: friends help each other move from one point to the other

5. Maturity: friends nurture each other to grow up, become mature, a more complete person.

6. Endurance: friendship is a coping mechanism; a true friend gives you the edge in difficult times, because she will strengthen and empower you to cope with some of life's toughest challenges; friends see each other through hardship, without being mere bystanders. Friendship can make the difference between surviving war, as prisoner of war, or life in a refugee camp.

Friendship that fails to somehow in some way make one or both friends better cannot be called genuine friendship. It may be a leech-connection, a sponge-bond, or codependency, but not friendship in the true sense of the concept. Any friendship that ceases to make one better no longer has any purpose for being kept alive.

What is Your Friendship Based On?

Every friendship has a basis on which it sits and rests. It is important to know what a friendship is based on. Friendship can be based on one of five things: affinity, personality, common bond, need or interest.

1. In an affinity-based friendship, two friends just take a natural liking or attraction to each other. They just seem to click. It's a chemistry thing. This form of friendship tends to lean towards romantic involvement, though it may develop between two people who may never drag romance into it. Affinity friends do not have to be alike. In fact, they may actually be opposites, but as we know from magnetic poles, opposites can and do attract.

2. In a personality-based friendship, two individuals become friends because they are similar. They may both be reserved (introvert), outgoing (extrovert), or mediocre (average) for that matter. Or politically, they may be conservative, liberal or moderate in their views. They may both be secular, progressive, religious or traditional.

3. Common-bond friendship is one between persons of similar ethnicity (two Hispanics), religion (two Muslims), church (two Baptists), nationality (two Chinese), team (two Celtics fans) or life experience (two refugees). Yes, when it comes to friendship, birds of like feather do flock together.

4. In a need-based friendship, two persons came together because one of them had a need that the other helped meet. For example, you become friends with the person who paid for your stay at a motel when you lost your job or when you just got of jail.

Need-based friendship can be an uncomfortable union of unequals, unless something happens for the two friends to switch roles, whereby the one who had received help before becomes the helper in a situation that puts the original helper at a point of need. For example, the guy who paid his friend's motel bill gets evicted by his landlord and has to lodge with his friend who now owns an apartment.

Because of the usually one-sided nature of need-based friendship, it is often not a simultaneously enjoyable experience for both friends equally. Therefore, this form of friendship is often short-lived, if the "beneficiary" (needy person) and the "benefactor" do not switch hats every now and then throughout the relationship.

5. Interest-based friendship is one in which two friends share a common interest, which may be sports, music, career path, books, movies, travel, etc. This form of friendship is likely to terminate if one person replaces the interest that formed the basis of the relationship.

For example, if you and I became friends primarily because we were members of the same band, our friendship may bite the dust if our band disbands.

Interest-based friendship runs the risk of being very superficial, though it can become deep and meaningful if the parties put in the effort needed to keep their relationship interesting.

Three Types of Friendship

There are various types of friendship with reference to time or timing. Every genuine friendship is a timely relationship. As such, a friendship can be seasonal, temporary, or permanent.

1. Seasonal friendship is one that is on and off, based on the season in either friend's life. Seasonal friendship is only useful and rewarding when the season is right, or else, one person or both become a bother to the other.

An example of a seasonal friend is a person who becomes your friend because your loved one died. This friendship was created by the season of bereavement, and its only reason may have been to help you get through the period of loss. By the way, the season that creates a friendship doesn't have to be a bad season; it can be a good one, as when two persons who get hired by a company at the same time become buddies.

2. Temporary friendship comes to an end after it has served its purpose. What is the difference between seasonal friendship and temporary friendship? Temporary friendship can begin at any ordinary time of your life; it is not connected to a season of loss or any other season of life.

Attempts to prolong a temporary friendship may create disrespect for a friend, resentment or even enmity towards an ex-friend. It is often better to let a temporary friendship die, or you may find yourself playing the undertaker, regretting why you revived the corpse, the dead body, in this case a dead friendship, in the first place. Friendship can never be a forced relationship; so, when it's over, let it go; when a friendship dies, lay it to rest.

3. Permanent friendship is the yearning of everyone who values friendship. Yet a lifelong friend is a treasure too few and far between.

After more than 40 years on Planet Earth, I can claim about 3 permanent friends so far, and one of them is my wife.

The average person so desires each and every friendship to be lifelong that she tries to force the issue and keep a friendship on life support, when it would be far better to eulogize the thing and just let it go to the trash bin of human relationships.

When you find a truly permanent friendship, the circumstances and dynamics of that relationship will serve to sustain it over the years. No need to repair a temp friend to make him or her perm.

If you are a typical person, over your lifetime, you will meet and make many seasonal friends, many temporary friends, but very few permanent friends.

Friendship - Life's Best Part

Every family member. Every neighbor. Every coworker. Every stranger. Every person is a potential friend.

Isn't it strange how the word "friend" conjures closer ties than words like relative, sibling, or even spouse? Yet it is even a double blessing when one's friend happens to also be a husband, wife or family member.

Friend. One of the sweetest words in any language, whatever it is called in that language. Friend. A person with whom you are in harmony, one accord. Someone that understands you, someone that you understand. One you are in rapport with. A friend is a human being who has become more human to you than anyone else. To become a friend is to become a person in a greater sense, at a deeper level, than merely being another human.

Friendship. Why don't we define or describe friendship as a "ship" with just friends on board? A ship that carries no other cargo but friends. Really, in true friendship, the two of you do feel like you have climbed into some kind of vessel that floats above and beyond the ordinary. Friendship. A simple network of two persons who have discovered a special chemistry for a relationship in which each person says things and acts in ways that benefit the other. The epitome and glory of a life aglow with unselfishness. Life at its peak and very best is friendship.

Yet there is an irony to friendship: the benefits of the birth of friendship can match the blight of the death of friendship. Just as many lives have been transformed by the discovery of true friendship, so many lives have been torn down by the destruction of the same. Therefore, to ease or lighten the blow of friendship's demise, it really behooves us to understand friendship in its many complex aspects and facets. Though friendship itself is a very simple human relationship, there is not much that is simplistic about the ingredients and tenets that go into making a great friendship.