Friendship

So, I've been thinking a lot about this recently. What exactly this means. I remember my first best friend (I guess the kids today say BFF or something like that). I can't tell you how we came to be friends. If it was a matter of convenience or temperament or similar likes and dislikes. But we were friends for many, many years, until she moved away. And even then, my parents and hers would arrange for us to spend a few weeks together in the summer. We would create stories around the dolls we shared and we would fight over...I don't remember what exactly...but it was one of those things where, even with my limited capacity for understanding the finer points of complex personal relationships, I knew that the two of us together would endure. We would survive her moving away and our rows. Of course, we eventually grew up and apart and reconnected on the facebook years later. And since then, I've had numerous friends throughout my life. But it has occurred to me that some of the people were not actually friends. Some were men I "dated" who just wanted to be "friends". We all know what THAT means. Some were rather toxic individuals that I got some sick satisfaction out of letting control me, or letting me control them. And then there were those people that I only seemed to meet up with at a bar and we would make "all those plans" and then never follow through. And then there were those who were and are closer to family: they drive me crazy and I can't hang out with them all the time, but I've known them for so long and been through so much with them, that there's no question in my being that we shall "endure". But I've experienced a new kind of friendship over these past few years. And that's not to say that I'm meeting a different kind of people, it's that my understanding of and approach to actual friendship is different now. Boy, those men I dated were wrong. Being a friend to someone, letting them be a friend to you, is infinitely more complex and rewarding than "dating". I have learned that being a friend is an action. It involves patience, attention, forgiveness, trust, willingness, vulnerability, understanding, kindness, and, above all, love. True love. Not the "I give to get" kind of love, but the "I give, because that will make you happy" kind of love. Love that, as Father Robert Barron says, "wills the good will of the other as other". It is not about possession, or about control, or about manipulation, or about barter, or about justice, or about power. It's sometimes just about sitting and listening to someone cry. It's sometimes just about letting someone else listen to you cry. It's about asking someone for help. It's about giving someone else help when they ask. It's about watching someone act out or fall down or descend into despair or hurt themselves or others and loving them anyway. It's about knowing that someone will do the same for me. And so we bear witness to each other's lives. And that really is all. That really is everything. It is indeed the food that we cannot live without. At least I can't.