J said something to me while we were in SF that I haven’t stopped thinking about: friendship is based on mutual respect and admiration. It’s so simple, yet I never thought about it in those terms. I’ve written a lot on this subject, trying to figure out what makes friendships work. Is it a shared sense of humor? Similar values? Common interests? Every successful friendship is different, but if there is a common denominator, mutual admiration seems to come closest.
From Gauguin and Van Gogh to Lila and Lenù, mutual admiration has underpinned some of the most iconic friendships, both real and fictional. And when I ran through all the significant friendships in my own life, each one passed this litmus test. Admiration, combined with emotional intimacy, fosters affection, and affection is as foundational as trust. Trust can be broken and restored. But without mutual affection and admiration, there’s no friendship.
Friendship is not charity whereby you’re kind to someone out of sympathy. It’s not a mentorship where one person guides another by sharing their knowledge and wisdom. It’s not a parent-child relationship where there are innate obligations on both sides. In friendship, which is also the foundation of romantic partnerships, we find the only love that is freely chosen and freely given.
We admire our friends in ways that are extensions of our own values and aspirations. I admire K’s exothermic nature, J’s introspection and sense of adventure, E’s intellect and humor, M’s even-temperedness, C’s ability to bring people together. Like romantic partners, your friends can inspire you to become a better person.
I was about to publish this piece when a friend’s essay popped into my inbox. So timely, and I could not have said it better:
If you want people’s respect, you have to have something real to offer them. Get really good at a specific skill. Be a genuinely kind person. Learn new things and become more interesting. Work on yourself rather than trying to navigate social ladders.
— Kasra, bits of wonder
To have friends, it’s so important to invest in yourself. The more confidence you have in your own qualities, the more visible they become to others, and the more likely you are to attract your tribe.
I’m constantly in awe of the love I receive from my friends, and at the same time, I’m more insecure in my friendships than I am in other types of relationships. The cost of leaving a romantic partner is higher the longer you stay in the relationship. You grow to depend on each other. But people have multiple friends they can turn to for support. They’re not as reliant on one person. Friends can grow close, grow apart, move across the country, make new friends. But what I’ve come to realize is that our freedom to choose our friends is also what makes our love for them (and theirs for us) so powerful. The more active and intentional the choice, the stronger the bond (the less intentional, the more precarious).
Thanks to the internet we have the ability to seek out the connections we want pretty much anywhere in the world. It’s incredible to have this freedom, but many people don’t take advantage of it because it requires effort—and guts. It’s daunting to reach out to someone you’ve never met and ask for their time. A Twitter mutual I met on a reading retreat messaged me and said he thought we had the potential to become friends, and I’m so glad he did. He said he was trying to create a feeling of home no matter where he was, home being the people around him.
Just as it’s important to seek the connections you want, it’s also important to be clear about what you don’t want. If you feel indifferent about spending time with someone but agree to it because you don’t want to hurt their feelings, you’re essentially compromising your own desires for theirs. You’re not being fair to yourself or them. That used to be me. Then, I realized you can’t do anything well—writing, work, meditation, yoga, relationships—if you’re halfhearted.
I’ve been going to the same hair stylist for years, and what I love about him is his meticulous care and attention to detail. The appointment always ends up taking longer than I expect. This time, as I watched him, I thought, wow, he really loves his job. I’m probably the eighth person he’s seen today, and he’s still approaching the work like it’s the first and last time he’ll ever see a head of hair. For the same reason, I admire chefs who painstakingly assemble each component of a dish, knowing it will be demolished in a few bites. When you choose the work you love, you can’t help but pour your heart into it, and the resulting product speaks for itself. The same is true of the relationships we form when we seek people with intention.
I love this essay by Ava: “In choosing who you spend time with, you choose who you are.”
It’s impossible to overstate how much the people we’re close with affect us. I tweeted recently that “romantic relationships/best friends/therapists are critical for the same reason, where this person can become the primary person who explains you to *you*, the supplement to your internal monologue, and can rewire your understanding of yourself for way better or for way worse.”
— Ava, bookbear express
i love this - my mom always says that about finding a partner (finding someone you respect) but i certainly think thats true for friends as well. i’ve heard it said that rather than surrounding yourself with people who are smarter than you, consider finding friends who are freer than you in some way - i think that relates to this idea of mutual respect/admiration for the other person. a quality they have that you wish you had in you or that you really admire in the way they interact with the world. i often wish that the things society says about dating and romantic partners (like communication, choosing to love someone day after day, etc) would be more frequently applied in the way we talk about friendships as well, because to me platonic love is one of the highest forms of love for the reasons of choice and intentionality you mention :)