On friends and friendship

Born, brought up and educated in Africa, we lived in Zimbabwe (then Rhodesia) and South Africa. Pursuing my career in science we moved to Scotland, England and later Australia, taking our children with us. The friends we accumulated along the way tended to reflect the stage of our lives at the time: when we were young parents with small kids, most of our friends were people from the same group – small children and their requirements take up a great deal of time and attention, so it’s easier to make friends with people who have the same preoccupations and who find children and their doings subjects of engrossing interest. As our children grew interactions with other parents decreased, or at least changed as the children themselves influenced the friends we made and it became necessary to meet the parents of their friends, and the parents of those with whom they shared activities, on a different basis. And, of course, there were always friends and acquaintances from entirely separate groups, such as people we met through work or sport.

Friends and colleagues: Paul Joe Dick Sune. In Estonia, at working meeting; 40 years since we all first met at a conference - and it looks like it! Work and social groups have overlapped over the years.

We use the word ‘friend’ quite loosely in relation to people ranging from acquaintances, who don’t really mean much to us and to whom we are not particularly important, to those with whom the ties of shared interest and mutual concern are strong and durable. The difficulty, quite often, is to know the difference. Real friends, the ones that matter, are willing to do things for you that might involve inconvenience for themselves; they’re seriously concerned about your welfare, well-being and happiness. They’re there for the long haul, so even if you don’t see each other for years, when you do get together it takes very little time to re-establish the relationship, to pick up where you left off, fill in the gaps and enjoy each other’s company.

So there are gradations in all this; most of us have a range of different kinds of friends, from the solid, intense, important relationships to the unimportant. There are people whose company we really enjoy; others with whom we’re happy to spend time when it’s mutually convenient, and there are people we meet who are irrelevant to us except insofar as they are fellow-members of the human race and deserving of consideration for that reason. The more casual friends may be fun to be with, when all is well on both sides of the relationship, but we are likely to find that, in many cases, we’re not important enough to them to make them ready and willing to put themselves out for us – and that may include not being willing to provide a sympathetic ear when we want a confidant. It’s a two-way business, of course: there may be times when we’re not interested in a friendship developing beyond the casual, but there will also be times when we put quite a lot of work into a relationship to find that the interest isn’t really reciprocated. It hurts, but in those cases we may as well cut our losses and walk away.

Regardless of whether we have led a peripatetic or stable and locally-rooted life, the patterns of friends and friendship groups change with age. Those who live their lives in one place, who grow up and grow old in the community they were born into are likely, I suspect, to have fewer friends than those who, like me and my family, have moved around. They will have a much more settled sense of place, of belonging to a community that defines their place in the world. No doubt old friendships solidify into comfortable patterns of long-settled mutual regard with well recognised problem areas that can be avoided, as well as highly-valued areas of shared experience. And, it seems reasonable to assume, the overlap between different groups of friends and acquaintances is much greater when most of the people involved have deep roots and multiple connections in the community. Nevertheless the friends of youth grow older and change, interests diverge, relationships with others affect friendships, people move away, or die. Society changes and everyone is affected.

And there is another point: not only do we change with time but, because we tend to project ourselves in quite different ways in different environments, the person we seem to be within one group may be slightly different from that in another. So the way we’re seen by the people in our local sports club may be entirely different from the way we’re seen by our workmates or by our family and neighbourhood friends and acquaintances.

For the transients, who move in and out of communities, the problem is to develop friendships that are meaningful, relationships that matter, in each of the communities in which they find themselves. And, having developed such friendships, then – as we did so often – they may have to be left behind. Furthermore, even if the ‘residence time’ in various places is measured in years, the connections and overlaps between the groups associated with work and sport and family and neighbourhood communities, if they exist at all, are likely to be much weaker than they would be for people who stay in one place for all most of their lives.

The whole process of making friends gets harder as you get older: the children leave home; you retire and move away from, or lose contact with, your community of workmates; your recreational activities become more restricted – perhaps you no longer play tennis or golf in the pennant competitions, or you drop sport entirely in favour of the bridge group, or whatever. People you meet are more set in their ways; they have their friendship circles and may not be much interested in expanding them, they may make polite enquiry about your family but are not much interested in hearing about them and their doings. So the real friends scattered down the years and across the world hold their value, even if their direct impact on our day-to-day lives is now miniscule or non-existent. They justify the hassle of travel.