Friendship

I’ve been musing recently about friendship and what it means to have a friend.  I really should be musing about how the Genesis creation story is embedded in Columbus’s journey to and encounter with the Americas, but I can hardly start that until I’ve procrastinated a bit with more interesting writing.

How do we make friends?  Why do we need friends?  What makes a good friend?  What does it mean to be a friend?  How does friendship work?  Right now, it feels like I’m breaking into friendships and ‘groups’ that developed prior to my arrival on campus, and it’s almost like I’m that exciting new commodity the transfer.  People are genuine when they speak with me, but they maintain ongoing dialogues with their friends that I simply don’t understand.  I feel very welcomed and happy at Grinnell, but somehow I still feel like an outsider in certain respects.  As a result, I start thinking about friends and what that even means.

I know why we need friends.  We’re social creatures.  It’s innate.  We need other people to survive.  Another theory I recently read (which is compatible with my short thoughts), suggests that people need friends to reassure themselves that they’re good people, that they’re successful, and that they’re loved, and that this need for recognition can be traced back to the Fall of Man.  Think about it.  In Eden, man and woman lived without shame in God’s presence.  They had a perfect relationship with God.  Now, we’ve lost that close, intimate connection.  We’ve become distant from God’s constant, reassuring, loving voice, and we want people to fill that hole for us.

I’m writing this without an outline, which is dangerous, as it leads to rambling like this, but regardless, I’ll continue on.  I don’t know how many friends I have at Grinnell right now.  However, I’m not at all concerned or worried, because at last I have a lot of acquaintances.  I’m putting myself out there, trying to show all aspects of me, and maybe someone will reach out toward me a little more.  Do I know the girls on the tennis team?  Yes and no.  I know names, faces, majors, where they live, but I don’t know them yet as people.  However, I know that is inevitably coming.  Are they friends now?  Yes, I think so.  I can count on them to help me out, to answer random embarrassing questions, and to do what they can to ease the transition.  Can they be better friends?  Yes, and I don’t mean that as a criticism of their behavior now, because they are all amazing people.  I mean ‘better’ only in the sense of a deeper, more profound connection, as two individuals who really start to know each other and to genuinely care for the other.  But what does that even mean or entail? 

I’m not sure if any of that made sense, but it’s really my first attempt to get some of those thoughts on paper.  Basically, friendship is a curious, elusive idea . . . as is my thesis for this paper.  Because yes, I’m supposed to construct an argument with only four-hundred words.