#008: On true love (aka friendship) and choosing versus falling
Dedicated to my closest friends
Read time: 5m 29s
When something bad happens, it seems to me that both objects and people take on their truest form. It’s as though everything and everyone that you were doubtful about fades into obscurity, while everything and everyone truly important emerges into sharp focus. The past two weeks have been difficult for me, but the thought that has been playing on repeat is this: I am so lucky to have the friends I do. It is to them that I dedicate today’s essay.
🪟 A window into my brain
I have never felt more loved than I do now.
Experiencing real love at least once in our lives is a privilege. To feel cocooned in its warm embrace throughout the ebbs and flows of life is close to a divine honour. To know that when you pick up the phone during an emergency, the person on the other end of the line will drop whatever they’re doing simply to hold you. To know that someone will sprint across the city just to stroll alongside you in silence. To know that someone will share a loving text every morning to ensure you don’t feel alone. To know that someone will remain fiercely loyal even if in doing so they sacrifice someone else they hold dear.
I wonder who you were thinking of as you read those sentences. A partner, perhaps? A parent? A sibling? I was thinking of my friends, who have done every single one of these things in the past two weeks.
Friendship is a critical social institution whose immense power we seem to have silenced. Our collective consciousness elevates romantic love to an almost deific status, deprioritising the love that originates in the primary relationships we have with our parents, siblings and the extended family we choose in our friends. This choice is what fascinates me most about friendship.
When we’re children, the majority of our friendships derive from circumstance. Perhaps our parents happen to be lifelong friends so we play together when we’re young, or maybe we meet on the first day of school and become immediately inseparable. Whatever the circumstance, for most of our history, friendships have originated from chance, based on location, age or existing webs of relationships. There is nothing wrong with this; in fact, circumstantial friendship is one of the most beautiful forms of friendship. I’m often envious of people who are still friends at the age of 30 with people they first bonded with at the age of 5. This shows a deep desire and ability to grow in converging versus diverging directions, maintaining the sanctity of the friendship even as the realities of adult life wash the sandcastles of youth away.
As we mature, develop our self-awareness, and increase our understanding of what matters to us in our primary relationships, we start building more intentional friendships. These friendships often stem from shared worldviews, values, hobbies or a similar sense of ambition or purpose. We are lucky to be alive at a time when the Internet enables us to overcome circumstantial factors like location and age, instead enabling us to build global and intergenerational friendships that would have previously been impossible. Indeed, I met most of my best friends on the Internet during the COVID-19 pandemic. It is arguably easier than ever before to “find your people”.
True friendship is found with those people with whom you can drop into your most natural, raw, unpolished self.
I wonder sometimes whether the next generation’s friendships will be so intentional–due to their upbringing in such an information-dense and hyperconnected environment–that they will forget the innocent beauty of circumstantial friendships. I’m also concerned that, as the promise of finding your people on the Internet becomes more mainstream, people will become exclusively surrounded by those with whom they identify deeply and may, as a consequence, become less tolerant of those who exhibit differences. In an already polarised world, this possibility feels troubling.
Yet for me, the beauty of intentionality in friendship far outweighs this minor concern, because regardless of whether a friendship is circumstantial or intentional, every friendship is chosen. In romantic love, I take issue with the phrase “falling in love”. To me, it reeks of romanticism and seeks to justify the flouting of responsibility for one’s own actions. But unlike falling in love, we do not “fall in friendship”. Instead, we “make a friend”. The etymology of the verb “to make [friends]” is derived from the Old English macian, meaning “to give being to, give form or character to, or bring into existence”.
This connotes a mutual decision to collectively craft something that didn’t previously exist and invest the necessary effort, respect, trust and care to enable it to thrive. There is deep integrity and beauty in the language we use to express this shared commitment that is simply not present in other relationships in our life. It is this intentional commitment that is the common denominator of all of my closest friendships, driving the collective strength that is capable of overcoming life’s most challenging hurdles.
🖋️ Sentences I wish I’d written
“Friendships between women are often the deepest and most profound love stories, but they are often discussed as if they are ancillary, “bonus” relationships to the truly important ones. Women’s friendships outlast jobs, parents, husbands, boyfriends, lovers, and sometimes children…it’s possible to transcend the limits of your skin in a friendship…This kind of friendship is not a frivolous connection, a supplementary relationship to the ones we’re taught and told are primary – spouses, children, parents. It is love…support, salvation, transformation, life: this is what women give to one another when they are true friends, soul friends.”
~ Emily Rapp
“Friendship is the place in which a great majority of us have our first glimpse of redemptive love and caring community. Learning to love in friendships empowers us in ways that enable us to bring this love to other interactions with family or with romantic bonds.”
~ bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions
“The capacity to feel more love means the capacity to feel more pain.”
~ unattributed
🚀 From idea to reality
As I was writing this, a wonderful friend of mine (thanks, Max!) made a great suggestion. What would it look like to have others share their thoughts about translating this idea into reality in this segment of the newsletter? This feels very aligned with my aim to make this a collective syllabus through which we can all understand ourselves and the world around us better. If there’s enough interest, I’ll implement this from next week:
💭 A question for you
What beliefs, opinions and ideologies have you absorbed but not chosen?
Have a sunny rest of the week,
Nikita 💃🏽