Four Flavors of Friendship

Friendships are containers of caring within which we learn about each other and ourselves. Relationships are one of the most fertile paths that people can follow to develop into healthy, creative, loving individuals. Four kinds of friendships reveal the ways that people use relationships for personal enhancement, for safety in human interactions and for deepening our appreciation of the Beloved in the face of our friend.

Formal Friendship

Formal friendships develop through associations with people in environments such as the workplace. Liking someone and being formal friends has to do with closeness, familiarity and doing activities in a shared workspace. Socially established roles and rules define the boundaries for appropriate and accepted behaviors in formal friendships. For example, sexual harassment laws protect people in their peer relationships on the job.

Formal friendships are based on mutual usefulness. The old saying, "I'll scratch your back if you'll scratch mine," describes the character of interactions and understandings between formal friends. The underlying agreements may not be openly discussed, but they are recognized and depended upon by all. The cost and rewards that define a formal friendship must be beneficial and truly rewarding to everyone concerned.

Participating with friends in a stimulating, pleasant work environment on a daily basis allows co-workers to become familiar with each other and to share a certain intimacy. Meetings between friends that take place at work can be very attractive and seductive. In our modern world, the economic reality that most often both partners of a marriage must work makes it essential that people recognize the power of formal friendships. Working partners, who often spend their days working in different places and with different groups of co-workers, need to understand the necessity of keeping formal friendship boundaries clear and unambiguous. Such boundaries allow productive relationships to function in a creative work force.

Fickle Friendship

Fickle friendship is distinguished by unstableness and inconsistency. A fickle friend pulls you in with feelings of comfort, relaxation and safety, and then unexpectedly manages to push you away. The instability of this friendship style is based on a deep fear of closeness and intimacy. Four negative elements-blaming, persecuting, victimization and avoidance-help fickle friends avoid the intimacy of a truly rewarding personal friendship.

Blaming in fickle friendships is very subtle. A fickle friend may listen carefully to a point of view that is being presented. The speaker is relaxed and feels heard and understood. Then the listener slyly turns the story on the storyteller, who suddenly feels criticized for saying something improper or blamed for doing something wrong. A woman who had a fickle friend once told me, "When I'm with her I always feel like I'm in the presence of an over bearing big parent. It seems I'm always somehow wrong."

Persecuting fickle friends are more overt and confronting. The surprise attack seems to come out of mid-air and suddenly you feel like you have been caught committing a major crime. An example is a woman who shared many evenings with her friend, going out dancing on double dates. She felt that they were very close and enjoyed being together. She was completely stunned when her fickle friend called up and said, "You are using me to meet men!" Needless to say this put the friendship in jeopardy. The basis of friendship, their shared social activities, had suddenly become an environment of betrayal.

Victim fickle friends suffer from a distortion of thinking called filtering. They perceive everything from a viewpoint that says "I'm no good." Even if you say something positive to them, they can turn it around and feel criticized and put down. An example is a boy who was bragging about his friend to a group of girls with the friend present. After the girls left, the victim friend was pouting and he obviously felt very bad. He had mentally distorted what had been said about him to the girls as proof that he didn't have the confidence to show his own good qualities. He felt he was so inadequate that he had to have his buddy speak up for him. A victim friend can turn a compliment into a criticism by the power of his own inner critic.

Avoidant fickle friends leave you feeling confused and angry because communications suddenly stop. The avoidant friend just goes away and stays away, leaving you trying to connect but unable to. Avoidant friends try to dodge and escape the responsibility of friendship most of their life. They feel less safe as friendships get closer and the lack of contact comes just as the friends are beginning to feel comfortable and familiar. Avoidant fickle friends fear intimacy and cannot bear the tension of risking that is essential to vital and creative friendship. They have learned to keep their balance by not developing close friendships and by maintaining separation and distance between themselves and other people.

Faithful Friendship

Faithful friendships are equitable relationships that demand mutual honesty and truth. Differences and diversity are allowed because they bring out the best in each friend. The similarities that bring friends together as true friends provide feelings of safety so that differences can be expressed. Conflict is allowed and working it through produces a sense of integrity and authenticity.

The feeling of being truly liked is a great quality of faithful friendship. Faithful friends are often physically attracted to each other's appearance, their way of dressing and general demeanor. A faithful friend is usually similar to us in many ways, so it is easier for us to appreciate them. Similarity can minimize defensiveness and criticism and it is rewarding to care for someone who is fond of you.

Faithful friendship involves safety, passion and commitment. Emotional intimacy, loyalty, trust and mutual self-disclosure allow faithful friends to be open enough with each other to safely reveal private and personal concerns. Altruism and passion keep the faithful friendship alive during the hardships of life. The friends share a common commitment that when one of them suffers misfortune, they will not abandon their friend to despair and loneliness. Enjoying a faithful friendship keeps many people mentally healthy in our vicious, competitive American society.

Forever Friendship

Forever friendship is a spiritual experience. Mother Teresa and Mahatma Gandhi pinpointed the nature of forever friendship when they spoke of seeing God in the face of the poor. When we take the time to truly see the "face of the other," we can see the beauty of God shining through them. This vision brings about feelings of commitment and love for the stranger, the enemy and our neighbor. Such caring is called "agape"-a disinterested investment in other people, an acceptance that we are our brother and sisters' keeper. Martin Luther King, Jr. understood forever friendship when he said that "When one person is diminished all people are diminished."

Faithful friendship can be a connection from past lives; and it is important to give the reality of past life friendships a vote of possibility. We need to recognize that sometimes we meet new people whom we have never met before, but whom we feel we have always known. It seems like we were in relationship to them in our past lives and that we will be in relationship with them in our future lives. This is the beautiful sense of a soul mate friendship. The World Soul speaks to our personal soul through their face. Their face shines with God and Goddess and we feel an instant attraction, commitment and a passion to pursue projects and mutual concerns together. This is the forever quality a mother and father feel when they see their child born. It is the sureness that is present in soul mate love relationships. This friendship is truly forever and ever.