Here is the ninth and final part in this series. By this point there are some common themes and repeated ideas amongst different people, but that can be helpful for reinforcing shared opinions about friendship. Everyone seems to agree that friendship is difficult and something that has to be invested in, but that it’s worth the persistence and is a skill that can be practised.
Friendship with Amelia Liana – The Estée Lalonde Show
‘Do you think girl friends are always going to be inherently bitchy towards each another? Like, are girls really as catty as people sometimes stereotype? They can be, but also they can’t be. I also think that’s like a younger mentality… There’s that phrase “never trust a girl who doesn’t have girl friends”… There’s like a phrase of never trust a girl who can’t keep their girl friend relationships alive, and in a way I can understand that... I think that probably is the root of some bitchiness and cattiness is feeling a little threatened.‘
Estée Lalonde & Amelia Liana
‘I think no friendship is the same. Some people it’s more of like a surface level friendship, whereas like me and you it’s a much deeper friendship. Don’t get me wrong, we talk about surface level stuff all the time too much everyday, but when we need to get deep we want to get personal, like no one knows the ins and outs of my life more than you do.’
Estée Lalonde & Amelia Liana
‘How do you think we got to the friendship stage we are now? Well, I don’t think it happened immediately. I think it took a couple years. And it was kind of by coincidence. I remember we always liked each other, obviously, but we didn’t always hang out… but I think eventually we just built this trust and trust is just, like, so crucial… I think something else that happened with us is that when we shared something negative, and we started this rule kind of from the beginning, we wouldn’t bring it up to the other person unless they brought it up to us.’
Estée Lalonde & Amelia Liana
Friendship (PART 2) – Shmanners
‘This is probably the question everyone wants to know: how to make friends in your thirties, or I guess after school as an adult, however you want to phrase it. Right, and I think the real key to this is that you have to actively do it. There is no passiveness about making new friends and that’s the hard part. You have to go places, you have to talk to people, you have to participate in activities. You have to make a concerned effort, that is what’s hard… The answer is be vulnerable… Everybody wants to make friends.’
Travis & Teresa McElroy
Friendship – In Our Time: Philiosophy
‘He [Augustine] decides he was a fool to love this man, this friend, as if he were a god. And what you get in Augustine’s thought is kind of a triangulation that friendship is only good and substantial and trustworthy when it’s triangulated within the love of God. You love your friend through God.’
Mark Vernon
‘I would say in the eighteenth century friendship became a secular religion, actually… The eighteenth century’s the great period of clubs and societies… philosophers like David Hume and Adam Smith, they actually valued their culture as, I think they thought, the first true culture of friendship actually, because what they believed was that actually it was only in a commercial society, a market economy, you could really value friendship. Because before, for the whole of human history, friendship had been tangled up in other kinds of commitments and bond and obligation. And now, you could leave the market to get on with that and meanwhile off to the side you could enjoy these friendships.’
John Mullan
‘Although friendship was very important to him [Adam Smith] on a personal level, for these thinkers and writers, Adam Smith in his Theory of Moral Sentiments, one of the ways you can read that book is there’s a struggle to try to give friendship and moral sensibilities between people a public platform as well as a private place, and the trouble that Adam Smith has is that in a modern commercial society, the most important value is not happiness, it’s not virtue like the Greeks thought, it’s pure cooperation. As long as people cooperate and obey the law, then that society can function. And so friendship can’t really, doesn’t really rise to the fore as a great value in modern society because it’s not really needed.’
Mark Vernon
‘The novels of the eighteenth century, many of the great novels, are written in fictional letters, recording the consciousness of their characters through the writing of letters to friends, as if that’s the best way of catching a person’s personality.’
John Mullan
‘Not since the Greeks has friendship been considered a problem worthy of a solution.’
Nietzsche
198: How friendship affects your immune system | Lydia Denworth – The mindbodygreen Podcast
‘How much do you go out of your way to make your friends feel good?’
Lydia Denworth
‘We often get something different from the different friends in our lives.’
Lydia Denworth
#587: Understanding the Wonderful, Frustrating Dynamic of Friendship – The Art of Manliness
‘Friendships thrive on equality… there is some aspect of our relationship that functions as a leveller… Friendships are always about something, and so many times that common interest, we treat each other as equals in regard to that.’
Bill Rawlins
EP 36: The Adult Friendship Crisis – Every Day Therapy
‘We have this assumption that we’re meant to be friends with everybody, and we’re not. We naturally fit with some types of people and have trouble with others based upon our personalities, our histories, our who we are, just naturally how we like to exist. And one thing I’d like to say about that, is it takes some of the pressure off to develop a friendship with everybody. But I can be kind to anybody, and that’s a launching space too.’
Dr Sally H Falwell
Feminine Finishing School 