Friends Forever ??

Friendship is the avenue of believing the power of choice. A choice by which we tend to shape our present and reflect our future. It’s an act of personal relationship closer than the association, though the range of intimacy differs person to person.

Is it really possible to tag a single person as a best friend? Perhaps not as I believe in a life time you meet many potential best friends. I say potential, as you decide to share your secrets and your happiness with them, to judge if they approximately fall into the proximity of becoming the best of your friend.

In philosophical discussions of friendship, it is common to follow Aristotle in distinguishing three kinds of friendship: friendships of pleasure, of utility, and of virtue. Although it is a bit unclear how to understand these distinctions, the basic idea seems to be that pleasure, utility, and virtue are the reasons we have in these various kinds of relationships for loving our friend. That is, I may love my friend because of the pleasure I get out of her, or because of the ways in which she is useful to me, or because I find her to have a virtuous character. Given the involvement of love in each case, all three kinds of friendship seem to involve a concern for your friend for her sake and not for your own.

To care about something is generally to find it worthwhile or valuable in some way; caring about one's friend is no exception. A central difference among the various accounts of mutual caring is the way in which these accounts understand the kind of evaluation implicit therein.

The question facing any philosophical account is how that characteristic intimacy of friendship is to be understood.

It is not the sharing of private information nor even of very personal information, as such, that contributes to the bonds of trust and intimacy between companion friends. At best it is the sharing of what friends care about that is relevant.

A final common thread in philosophical accounts of friendship is shared activity. The shared activity is important because friends normally have shared interests as a part of the intimacy that is characteristic of friendship as such, and the “shared” pursuit of such shared interests is therefore an important part of friendship.

Throughout the path of our lives our chemistry with people is worked upon by the balance of our mind and heart. We push away the factors that may confuse the decision making.

A friend will always rise to the occasion, and might not always tell you what you want to hear, but will never let your stride go away.