| | Friendships can, and often do, spring out of nowhere, fully formed to take both members of the relationship by surprise. On the other hand, they might grow slowly and almost unnoticeably, unsuspected by either participant. Friendship is untrammeled and unconstrained in its acceptance in a friend of appearances and personality quirks that would be unacceptable in anyone else.
Love is an essential part of friendship, although it might be seldom mentioned by the friends themselves, but friendship may not necessarily be a part of love. Physical love -- sexual love -- completely enfold two individual people, fusing them emotionally and inexorably into a single unit of awareness and rendering them generally oblivious to everything else that is taking place in the world about them. They are a pair, but in the fiery singularity of their love for each other they exist as a single entity that shuts out the rest of the world.
Friendship, on the other hand, while also confined to two people, involves each of the two less exclusively and far less selfishly. Lovers demand propinquity, but friends could remain friends at opposite ends of the world and their friendship was undeterred by years of separation. Each friend in a pair might have many other friends, and those friends might like or dislike any of their friend's other friends, but the initial pair's friendship was a thing unique to the two of them, and although they might choose to extend the privilege of their friendship to others, their own friendship remain strictly and at all times a private matter between the two of them.
True friendship is a unique and divinely privileged phenomenon, and in consequence it is a condition that occurs only rarely in the life of any single person. If a man can name five close, lifetime friends before he dies, then his life would truly have been blessed.
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| | Posted 9/14/2005 11:12 PM - 5 views - 2 comments
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