Friendship

Maybe it's because of my Asperger's or maybe everyone has this problem. I mean defining friendship. Just what is it anyway? I like lots of people. It's good to know them. I'm not sure why I feel good about knowing these people, because I really do not enjoy being with them. I wish I did but I always feel like I have to act a certain way for them and it's a pain and not fun at all. I wonder if they're really friends or just people I happen to know.


The only way that I'm going to figure this out is to define who a friend is. I've thought about that a lot and here's my personal provisional definition. A friend is someone who validates you. That's nice and simple if you understand what I mean by 'validates'. I think that there are 2 parts to getting validated. 1) You show or tell a person something important about yourself that you normally wouldn't share with most people. Maybe even something you wouldn't share with anyone else. So part 1 is your job. It's offering your hand in friendship. 2) The person that you reveal yourself to has to understand and accept you and show you that he understands how you feel. I think this exchange is a way to connect with people and this connection becomes the basis for the formation of a friendship. As the friendship grows, you can reveal more of yourself and the friend can validate you to make the friendship stronger. That's a workable definition for now, but there are lots of problems.

1) It's hard to share these things with a friend. In my case, if I tell a prospective friend that I am gay, I may be rejected or even despised and I suffer the possibility that I may be outed generally when I am not comfortable with that.

2) I'm married to a woman. A friendship is not a marriage. Yet both friendship and marriage involve love. How does one make sure that he is making a friend and not falling in love? That's gnarly. It seems that most people in a committed relationship have friends. So it should be possible for a gay married guy like me to have a frined as well as a wife. My wife validates me constantly and no relationship will ever be on a par with the one I have with her. However, I feel a need to be validated by a man. I think all heterosexual guys have this need to be validated by other men. I think they get this validation as adolescents when they share their feelings of sexual attraction to girls. But as a gay adolescent, I could not share any of my sexual feelings with anybody. I was gay and it was illegal to do gay stuff...so one had to jjust keep it to oneself or risk ...losing everything.

3) What's the difference between conjugial love and friendship love? Is it a question of quantity, quality, or something else. There is a difference. There has to be a difference. Love is not a good word. We need to be more like the ancient Greeks who had several different words for love. BUt that wouldn't even help because it's just semantics. I feel a need to explore the differences between love for a friend and love for a spouse.

I think these three problems would be good subjects for future posts. But for now, this is enough.