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A Rare and Precious Thing

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Sir Roger has been touched by the loyalty of one of his longterm readers and a fellow-blogger to muse on the importance of friends.

What is a friend?

A friend is someone who cares, fosters, encourages and shares; someone who is almost as excited as you are about your successes and supports you in your failures or sadnesses.

Many people believe a friend is someone who overlooks your crap in return for you overlooking theirs. This is bullshit.

A friend is someone who will always call you on your shit – in the most empathetic way, of course – and relies on you to do likewise about theirs, because only then can you make corrections and perhaps grow and achieve what you are capable of.

A real friend is a rare and precious thing.

A real friend is someone you feel comfortable with, that you can talk to easily at any time, whose company you can enjoy in silence. Real friends are the embodiment of loyalty.

Real friendships last through time and separation.

Sir Roger recently spent two weeks in a villa on the Continong with friends made over forty years earlier; and although they had led separate lives in different cities, towns and countries, concentrating on building careers and families, and flourishing in diverse areas, when they gathered together again their friendship was as fresh and real as it had been all those years ago. And the conversation picked up, as it were, just where it had left off as if the intervening years were transparent.

So friends and friendships need to be nourished and enjoyed and cherished.

And the only way to have real friends is to be one.

None of this is to be confused with mateship.

As Sir Roger has written elsewhere:

“ What is mateship? Mateship is pretending to be friends with someone who doesn’t want your job. A mate is someone who won’t sleep with your wife/girlfiriend without asking you first.

A “great mate” is a rugby league footballer who enjoys a gang bang with the other members of his team.

A mate is what men have who are incapable of attracting actual friends (see Tony Abbott, John Howard) or of forming any kind of vaguely intimate relationships (ibid) .

 

So mateship is how Australian men pretend to have friends.