As children, we dream about a best friend who would be our soulmate and then, as adults, we miss him or her. To what extent are the need for friendship and the ability to form this kind of relationship encoded in us and to what degree are they socially acquired?
Before a child understands the nature of romantic love, they learn about friendship. In the academy of feelings, friendship precedes love. They swap places later, which doesn’t occur without effort. There is a big chance that at an early stage of life all of us went through a break-up with a friend. Apart from family tragedies, there is nothing so devastating for a child. At least that’s how it was, pre-internet, when cutting ties was a definitive act: no texts or WhatsApp messages. A whole drama, or rather tragedy, of separation was beautifully evoked in the final scene of Steven’s Spielberg’s E.T.:
“Come,” says a cosmic child while embarking on a spacecraft about to leave our planet.
“Stay,” says an earthling child.
It’s hard to forget having a knot in one’s heart as the day of departure approached—the day when we were to leave one city for another, or return from a summer camp, a family vacation, or abroad. Everyone would go back to a different place and different life; it was a great lesson in loss. Before returning to Prague after a four-year stay in Warsaw, my seven-year-old Czech neighbor told me with tears in his eyes how he had to say goodbye to his classmate: “I will never, never, never see him again.” It sounded as if he knew that repeating the word three times was like casting a spell or like fate knocking at the door: that’s the sound of the definitive. Friendship is the first existential experience that teaches a child about the abyss of existence and its sublimity.
Formula to Fill
As François de La Rochefoucauld famously stated in the seventeenth century, “There are some people who would never have fallen in love if they had not heard there was such a thing.” And would they have had friends if they had not heard about friendship before? Even as kids we read about it, finding in books a certain formula to fill, a fixed pattern to follow (each generation has a list of books which shape their idea of friendship; mine consisted of Fiedler’s Little Bison, May’s Winnetou, Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, and, naturally, De Amicis’ Heart). One day, after school, my friend Maciej and I cut our palms and made a blood pact—one hundred years after Winnetou and his “white friend” Old Shatterhand.
Like love, friendship is both work and a phantasm, or a promise of fulfillment, known for centuries. I opened this essay with remarks about children because despite having read so many psychological books, I still wonder to what extent the need for friendship and ability to form this kind of relationship are encoded in us and to what degree they’ve been socially acquired. Undoubtedly, there is a social norm according to which one should have friends. Saying that someone “has no friends” sounds like an accusation. S/he has no friends for one reason or the other, but mostly because s/he is a mean person. In a social hierarchy of values, having no friends, unlike being single, seems suspicious. Being single now enjoys equal rights, ethically speaking, and has become a sign of courage and a desirable status.
It’s hard to free oneself from a belief, or an illusion, that when we are born, we bring into this world a space inside us for the other—so that we can fully identify with this person. As Michel de Montaigne famously stated five hundred years ago: “Because it was he; because it was me.” And his words are still quoted today.
Montaigne talks about Étienne de La Boétie—a poet, politician, and author of a thought-provoking treatise on tyranny, who died at a very young age. Montaigne, another La Boétie, dedicates to his friend his discussion of how two humans are entangled and become one. “Our souls had drawn so unanimously together, they had considered each other with so ardent an affection, and with the like affection laid open the very bottom of our hearts to one another’s view, that I not only knew his as well as my own; but should certainly in any concern of mine have trusted my interest much more willingly with him, than with myself.” (trans. Charles Cotton).
Here, Montaigne draws on an old Pythagorean theory of friendship, which foregrounds the kinship of friends and their unity. I’m you and you’re me—another me (allos autos). At the same time, however, he evokes a paradoxical statement attributed to Aristotle: “O my friends, there is no friend.”
This statement, which has been translated from the Greek in different ways, doesn’t necessarily suggest a lack of faith in friendship. It’s paradoxical since it leads to an illogical conclusion: friendship precludes friendship. In other words, a person can have one friend, but not many friends—a quantitative threshold turns into an existential one. A person has either one friend (for Montaigne, one friend only) or no friends at all, since many friendships can’t be formed. There’s a basic condition that can’t be met in multitude: a full identification with the other. “(T)he perfect friendship I speak of is indivisible; each one gives himself so entirely to his friend, that he has nothing left to distribute to others: on the contrary, is sorry that he is not double, treble, or quadruple, and that he has not many souls and many wills, to confer them all upon this one object” (trans. Charles Cotton). Lately, we’ve been talking more openly about polyamory: a romantic relationship with many partners at the same time. Would “polyamity”—a profound, intense, and committed friendship with multiple people simultaneously—be also possible then? Following the Greeks, Montaigne would say no.
I still remember that night, as if it were today. Our boss, Rysiek, brought two strangers to our rehearsal room and said, “Meet our new friends. They did their internships with (Polish theater director) Jerzy Grotowski.” We were in our twenties and formed a small theater group, consisting of only a few people. We were Grotowski’s orphans, desperately trying to imitate Poznań’s famed Teatr Ósmego Dnia, which was, for us, equally important. We were sort of appointed to be friends, since we were all immersed in the same metaphysics and rebellion against the inauthentic world around us: Do you think like us, stranger? Do you also see our theater as open and immense? Are you sickened by the prospect of limiting yourself to what has been named heaven on earth? If so, you automatically become my friend, even though we’ve never met in person.
A few days later, during a rehearsal, we put our arms around each other and formed a circle. With naked torsos, we dived into the ocean of limitless togetherness. Suddenly, one person disentangled himself and shouted, “Liars, you’re all liars!” He ran out of the room and we never saw him again. He was right: we desired absolute unity, limitless friendship, a real interweaving of naked souls. And we did lie to ourselves; like love, friendship can’t be cemented by decree. O my friends, there is no friend.
Silent Manifestation
Perhaps friendship, as viewed by Montaigne, remains the least tainted or recognized affective utopia. When I introduce people that I know well to someone, I eagerly say: “Meet my friend.” I’m aware that I exaggerate and speak figuratively, but I truly enjoy saying this word out loud. Each time I do, I feel an old desire reawakening—an image of purity and completeness, which reminds me of childhood.
Over centuries, love has been carefully demystified. Its psychological, social, and even physiological dimensions have been scrutinized so closely that it is no longer a romantic, innocent, and flawless journey into cosmic harmony, even if we still want it to be. It’s harder to confess we love someone than to say we’re friends. “This is my friend” still sounds proud, just like before.
In a memorable scene from Four Weddings and a Funeral, Charles (Hugh Grant) is struggling horribly to confess love to Carrie (Andie McDowell). Unable to simply say, “I love you,” he seems to enclose his declaration in quotation marks as if compelled to cite rather than express his own feelings: “I think I love you.” At the time, this scene was considered an evocation of “postmodernist” sensibility, which doesn’t allow for unambiguous expression because everything “already happened” and we now exist in a system of citations and references.
Even though “postmodernist” Charles struggles and laughs at himself, he is truly in love. Today, in times of dating apps and changes in how we express and experience emotions, renowned sociologists like Eva Illouz, talk about “the end of love.” It’s actually the title of her famous book, in which she argues that the nature of relationships radically changed. According to Illouz, a model of relationships which begins to prevail nowadays is rooted in what she calls “Santa Claus logic”: we know that something doesn’t exist, but we still talk about it, pretending it does. This kind of relationship is ephemeral and rejects the idea of commitment and stability. It’s supposed to be a fleeting relationship, if not just a casual romance. Modernity, as Illouz writes, was defined by a hard-won right to choose: to make political choices thanks to the right to vote, to freely choose a life partner without being punished by family, society, or the church. Our times, by contrast, are characterized by a refusal to make a choice. People define themselves not in relation to what they choose, but to what they reject: by each break-up, a systematic lack of commitment, or “ghosting,” which Illouz defines as a tentative presence with no strings attached.
Demystification doesn’t extend to friendship, though. Friendship still tends to be enshrined as it might be our last sanctity. But we could examine it more thoroughly and reveal its true face, especially in light of shifting forms of communication. Since we have dozens of the so-called “friends” on Facebook, don’t we ghost them too, per “Santa Claus logic”? A paradox of neo-friendship, like the paradox of neo-love, is that while we’re theoretically engaged in an intensified and constant communication with “friends,” it’s only a surface-level intensity: “polyamity” in the age of the internet.
There is also a social and political angle to contemporary “polyamity.” It’s close to tribalism, which often takes control of people’s minds or rather, their imaginations. “Our” people are those who, just like us, “can’t take it anymore,” and who “simply don’t get,” the other tribe. The islands of Facebook tribe-mates form archipelagos of “polyamity”: webs of shallow spiritual connections. Politics v. friendship remains a major theme in philosophy—from the idea of a society of brothers to dialectics of loneliness and tyranny (which I won’t discuss here).
After all, the most important aspect of friendship, its cornerstone, is silence. What is silence in friendship? Our destination. A silent manifestation of trust and fidelity; a shared root from which words can grow, but don’t have to. Montaigne’s ideal is very hard to approximate, yet remains a point of reference which helps us learn more about our own condition. It’s precisely through friendship that we can change and achieve something that can’t be achieved otherwise.
What is it, though? I would say it’s becoming one with the world without the corporeal element, of course to the extent possible. In a romantic relationship, our body is alternately at odds or in harmony with our imagination; we can’t fully control it. We turn to lofty language (“I love you,” “You are the man/woman of my life,” “Stars in the sky look so beautiful today”) to mask bodily desire. In social and professional relations, we teach our bodies to react in certain ways: we try to smile and make theatrical gestures, which we sometimes practice ahead of time. In meetings with acquaintances or bosses, we need to think about our bodies, dress to hide flaws and expose assets. In friendships, we don’t have to think about that at all; we can finally take a break from our body without playing any games.
A Gesture of Protest
Love embraces solidarity, but typically rejects ethics. If we truly love someone for better or worse, we feel we must stand by their side even if their social behavior and views are considered immoral by others. We will defend their words and actions, even if we don’t accept them. We will still (at least in most cases) sleep with them even if they vote differently. It is rather a lack of solidarity with our loved ones that is considered unethical, at least, according to the prevailing romantic standard of love. It should be emphasized, however, that in recent years, our tolerance for love choices has lowered considerably due to strong social polarization and a growing readiness to publicly stigmatize people.
It’s more complicated in the case of friendship. As one version of a medieval axiom derived from Greek writings states, “Plato is my friend, but truth is a better friend.” The question of truth is crucial in friendship, especially since there is no good answer to it; it’s essentially tragic. What do my friend and I have in common? To grossly oversimplify: if s/he votes for the ruling party, whereas I vote for the opposition (or the other way round), will our friendship last? I’ve witnessed dozens of friendships end over the last eight years. Some people had been friends since school or college, for two or three decades, and they’re not anymore. They chose their better friend—their own truth. And they were right. And, at the same time, they weren’t.
But I also know friendships that have survived: those for which it’s not politics, faith, or outlook on life that matter, but rather aesthetics; shared past experiences—naturally—but also a shared taste. How to be friends with someone who votes for whom I vote and hates the same people I hate, but—I’m oversimplifying again—prefers hip-hop to Led Zeppelin, Agatha Christie to Chandler, Beksiński to Wojtkiewicz, and so on. This reveals a strange and inconceivable nature of friendship, which is both irrational and ineffable. It brings redemption and opposes sudden explosions of immediacy through long duration. In the world in which negative feelings intensify and it’s growingly easy to hate, ban, or cancel, profound friendship emerges as a gesture of protest. It’s a rebellion against omnipresent aggression—our small social revolution.
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