On Friendship: Part One by Beth Bartlett

I’ve been fortunate in my life to have friends, to be a friend, though I’ve also had periods of drought without the nourishing stream of friendship in my life. The nature of my friendships have changed over time – with friends in childhood being primarily playmates, in adolescence – friends traveling in packs – gangs of girls; in grad school, mostly my colleagues.  And then I discovered feminism.

 I bonded with people with whom I shared a passion, a cause, and the work to bring our vision into being.  We gathered in consciousness-raising groups where, in Nelle Morton’s phrase, we heard each other into speech.  We helped each other discover ourselves by sharing our truths out loud – without criticism, argument, interruption, advice – simply being heard.  The self-discovery in sharing the truths we had not even been willing to tell ourselves was powerful.  Most importantly for me was the feminist theorists I was reading – Adrienne Rich, Audre Lorde, Susan Griffin – who challenged me to be my authentic self, honest, open, no longer hiding behind the façade of being someone I thought others wanted me to be – myself.[i]  

Feminism takes friendship seriously. I’ve thought often, and written about,[ii] what the requisites of being a good friend are, but wanted to revisit this question with whatever wisdom I’ve gained with age.  Ultimately, I arrived at nine: love, reciprocity, honor and trust, world-traveling, commitment, reconciliation, loyalty, fun and play, and graciousness.

1) Love.  Friend – from the Old English, Old German, and Old Dutch priy-ont  (hence the strange spelling  —  fr- I – end —  rather than simply “frend”)  — meaning  “to love. Certainly, the first and foremost requirement of friendship is love.  And I mean by this not feelings of affection, though certainly that is a part of love, but rather as bell hooks said – love as a verb, as an action which, as hooks enumerated, includes not only affection, but also care, recognition, respect, commitment, trust, and honest and open communication. 

For me, one of the most important aspects of love as a verb is what Simone Weil described as “intense, pure, disinterested, gratuitous, generous attention”(333). Attention — from the Latin ad – meaning “toward,” and tendre – meaning “to stretch.” To stretch toward. The image coming to mind is of those times I can’t quite hear what someone is saying and I lean in closer, carefully observe their face, their mouth, and their body movements.

Examining each of Weil’s descriptors takes us closer to its meaning.  First, intense – coincidentally also derived from the word tendre – “to stretch.”  It is to lean in even closer, not to miss a thing, the fine details, the dropped clue, the tear or slight smile that tell us so much. Pure —with the only motive being one of knowing and caring – not to sway or advise or correct or manipulate. Disinterested – far from “uninterested” – disinterested is to give attention without bringing one’s own interests to the conversation, to gain nothing but understanding and knowledge of the other person. And as Maria Lugones and Elizabeth Spelman made clear, in friendship the desire to gain knowledge is not out of self-interest — better to dominate or for self-growth, or out of duty, or for research, but as Weil said, pure. Gratuitous – completely voluntary. I give you attention because I want to, because I care, because you are my friend. Finally, generous – liberal in giving one’s time, and friendship does require time. To give attentive love is to be fully present to another, without one’s own interests, fears, projections, agendas getting in the way, and without concern for time.

2) Reciprocity. Reciprocity is the give and take of friendship – that as much as we want to know we also want to be known. If only one is providing attentive love and not the other, then it’s not friendship, but a different kind of relationship – a counselor, or the relationship of parent to child, or teacher to student. As Lugones and Spelman wrote, “If you enter the task out of friendship with us, then you will be moved to attain the appropriate reciprocity of care for your and our well-being as whole beings, .. . [and] to satisfy the need for reciprocity of understanding that will enable you to follow us in our experiences as we are able to follow you in yours” (24). We need balance in friendships – an evenness in what we give and receive, or the relationship will start to feel lopsided. No one’s keeping score. If we were, it would stop being a friendship but rather more of a transaction.  Nor do our gifts of time, attention, objects of affection come with the expectation of being repaid in kind. Reciprocity is not the motive of friendship, but rather the mode – a recognition of mutuality and of being equally invested in the friendship.

3) Honor and Trust. In friendship, we entrust to each other our hearts and minds, our sanity, our sense of the world.  At best, we can achieve in our friendships what Adrienne Rich called an “honorable relationship” – “a process, delicate, violent, often terrifying to both persons involved, a process of refining the truths they can tell each other.”  This is important, she wrote, “because it breaks down human self-delusion and isolation, . . . because in so doing we do justice to our own complexity, . . and because we can count on so few people to go that hard way with us” (188).  We cannot love what we do not know.  Knowledge makes love possible.  Love requires both the honest sharing of our truths and the desire to know and accept deeply all that is.  In truth-telling and compassionate listening, friendship is made possible.

I will examine world-traveling, reciprocity, reconciliation, loyalty, fun and play, and graciousness in Part Two.

Sources

Bartlett, Elizabeth Ann. 2004. Rebellious Feminism: Camus’s Ethic of Rebellion and Feminist Thought. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Griffin, Susan. 1982. Made from this Earth: An Anthology of Writings by Susan Griffin. New York: Harper & Row.

Heyward, Carter. 1989. “Sexuality, Love, and Justice.” In Plaskow, Judith and Carol P. Christ, eds. Weaving the Visions: New Patterns in Feminist Spirituality. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancsco. 293-301.

hooks, bell. 2000. All About Love: New Visions. New York: William Morrow & Co.

______. 1993.  Sisters of the Yam: Black Women and Self-recovery. Boston: South End Press.

Lorde, Audre. Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches by Audre Lorde.  Trumansburg, NY: Crossing Press, 1984.

Lugones, Maria. C. and Elizabeth V. Spelman. 2013. “Have We Got a Theory for You! Feminist Theory, Cultural Imperialism and the Demand for ‘The Woman’s Voice.’” In Kolmar, Wendy K. and Frances Bartkowski, eds. Feminist Theory: A Reader. 4^th edition. New York: McGraw Hill. 17-24.

Morton, Nelle. 1985. The Journey Is Home. Boston: Beacon.

Rich, Adrienne. 1979. On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose 1966-1978. New York: W. W. Norton & Co.

Weil, Simone. 1977. The Simone Weil Reader. George A. Panichas, ed. New York: David McKay.

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[i] Of particular importance to me in this were Adrienne Rich’s, “On Women and Honor,” in her On Lies, Secrets, and Silence; Audre Lorde’s “Uses of the Erotic” and “The Transformation of Silence Into Language and Action,” in her Sister Outsider, and Susan Griffin’s “The Way of All Ideology,” in her Made from this Earth.

[ii] See my chapter on friendship in my Rebellious Feminism.