On Friendship: Part Two by Beth Bartlett

In Part One I began the examination of nine requisites of friendship. The first three are love, reciprocity, and honesty and trust. In Part Two, I continue the examination of the final six: world-traveling, commitment, reconciliation, loyalty, fun and play, and graciousness.

4) World-traveling. Maria Lugones’s prescription for truly knowing and loving another is to travel with them to those places where they are most at home, playful, and at ease.  This may mean knowing them in their homes, meeting their families, or literally traveling to their countries, knowing them in what may be cultures and languages different from our own. This has been especially important for me as I’ve sought friendship with those whose identities are different from mine – the lesbian community in the ‘80s, the indigenous community. It has been a vital part of my friendships to travel and be with friends, and create friendships, in those places where they thrive, find meaning, and are most fully themselves.

5) Commitment. To be a friend is to commit to all the other elements – to care, attention, honesty, investment in their worlds, and time.  It may mean making a commitment to check in every day, once a week, or once a year, to make the time to keep the connection meaningful.  It means being there for your friend — in times of need, as best you as you are able, and may sometimes mean dropping everything when the need is great, or in times of great joy and celebration.

6) Reconciliation.  Friends can and do hurt each other.  Part of commitment to a friendship is to stay in relation to do the work of reconciliation — that each do what one can, in bell hooks’ words, “to restore to harmony that which has been broken, severed, and disrupted. . . . We can come together with those who have hurt us, with those whom we have caused pain” (Sisters 163). Sara Ruddick has written that reconciliation requires that we name and own the harm perpetrated, that each take responsibility for their part in it, and then and only then, to forgive appropriately – allowing each to “start over again on an equal footing, no longer separated by whatever wrong occurred” (hooks, Sisters, 173). As Carter Heyward wrote so passionately, “I care about us, whether or not I ‘feel good’ about us right now, and I do not want to leave you comfortless and without strength. . . . If I love you, I will struggle for myself/us.  . . to do what is just, to make right our relation” (296).

7) Loyalty. I am wary, skeptical of a certain kind of loyalty that requires one to be disloyal to oneself, to act against one’s integrity.  I don’t believe a true friend would ask that of another.  But I do believe a faithfulness to our friend’s well-being, to be someone they can count on – whether to have their back, to keep one’s promises to them, or to keep their confidences, or simply showing up.  It means, as Lugones and Spelman said, “having a stake in our world” – to act in ways that are supportive of their individual and collective well-being. 

8) Fun and play. As children, friendship is almost entirely about playing together – whether games, tag, hide and seek, make-believe, dress-up, riding bikes, going swimming, sledding, or skating. As we grow up, friendships get more serious along with life – talking, supporting, sharing meals. But it’s important that we not forget to play and laugh together. Lugones advocated world-traveling in order to know one’s friends where they are most playful. Such play is not the agonistic play of winning, losing, battling, keeping score, but rather being open to surprise, to self-construction, and, unworried about competence and following the rules, simply being open to being silly and having fun.

Feminist organizations in this town thrived for so many years because they regularly took time for playing together.  Especially in the serious and often traumatic work they were engaged in, it was vital to their well-being that they took time away just for fun – whether to go camping, hiking, playing poker, or singing songs around a campfire.  En-joying each other was vital. 

One of my favorite ways to play with friends as an adult has been playing music together. Playing duets with friends often has resulted in us collapsing in laughter.[i] Never about perfection, we were able to laugh at our mistakes.  We played for the fun of it. The two, then three of us, who regularly made music together for forty years are bonded through song.  Our best times weren’t the concerts but rather the rehearsals. I’ve never laughed so hard and long as we did in rehearsals. 

Then there’s just being kids again.  In our seventies, the best times my friend and I have had together have been getting out the snowtube and saucer and sliding down snowy hillsides – laughing all the way. 

9) Finally, graciousness. As I’ve grown older, being gracious with my friends has become more important and more possible.  For me that means understanding their limitations, abilities, capacities and incapacities, knowing their quirks, their likes and dislikes, their routines, commitments, their lives — accepting that I may go weeks, months, years without hearing from them – and then, with gratitude, begin again right where we left off, always trusting that they are doing the best they can. I’m sure I have been given the grace of friends more times than I know.

. . .

It is a rare gift – to have one’s words received, given back, with care and understanding; for someone to ask, “How are you?” and want to know; to ask “How can I help?” and then respond; to ask in order to know more deeply; to answer with the fullest measure of one’s honesty and be responded to in kind; to know there is someone to whom one can turn in tragedy, knowing they will mourn with you, or in excited joy, knowing they will celebrate with you with a full and generous heart.  I have been blessed in my life to have known all of these.  I hope I have given in full measure in return.

Sources

Bartlett, Elizabeth Ann. 2016. Making Waves: Grassroots Feminism in Duluth and Superior. St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press.

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

Lugones, Maria C. 1990. “Playfulness, ‘World-Travelling,’ and Loving Perception.” In Anzaldúa, Gloria. Making Face, Making Soul/Haciendo Caras: Creative and Critical Perspectives by Feminists of Color.  San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books. 390-403.

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.

Ruddick, Sara. 1989. Maternal Thinking: Toward a Politics of Peace. New York: Ballantine.

The evolutionary origins of laughter are rooted more in survival than enjoyment (theconversation.com)

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[i] It’s been found that the principal function of laughter, evolutionarily speaking, is to create and deepen social bonds, and nothing seems to bring my friends and I together so much as good, raucous laughter.