The Price of Friendship

Friendship has so fascinated writers that Bartlett's Familiar Quotations carries 311 entries on the subject, against 24 for sex. Yet, curiously, it has been largely ignored by social scientists in favor of other human attachments: the sexual union, the family, the group. "This may be a serious mistake," writes University of Leicester Psychologist Derek Wright, 43, in Britain's New Society magazine. "Friendship forms the unobtrusive backcloth on which we play out our professional, sexual and familial lives."

Friendship is not a variation on any other human bond, says Wright. It is a uniquely symmetrical relation between two people that serves no economic, political or sexual purpose and--equally important--is felt by the participants to be the result of free choice. "We like to think," he writes, "that, though we may not be able to choose our neighbors, nor the people we work with, nor our relatives, at least we can choose our friends."

This point, however obvious, is instrumental in establishing the commonalty of friendship. "Every relationship between two people starts going sour if one person is more successful than the other," says Psychologist Wright. "There has to be an import-export quality to friendship. One exports what the other needs and vice versa. When the balance of payments is disturbed, there is a falling-out."

Unofficial Therapists. To determine the rewards of friendship, Wright asked 60 male and female university undergraduates to define what they understood by a "close friend" and a "friend." In defining close friends, Wright found, "there was an emphasis upon self-disclosure --i.e., upon someone to whom it is possible to unburden one's most secret thoughts." Sixty percent of the males and 82% of the females drew this distinction. Wright interprets it to mean that each human carefully nominates a few companions "in the more intimate role of unofficial therapist. Perhaps friends are more important for mental health than has yet been acknowledged."

A man with few close friends himself ("I lead a feeble social life"), Wright ponders the possibility that dependency on friendship is something that people grow out of--or should. "If individuals continue to develop psychologically throughout their lives, whether as members of a marital unit or not, their need for friendship becomes progressively less," he says. "I don't mean that people don't continue to have friends, but that they don't any longer need them." Why not? "In a way, friendship is for ignorant beginners in life. It is for those who are not grown up, who have to be like everyone else, who have to have people who 'love' them around. The price paid is conformity to a unity of dreary beliefs."

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