What does ‘True Friendship’ mean to you?
Studies suggest that loneliness is on the rise globally, despite us being more ‘connected’ than ever.
I suspect that a large part of this rise in loneliness is due to our psychological attitude towards friendship and our misunderstanding of what ‘true friendship’ means.
Many people when asked what they look for in relationships will answer: compatible personalities, shared interests or shared values.
All of these are valuable, but on their own they can never be enough to ‘make’ a wholesome relationship.
For someone acting largely out of the unconscious, any misalignment will inevitably lead to painful conflict and aversion. But for someone moving towards Individuation, it is a vehicle for growth.
‘True friendship’ is not so much about having aligned personalities, interests and values, but intention and acceptance where those values necessarily misalign.
Society’s current Modus Operandi is to try and fix and cajole the ‘external world’ and ‘make’ it a certain way. We push forward on the presumption that if we can avoid what we don’t like, and get enough of what we do, then we’ll have it figured out.
We find ourselves with the people we ‘don’t like,’ not merely choosing to not be around them, but pushing them away in our mind – unfollowing them, blocking them, ghosting them, unwilling to face the pain we feel in simply knowing they exist.
With people we ‘like,’ we come to depend on them for the regulation of our own feelings that we are unwilling to face up to.
Whether we are pushing people away, or leaning on others to regulate ourselves, there’s something that we’re not willing to feel.
Perhaps the primary cause of loneliness in our world is not our lifestyle or our use of technology per se, but our misunderstanding of what true friendship is.
How we engage with the external world is a reflection of how we engage with ourselves. If we reject certain people and certain aspects of other people, then we are rejecting aspects of ourselves. People are a way to our own Individuation. True friendship makes finding our True Self possible.
