By
Madeleine Kando
It is difficult to define friendship, but like many other indefinable things in life, ‘you know it when it’s there’. It is more like beauty or art, something that you value for its own sake. As soon as you try to exploit it for personal gain, it vanishes. It’s like trying to catch your own shadow.
I am not talking about the Facebook kind of ‘friend’. I am talking about the bond that is created between two people who decide to devote their time and energy to a mutually agreed upon relationship that is completely voluntary. Unlike other types of relationships like family ties, romantic ties or business ties, where you have some kind of ‘obligation’ to each other, friendship survives on the complete absence of rules. It is literally the stuff of dreams. A friendship is like a dream that you have with another person. And just like a dream, friendship is fragile.
The root word for friend is fréon (to love), which is connected to freo (not in bondage, acting of one's own will). It describes friendship to a T. It is one of the most democratic arrangements in social interactions. And just like a Democratic arrangement, if you don’t work at maintaining a friendship, it just disappears, without complaining or throwing a tantrum.
One factor that has influenced my view of friendship, is the fact that I am a twin. My sister is actually not at all like me. She is uninhibited and blunt and she acts out her frustrations by lashing out. I am self-conscious, reserved and eat up all my anger. But we were never really ‘alone’. There was always this other you that wasn’t you.
We were close growing up, since people couldn’t tell us apart, but for years, we were compelled to create conflict to prove that we were really two people. Especially after my father left and we had to vie for our only parent’s attention.
We have come full circle, however. With the help of distance and time (my twin in Spain, me in the States), we are finally able to meet each other as equals, like two branches on an old tree with a common base. We can talk to each other, accept each other and let bygones be bygones.
I had several friends, on my way to old age, most of them women. There was Marijke in high school, back in Holland. She lived in a beautiful, old style Dutch house with a thatched roof and a large garden with cherry trees. Why we were friends, I don’t remember. She actually decided that we should be, not me. Then, there was Barbara. Beautiful, tall, intoxicating Barbara. We were friends too, to the point of embarking on a secret correspondence based on a semi-pornographic series of teenage books called ‘the thousand and one nights’. Barbara sometimes gave me a ride home on her bike. I sat on the rack behind her, holding her narrow waist, her long skirts brushing against my legs. Her long pony tail reminded me of a beautiful, shiny race horse.
Since I was in an all girl high school, I had to deal with my budding sexuality any way I could without the male sex being present. When high-school ended, so did the protection against the unstoppable march of my biological urges and I met my first boyfriend. My infatuation with Barbara’s narrow waist and long pony tail got transferred to this young boy. We were dancing cheek to cheek at all-night parties and I fell head over heels with the nape of his neck. The way his dark thick hair met that unblemished teenager skin was irresistible.
Friendship was on the backburner in those days. I was too busy discovering the opposite sex. I didn’t have one of those ‘best friends’ you encounter in Hollywood movies, in which a woman describes her sexual adventures to her best friend, as if the sex would rub off by talking about it.
When I lived in London, there was Jacqueline. She was French but very seasoned in this vast, mysterious city. We were waitressing at a Chinese restaurant and I tried to imitate Jacqueline’s dexterity, holding a plate full of soup in each hand. As I was gracefully placing one on the table, the other one tipped and its content dripped down the back of the customer on the left. I am surprised that they didn’t fire me on the spot.
I also met dainty, funny and adventurous Michelle. We decided that London was too grey, packed our bags and hitch hiked the entire length of Europe to Spain, in the middle of winter.
Michelle knew exactly why she was traveling to Spain. She was husband hunting. She found an American ex-pat, not much taller than she was, who lived in a house dangling over a cliff in Torremolinos. And all this time, I thought she was in it for the adventure. Go figure. We completely lost touch after she accomplished her goal.
After I took the big plunge and emigrated to the United States, I had to start from scratch in the friendship department. I was initially pleasantly surprised to see how easily I was invited to dinners and garden parties. I thought: ‘Wow, those people will become good friends! They will want to get to know me and I have all these questions about their lives.’
But the meaning of friendship is different here. As a rookie immigrant, I soon learnt the rules of the friendship game on one of my neighborhood walks. I grew up in Amsterdam, where visiting friends unannounced is the norm, so when I passed a friend’s house, I rang the bell.
My friend opened the door and with a concerned look on her face asked if I had been in an accident. Stopping by impromptu to shoot the breeze over a cup of coffee is not part of the friendship code in America. You have to ‘schedule’ friendship, just like other appointments in one’s busy life. Besides, in a portable society, you are hesitant to invest too much in a friendship that will end when you move away. It’s a self-protective mechanism that has served Americans well.
While I was raising a family, friendships seemed to sprout out of the ground. You become friends with other parents, the friendships mostly centered around your children’s lives. If you are lucky, some of those remain for the rest of your life.
Loosing a friendship can be very traumatic. Especially a ‘best friend’ friendship. As with other types of losses, one goes through the same stages of grief. First, there is denial. Despite the obvious signs of the friendship coming to an end, you make excuses and attribute the changes to other reasons. Then, there is the anger phase: ‘well, who needs a friend anyway’ or ‘pfff, there are other fish in the sea’. Then comes depression and feelings of sadness and finally there is acceptance. When you realize that you will ultimately be fine, the loss becomes manageable.
Are twins primed for a life-long search for a twin surrogate? Do introverted twins like myself, demand too much of a friendship? I am a loner and choose to swim instead of play a team sport like basket ball, which makes it hard to socialize. I like to write instead of play an instrument and join a band. I am not religious so I don’t go to church where I could join a community. I am told I am too intense, wanting to devour the person I am friends with, or at least mold her into a twin sister.
There is a Dutch poem whose first line describes friendship like this: ‘Friends are like trees, they wait for you until you come again and they are undisturbed if you stay away.’
That sounds too saintly for my taste. To me, friendship is more like a trail in the forest that two friends walk on. If they don’t walk it regularly, together, it will start to grow over, and soon will disappear. leave comment here
I also met dainty, funny and adventurous Michelle. We decided that London was too grey, packed our bags and hitch hiked the entire length of Europe to Spain, in the middle of winter.
Michelle knew exactly why she was traveling to Spain. She was husband hunting. She found an American ex-pat, not much taller than she was, who lived in a house dangling over a cliff in Torremolinos. And all this time, I thought she was in it for the adventure. Go figure. We completely lost touch after she accomplished her goal.
After I took the big plunge and emigrated to the United States, I had to start from scratch in the friendship department. I was initially pleasantly surprised to see how easily I was invited to dinners and garden parties. I thought: ‘Wow, those people will become good friends! They will want to get to know me and I have all these questions about their lives.’
But the meaning of friendship is different here. As a rookie immigrant, I soon learnt the rules of the friendship game on one of my neighborhood walks. I grew up in Amsterdam, where visiting friends unannounced is the norm, so when I passed a friend’s house, I rang the bell.
My friend opened the door and with a concerned look on her face asked if I had been in an accident. Stopping by impromptu to shoot the breeze over a cup of coffee is not part of the friendship code in America. You have to ‘schedule’ friendship, just like other appointments in one’s busy life. Besides, in a portable society, you are hesitant to invest too much in a friendship that will end when you move away. It’s a self-protective mechanism that has served Americans well.
While I was raising a family, friendships seemed to sprout out of the ground. You become friends with other parents, the friendships mostly centered around your children’s lives. If you are lucky, some of those remain for the rest of your life.
Loosing a friendship can be very traumatic. Especially a ‘best friend’ friendship. As with other types of losses, one goes through the same stages of grief. First, there is denial. Despite the obvious signs of the friendship coming to an end, you make excuses and attribute the changes to other reasons. Then, there is the anger phase: ‘well, who needs a friend anyway’ or ‘pfff, there are other fish in the sea’. Then comes depression and feelings of sadness and finally there is acceptance. When you realize that you will ultimately be fine, the loss becomes manageable.
Are twins primed for a life-long search for a twin surrogate? Do introverted twins like myself, demand too much of a friendship? I am a loner and choose to swim instead of play a team sport like basket ball, which makes it hard to socialize. I like to write instead of play an instrument and join a band. I am not religious so I don’t go to church where I could join a community. I am told I am too intense, wanting to devour the person I am friends with, or at least mold her into a twin sister.
There is a Dutch poem whose first line describes friendship like this: ‘Friends are like trees, they wait for you until you come again and they are undisturbed if you stay away.’
That sounds too saintly for my taste. To me, friendship is more like a trail in the forest that two friends walk on. If they don’t walk it regularly, together, it will start to grow over, and soon will disappear. leave comment here
