Sunday, December 21, 2008

Friendship in life, friendship in culture

By John King

As a great quote was saying, "friendship is the bridge between Earth and Heaven"; actually, no matter how much you analyze this quote or how much you try to describe friendship in words, they could never be enough to define it. It's all about giving instead of expecting or receiving; it's about feeling when a friend is down and visiting him for no particular reason.. It's about trust and confidence, it's about sharing, it's about another kind of love.

An interesting approach literature has on the subject claims that a person should be friends with itself first, in order to be friends with others. He who hasn't found a friend in himself, could never have one in the outside world. Another quote, saying "the greatest sweetener of human life is friendship" is also very real, and together they prove the value given to friendship by literature - may it be classical or modern.

Psychologists propose many theories for explaining friendship, such as: social exchange theory, rational dialectics, equity theory, attachment styles and so on. They concluded that confidence is the most important ingredient in a friendship - this satisfies the human need to share deep secrets without being betrayed; to build this kind of trust, time is necessary, but once the rules broken - wounds don't heal very easy, or they don't heal at all. In the end, as we can imagine, friendship can't really be put into theory exactly, but certain characteristics do apply.

The word itself is very powerful - "friendship" being responsible for modifying human emotions. That's why some(as the politicians) exploit it for their own interest it, by using it in political speeches. People perceive it and react to it at their subconscious level - that's where it power comes from. Politicians have even used it to define relations between states and this contributed to distorting its initial meaning in a way.

In the end, we can never tell if this or love is the greatest human emotion; anyone felt it at least once, and you must know its importance; as you also must know the sour taste of betrayal. But these are both parts of life as we know it, and when we draw the line we notice that the world is interconnected through this wonderful emotion. - 15433

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