Seneca on True and False Friendship 1

You have sent a letter to me through the hand of a "friend" of yours, as you call him.  And in your very next sentence you warn me not to discuss with him all the matters that concern you, saying that even you yourself are not accustomed to do this; in other words, you have in the same letter affirmed and denied that he is your friend.

Now if you used this word of ours in the popular sense, and called him "friend" in the same way in which we speak of all candidates for election as "honorable gentlemen," and as we greet all men whom we meet casually, if their names slip us for the moment, with the salutation "my dear sir," —so be it. 

But if you consider any man a friend whom you do not trust as you trust yourself, you are mightily mistaken and you do not sufficiently understand what true friendship means. . . .

—Seneca the Younger, Moral Letters to Lucilius 3, tr Gummere

Words have genuine meaning, and the clarity of our expression is in a direct relationship to the clarity of our thinking. I will often claim that the word “love” is the most abused of all, for we use it too broadly, too vaguely, and often intend it in very different a manner than others understand it. “I love ice cream” and “I love you” are hardly the same, and these aren’t just obscure questions of semantics. We do others and ourselves an injustice when we confuse meaning, and the confusion between the passion of affection and the promise of commitment can be the most destructive of all.

The word “friend” comes a very close second. We might use it to mean anything from a casual acquaintance to a soul mate. A few years back, the term “BFF”, standing for “best friends forever”, became popular among youngsters, and I was startled to see how many best friends people referred to having, and how often these lists changed as social tides changed.

Seneca’s reminder is a case in point. We may use the term “friend” rather casually, but if we are to truly mean what we say, speaking of a friend who I can’t really trust is a contradiction in terms. Perhaps I trust him at some times, and not at others, but note how this makes the nature of the relationship conditional, and therefore cannot involve the fullness of commitment that real trust entails.

It may be because I can be rather shy and awkward, or because I can be very unfashionable, or just because I can be very stubborn, but I have never made many friends. I know that I have spoken of many dozens of people as friends at various times, though in the end the true friends, the ones in the most specific sense of people I can trust and rely upon without question, have numbered fewer than can be counted on a hand.

Now this is not necessarily a bad thing, because I find that we tend to spread ourselves too thin, and we often confuse quantity with quality. The rise of social media introduced a whole new level of comparing and bragging about our social worth. In the end, however, I would always prefer one friend to rely upon than the dozens who will make excuses when the bad times arrive. No good will ever come from confusing these two.

Written in 7/2009

Image: Giotto, The Kiss of Judas (c. 1305)