What is friendship really?

How many real friends do you have? Have you ever felt the fear of not having friends? Do you have friends of the opposite sex? Do you have a guilty conscience for not caring about your friends? How much truth, how much lies, and how much secrecy can a friendship endure? These are recurring, age-old questions. Questions as important as they are uncomfortable. That's why we avoid them. Friendship is a mystery. It is, as Marina Garcés says in the essay, The passion of strangers (Galaxia Gutenberg), the only form of stable social interaction that isn't institutionalized or regulated: it's free, without rules, without paperwork, between equals. It depends only on the will of those who sustain it, on the rituals and habits they create. It is born and dies by spontaneous generation. No two friendships are alike. That's why it's sometimes difficult to know who is and isn't your friend. Friendship has a wonderfully unsettling quality, a desire and a promise.

The impulse toward others is born as much from curiosity as from our own fragility. We are social beings; we need each other. To be together, to laugh together. However, we know that if friendship is surrounded by too specific an interest, it fades. Friendship cannot be instrumental. It cannot depend on a desired pleasure, nor can it be pure, tied to great eternal values. Friendship is existential, it is life, everyday life, empathy with others, sometimes apparent banality, other times a friendly disagreement, occasionally a poetic harmony.

Far from both the ethical and political ideal with which it has been represented since Aristotle and from current therapeutic culture, as if it were a medicine, Marina Garcés sees friendship inevitably impregnated with "the shadow of passions, the ambiguity of desires." Above all, it is the antithesis of loneliness. And it cannot be confused with companionship, solidarity or sisterhood/fraternity. Not even with her family.

In essence, friendship is forged through shared time, day by day. Just as you learn to swim by swimming and ride a bike by getting on a bike, you learn to make friends by making friends. By living alongside others, in company. Friends are there and they aren't, it's only up to us to make them appear and disappear. To be or not to be: that is the question. In childhood, there are spontaneous relationships: "Do you want to be my friend? Shall we play?" Like an innate impulse, without apparent calculation, without fear. Like a transgression of "don't talk to strangers." Perhaps the bond will be strengthened. Perhaps one day there will be a resounding rupture. That's how it works.

From Gilgamesh, the all-powerful and cruel prince of the city of Uruk, friend of Endiku, in Montaigne and his beloved Étienne de la Boétie, over the centuries we have known stories of great friends. In these two cases, the friend's premature death created the mythologized memory. The model has often been masculine. Fortunately, this is changing. Incidentally, the great frontier has always been friendship between the sexes. This, too, is more fluid today.

There is a social dimension to friendship: harmony, civic coexistence. The desire to understand one another in community. Friendship as the alternative to tyranny, as the antidote to war. This is ostentatiously in crisis. What's in fashion today is identity paranoia, suspicion of what's different, distrust, the cultivation of enemies, division, hatred, confrontation on both a small and large scale. The climate is not conducive to making friends among strangers: but it turns out that whenever you make a friend, they're still a stranger from the start. We're all strange to someone. That's the charm of oddness, of strangeness. This is the core of Marina Garcés' essay, who still remembers how the film impacted her as a child. ETYes, there are very curious, counterintuitive friendships. Difficult and fabulous ones. There are also dangerous and toxic ones.

And, of course, friendship is always evolving because people never stop changing. We now lead two lives: the digital one and the physical one, both subject to the pulse of an emotional commercialism that values friendship as social capital. With the suspicion that, on social media, if everything is friendship, nothing is friendship.