The Nature Of Friendship And Pressures On Friendships

Friendship can have a significant impact on a person’s life in a positive and negative way. There are many definitions and types of friendship. In Todd May’s article “Friendship in an Age of Economics,” Aristotle believed that there are three types of friendship which are, “…those of pleasure, those of usefulness, and true friendship” (May). Friendship can be described as a bond between two people that have a connection which includes loyalty, acceptance, trust, and love. John Steinbeck’s novel Of Mice and Men, demonstrates a strong friendship between the main characters, George Milton and Lennie Small. Friendship can make people vulnerable in the way they trust, accept and love each other.

Despite the numerous different theories consisting of different stages of friendship they all contain certain aspects of relationships going through stages of increasing familiarity. They all show how we select friends through a stage model and how relationships also break down in stages. They provide Factors that increase friendship like after helping another person we like them more due to feelings and emotions such as empathy, or a decline in a relationship by the need for too much help and support that can cause stress and anxieties. If we feel empathy we are likely to help, and there are several factors that increase chances of friendship,

According to an article published in The New York Times entitled “Friendship in the Age of Economics,” there are three distinct forms of friendship, and all types of friendship leave each friend vulnerable. Moreover, all types of friendship leave some sort of significant impact on each friend’s life. “They [friendships] render us vulnerable, and in

Friendships are an essential part of human’s social development. The quality and amount of friends an individual has can impact an their growth. Friends fulfill a majority of different needs that when met can have positive responses.

The chapter about friendships begins by addressing different types of boundary problems that can occur in friendships before taking a deeper look at some questions that arise with boundary conflicts. The question that I found the most interesting was “aren’t friendships easily broken?” Their response to this question was unexpected. They state that all friendships are based on some level of attachment or love, and furthermore, they explain that love is

Countless individuals have found that their romantic relations have been more successful when they have developed a friendship with their companion. Laura VanderDrift from Purdue University, says, “Romantic relationships are, at their core, friendships” (Hodgekiss). Friendship is about supporting someone through thick and thin and attending events that are important to them. Friends are there to lend a helping hand or a shoulder to cry on in times of need. In addition to support, building a friendship with the partner could be the glue that holds the couple together. Lack of trust and communication could serve as the cause of a fallen out relationship. In a friendship both of the key traits are established making the success rate higher

The friendships form because they lack care from other people in their lives and need the friendship to compensate their loss of emotion. Although two people in the friendship have different genders and ages, they have similar life experiences and living background so they can understand each other’s feelings.

Lasting a year or a lifetime, friendship is something that we’ve all experienced and cherished throughout our lives. It has an impacted us in a good or bad way, teaching us a lesson for every encounter we come across: which brings a new meaning to the word friendship. I’ve had many good and bad friendships throughout my life, but one experience gave me a bigger outlook on the word “Friendship”.

Merriam-Webster defines a friend as “One attached to another by affection or esteem”. Our success and lives as a whole are altogether based on relationships we create and what we do with them. Communication and the ability to work with others is a basic and required skill in every field of our lives, whether it's applying for a job, meeting with a teacher, talking to a parent or simply spending time with family and friends. It is something taught to preschoolers on their first day and used until their final few. To survive, we must meet “basic needs” known as food, water, shelter and, clothing. Friendship should be acknowledged in this list as a need of each person. By displaying the relationship of Lennie Small and George Milton in Of Mice and Men, John Steinbeck portrays this need for friendship. F. Scott Fitzgerald portrays this idea as well through, Jay Gatsby and Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby. Friendship is a basic need of any human, needed to survive and thrive in our everyday lives.

Many philosophers through history have explained what the meaning of friendship is. One philosopher is Aristotle who said, “ For a person to be friends with another it is necessary that they bear good will to each other and wish good things for each other, without this escaping their notice.” Friendship has many different characteristics to it such as unconditional love, honesty, loyalty, nonjudgemental, and attentiveness.

Bennett Helm describes friendship as “a distinctive kind of concern for your friend, a concern which might reasonably be understood as a kind of love.” I believe friendship is a greater form of an acquaintance. With an acquaintance you will exchange greetings whenever you happen to meet and maybe have a small conversation, but that is where the effort of becoming a friend stops. A quality friendship is where each person cares for the other to succeed, enjoys going out of their way to spend quality time with the other, and deeply care for the other’s health.

Vallade, Dillow & Myers (2016) qualitative study found that from friends participants’ seek many psychological needs for example feeling of comfort, ease from negative situations, reassurance which is achieved through social supports from close friends. According to Bukowski & Sippola (2005) we hold variety of fulfilments and affection e.g. companionship, spending quality time building up closeness (Bagwell et al, 1998), and engaging in experiences for example loyalty. Concluding we develop friendships consistently with social needs, psychological objectives and through self-perception and are seen to attribute to social adjustments within different stages of young people’s life. (Laursen

Friendship is a relationship where all of the members are aware of and value each other’s well-being. It is a companionship, which is a reciprocated caring that comes with time together that is spent doing a common interest. Its social value, in both the general and specific sense, is often times questioned. So, specifically, what is the value of friendship for an individual? An individual with friends grows in self-knowledge. Because of the nature of friendship, people can learn about themselves while in this type of relationship. Friendship is valuable for individuals because, due to the common interests involved in it, they can learn more about their interests and themselves. Friendship increases one’s knowledge about what they enjoy to do because friendship is not only fundamentally a companionship, but it also involves shared interests.

Friendships are an important part of everyday life. The vast amount of research focusing on friendship (i.e., Fehr, 1996; Hays, 1984; Argyle & Henderson, 1985) is indicative of just how important friendship is to everyday life. The importance and necessity of friendship is also evident by how these relationships are portrayed on television. Shows such as Friends, Cougartown, Psych, and How I Met Your Mother portray various different kinds of friendship. Shows such as these provide viewers with a unique opportunity to be able to be an observer in these relationships and to see how these relationships form and develop. In some instances, viewers may have the opportunity to watch a friendship begin and blossom throughout the course of a television series.

It is about the situation in which a person has repeated contact with other people in order to lead to a friendship: “you have more friends if there are more people you meet on a regular basis” (Stauder 2014). Repetition of contact with humans is more significant than the number of people met. Contact opportunities are influenced not only by social structure but a person’s opportunity for contact and association. This idea of interaction structures starts to acutely explain empirical research: “young people in higher education are likely to have friends covering a broad spread of backgrounds, working-class are likely to be limited” (Pahl 2000: 108). This is not due to personal attitude or prejudices, but the situations and opportunities in which contact with people leads to friendship. University is increasingly mixed in terms of students' class and ethnicity, whereas a local community may tend to have less variation regardless of whether it is middle- or working-class. A person needs to be willing and open to friendship, and which people one chooses to become friends with depends on who one meets, so friendship necessarily occurs within the confines of social structures. This echoes Giddens' theory of structuration, wherein “human agency and social structure are in a relationship with each other” (Gauntlett 2002). It is the application of macro and