What is friendship?

My close girlfriend is in the middle of getting a masters degree. She's reading and writing a ton, but she still manages to email me now and again. Since she's knee deep in ideas, she can't help but pass some of them along and this latest one really made me think. Here's how it started out, from her:

"I read something in the Gatto book that I have been pondering a lot, and I wonder what your thoughts are. He writes about the fact that we don't really have friendships as adults, only networks. He says we don't even know the difference between communities and networks, communities being a collection of real families who participate in life--argue and help and make things together. Networks don't require the whole person. You suppress all the parts of you but the ones that are necessary to your job (calling, board, club). He says that networks seem to address human and social needs, but they don't really encourage the friendship that we constantly seek. [He says:]

'With a network, what you get at the beginning is all you ever get. Networks don't get better or worse; their limited purpose keeps them pretty much the same all the time, as there just isn't much development possible. The pathological state which eventually develops out of these constant repetitions of thin human contact is a feeling that your "friends" and "colleagues" don't really care about you beyond what you can do for them, that they have no curiosity about the way you manage your life, no curiosity about your hopes, fears, victories, defeats. The real truth is that the "friends" falsely mourned for their indifference were never friends, just fellow networkers from whom in fairness little should be expected beyond attention to the common interest.'

So... I've been thinking a lot about this. Here are some of my thoughts. What do you think?

Firstly, I agree with the network/community idea. Our mobile society has not been kind to communities. Nor is it kind to friendships. We move a lot. It's hard to build true communities (as Gatto describes them) in this kind of atmosphere. We try, though. We all want those kinds of connections. Perhaps networks are the best substitute that we manage to generate in our efforts to build communities. Networks are a series of positions that can be filled by whomever is present, so I guess it's kind of a framework for a kind of friendship. Some enduring friendships are made from those network beginnings. Communities seem to require a pre-supposed kind of committment e.g. when generations of families lived and died in the same place together, they knew they'd always be around each other and therefore there was a committment to living among each other. We just don't ever get to that place now. What social folks do instead is join multiple networks. They have many different groups of peers. In my area it's: book clubs, bunco groups, church groups, teams, school groups, etc. Pile up a lot of limited networks and maybe the community spirit comes close to being reached?

Secondly (and this is just a vague idea): I wonder sometimes if our general inability to form and maintain intimate friendships might be designed to bring us to God, or at least to leave a craving in us for that perfect relationship that only He can offer. After all, no human can be the perfect friend. Every friend has a flaw. Even our most intimate friend (hopefully), our husband, can never offer us the perfect love that can only be offered by God. Can anyone know every part of us and love us still? Are we even capable of showing anyone every part of ourselves? I'm not sure that we are. I think that we are flawed in what we can offer as a friend just by virtue of our humanity. We are incapable of complete unconditional love because we can't do anything perfectly. But God is God and he offers that love unceasingly, if only we can find our way to it. And there's the rub, eh? Hm.

Or here's another angle that makes even more sense to me: Our unsatisfying temporary friendships with others should encourage us to seek those more permanent friendships with the people who are truly permanent in our lives--our family. As I make and lose friends over years and years, I realize more and more that the most stable, lasting relationships that I have are family relationships. These are the relationships that are divinely designed to last forever and they have the most capacity for unconditional love and acceptance. However, these are also the relationships that can become most deeply flawed and therefore most deeply painful (which things are a good indication of how powerful these relationships are). And it's not always the fault of parents who are trying their best and children who are attempting to do what's expected of them. I believe that society has poisoned our notions about what family is.

One of the falsities of this "dynamic" sociality that is sold to us by our world is that our families are the enemy and our social peers are our friends, that family is to be outgrown, while friends are kept forever. This leads us to mock and abandon the "difficult" family relationships while we seek depth in the "easy" relationships with our friends. So we can never be satisfied. We invest in shallow relationships and feel the lack of them at the same time we are critical of the relationships that could really satisfy us.

I really think, though, that this campaign to destroy the family relationships has been going on for a long time, and that family dynamics today have fallen into patterns that create these disconnects. It starts in grade school when our teacher becomes our exemplar and we begin to see the inadequacies of our parents. As we get older, we become convinced that our parents (and most other adults) cannot understand us and that our peers can best provide that understanding and counsel that our parents seem incapable of offering. No sibling can be as close to us as a friend. Parents often become merely wardens and bankers. There are families that overcome these typical patterns, of course. Thank goodness for that! I'm suggesting only that these are common patterns that we have somehow been fooled into accepting as "normal". Some strong families see beyond "normal", but many people just follow conventions and, if they're lucky, they may manage to overcome the societal norms, and parents and children can build things in common and be friends. But, as the children grow to adulthood, too often parents and children follow their parallel paths to occasional visits, vastly different interests, regular back-biting and complaining, and general dissatisfaction.

So perhaps the loose networks that exist and that can provide foundations for deeper friendships are acceptable as long as we as a society remember to care for our family relationships. But that's the rub, isn't it? Family can be so much harder than casual friends. Have we discarded family members as our intimates in favor of our comfortable friends within our loose networks? And what does this say about our capacities for forming lasting relationships of value and depth? Are we, as individuals within a loosely knit society becoming too isolated? If so, will this isolation incubate selfishness, pride, enmity, and all those other destroying characteristics? Perhaps. Perhaps not. In any case, I'm sure thinking a lot about my friendships and family relationships and what I am (or am not) contributing to them. It's something to think about....