Quote - Friends - Funny but inaccurate

Contrary to general belief, I do not believe that friends are necessarily the people you like best, they are merely the people who got there first.

Peter Ustinov (1921 - 2004), Dear Me (1977)

This is funny. ^{1} So when I saw it, I chuckled and thought about it a bit. In general, I find that humor often contains significant truth. Does this quote?

The quote seems to imply that you became my friend just because I met you before I met other people.

Wrong.

I met a lot of people as I grew up. Some of them have become "Facebook friends" -- something Ustinov probably didn't have a chance to experience, but I suspect that, as a famous person he had many old acquaintances who considered themselves his friends. Maybe he even considered them "friends" in the same way we have "Facebook friends." We don't hang out with these folks, but we will exchange pleasantries and information with them, and we enjoy our interactions.

There is a whole spectrum of friendship beyond that, and in my experience, the more you like someone, the more you enjoy spending time getting to know them, and the deeper the freindship can become. They move from acquaintances to polite friends ("Facebook friends") to other stages, and it seems to me that the key attribute to that deepening of the friendship is affection -- liking -- and not time, though certainly time can help the depth of the friendship.

And then, for some select individuals, we reach "Capital-F Friendship."

"Capital-F Friends" are rarer. From my pre-college days, I have a few. I collected some more in college, and some more after that. Many -- probably most -- of those Friends became Friends because we shared certain interests or had personality traits which fit well together. And they remain Friends because, as we shared experiences, we grew closer together.

But I also know people who were Friends for a time, but have become "small-f friends" or acquaintances or "people I once knew" as life kept changing around us, or as it became clear we just weren't connecting with each other as we once did.

So, if someone is my Friend now, I really do think it's because I truly like them. And, in fact, I think I like "small-f friends" better than most of the people who I have known for a long time who were never friends of any sort.

So, Sir Peter, you were very clever. And I like the humor.

But I don't agree.

Thanks for prompting me to think about friendship, though.



^{1}[And it's related to an observation I've been meaning to write about - our identification of people we know as being "better" or "the best" - but that is a topic for another time.]