“Without friends, nobody would like to live,” Aristotle said and was right. Because it is difficult to exist without that essential ingredient of life in society, that we experience as the worst of the punishments conceivable to loneliness, exclusion and rejection. In daily mythology, friendship is a paradise of camaraderie and fun, an ideal fed by Hollywood films. But, really, it is much more than that. It is a full feeling of nuances, encounters and tensions, whose diversity is infinite. There are no two people in the world who conceive friendship exactly the same.
A book has just been published in Argentina that reflects these two aspects of the link very well: its essential importance and the wide variety of definitions that describe it. The text is called “Friendship. A shared essay” (Debate/Books of the Asteroid) and was written by the neuroscientist Mariano Sigman, author of Bestsellers as “The Secret Life of the Mind” and “The Power of Words” and his friend, the Spanish writer and producer Jacobo Bergareche.
Both devised an experiment that lasted about a week. In a spacious shed in Madrid, They gathered more than 70 participants to try to define what friendship means. The interviews took place in a warm atmosphere, with food and drinks in between and none of the guests hesitated too much to accept the treat. All were happy to contribute experiences and stories about various situations of their lives related to the subject. Among those who went through the place were famous people, such as Rosa Montero or Jorge Drexler; and true specialists, such as Marta Peirano, a journalist dedicated to technological issues. Entrepreneurs and students, old and young, Muslims and Jews, Europeans and people arriving in Spain from various corners of the planet were part of this particular meeting.
The experience turned to a podcast and the authors dream of giving him, in the future, audiovisual format. One of the most moving stories who heard in those days, that of Amadou, a young man born in Guinea who migrated with his best friend to Europe on a very cruel trip, will even subject to Jacobo’s next novel.
With all that material, immense and overflowing, the authors put together a lax and attempt classification, which follows in the book the form of the chapters. What was the final conclusion? “We were renovating friendship in its components,” explains Sigman-and that allows anyone to identify in the book what components he has, which he longs for, which would want to have more, which ones he is not watering and cultivating. A kind of periscope-observatory that allows you to look better. That is a form of conclusion. It is not the normative, taxative, imperative conclusion to tell you how something works, but a procedure for you to that allows you to exercise friendship better. ”
Roads for a definition
The ways of approaching the concept of the participants give an idea of the different scenarios that this relationship implies. Of the ease of becoming friends to the feeling of never fitting with anyone. From the lifelong links to those who are born by chance from one day to another. From the latent sex tension to the relationships they never dreamed of going through bed. Of the shared worlds to the differences they enrich. Of the ideology that separates the fanaticism that matches.
“We made many discoveries,” says Sigman. ”Suddenly a lot of issues began to appear, things we had not planned, such as the insistence on talking about Losses or ruptures of friendship. It is something that does not even have a name or word that describes it. A person can be orphan, widowed, divorced, but losing a friendship does not even have a social and labor entity. You can’t miss work for that. ”
Loyalty, reciprocity, duration in time arose as recurring topics among the interviewees. They even appeared on the possibility of being friends of animals. Rosa Montero pointed out, in this regard, that an already grown dog of “more than 30 kilos” could be a good comrade. The puppies not because they demanded too many care.
“One of the things that happens with friendship in cinema and comics is that it is like children,” Bergareche says.
Is friendship necessary for life? The question is addressed to Mariano Sigman, a true specialist in these issues. “There is no tribe, or social group that is known in ethnographic or anthropological history that has not forged friendly links. The first human stories are friendly. We all know that it is desperate to not be able to have friends, want to integrate into something and not being able to. One feels that being is described.
Friends on networks
Another inevitable question for the authors is what they discovered about today’s links, crossed by technology. On this subject, the specialist’s observations Marta Peirano They were guided.
First, they concluded that friendships can be very resistant to distance and lack of face to face. But everything has a limit. At the end and end, Sigman points out, the touch is the meaning that is at the origin of all relationships.
On the other hand, the dialogue of the applications – medium through which the ties are maintained at the distance – lacks the meanings provided by the gestures and intonations of the physical presence. And although the emoticons were invented to supplant them, today’s great disagreements are born from the coldness of WhatsApp messages. The lack of synchronicity, that is, being in different vital, geographical or temporal situations, can be lethal for loves of all kinds.
The best way to jump these obstacles is to remember, whenever you can, Aristotle’s words: “With friends men are more trained to think and act.”
Nearly a thousand kilometers, old or new, there is no way to imagine a good life without friends. That brotherhood that nobody imposes us, which we choose in total freedom.
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