Defining Friendship

What is Friendship?
It seems that I am at a crossroad in my life and I am forced to redefine what friends are and should be. In basic terms a friendship is a type of relationship that involves two or more people that contains the following traits and attributes. The world is obviously not black and white and there are different levels of each of these trait and attributes, however when any of these reach a level of 0 then it is no longer a friendship and would become more of an acquaintance. This is what you get from me when I consider you a friend.

• Respect:Positive feeling of esteem and actions that represent that esteem.
• Trust: Reliance on a persons integrity, strength, ability.
• Honesty: If your not honest with someone then you do not trust them. A friendship must contain honesty and trust. This does not mean that they have to agree with you all the time but there should be some similarity in values and morals this is important as it can cause a friendship to diverge.
  
• Loyalty: faithfulness to commitments or obligations such as one's word.
• Self Discloser: having someone to confide in is very important and is the expression of trust by disclosing information you normally would not disclose to others. There is some respect here that needs to be identified, when someone confides in you its not because they want the whole world told,
  
• Altruism: principal or practice of unselfish concern for the welfare of the other, this is the opposite of selfishness and this needs to be maintained by both sides of the friendship and needs to constantly balanced, however in times of need this can change for a short periods of time without any consequences and not change for long periods of time with direct consequences.
• Sympathy and Empathy: harmony of or agreement in feeling, as between persons or on the part of one person with respect to another. The intellectual identification with or vicarious experiencing of the feelings, thoughts, or attitudes of another. This does not mean that your values are the same as the other persons.

I don't think that any of this is too much to ask. And many people who know me know that these are traits that I exhibit for friends. I am changing since certain events and personal growth have triggered a lot of changes in my life. Before this year I would have considered anyone I know a friend, just like I would have pretty much considered any movie I saw was a good movie. My problem is I would give everyone priority over me all the time, the results were not good. I realize that I need to take care of myself and set proper boundaries. You would think that I would have figured this out already, and I did but not for people I considered friends. My other decision is to shy away from getting into a click of friends.

REV 1.0
3/19/2010