Social Skills

Three reasons people become friends

Aristotle noticed that people become friends for one of three reasons. Some friendships rest on usefulness: your lab partner, the teammate who passes you the ball, the neighbor who drives you to practice. Some rest on pleasure: the person who is fun at lunch, who laughs at the same videos, who is good company on a long bus ride. And some rest on goodness: two people who each admire the other's character and want what is truly good for the other, for the other's own sake.

None of these is shameful. Usefulness and fun are real goods, and most of your friendships will start there. But Aristotle points out what happens when the reason goes away. When the class ends or the season is over, the useful friendship often ends too. When one of you grows into new interests, the fun friendship can fade in a month. He says young people make and drop friends quickly for exactly this reason: they are following what pleases them today.

Friendships of the good last because goodness lasts. If you love your friend for his honesty, his courage, or her steady kindness, then that friendship survives a new schedule, a move across town, or a bad haircut. These friendships are rare, Aristotle says, and they take time: you have to watch each other over many seasons before you can trust each other fully. The hopeful part is that many of these deep friendships grow out of ordinary ones. The teammate can become the friend who prays for you.

• Usefulness: 'We're friends because we help each other get something done.'
• Pleasure: 'We're friends because we enjoy the same things and have fun together.'
• Goodness: 'We're friends because I admire who you are, and I want your good even when it costs me something.'

Five marks of a good friend

You can learn to see a good friend the way a gardener learns to see a healthy plant. Look for these five marks. A good friend is loyal: she speaks of you the same way when you are out of the room. A good friend is truthful: he will tell you there is spinach in your teeth and, later, harder things too. A good friend is kind: not only to you, but to the younger sibling, the cafeteria worker, the classmate nobody picks.

A good friend makes you better. After time together you are a little braver, a little more honest, a little more yourself, not smaller or meaner. Proverbs puts it in a picture: iron sharpening iron. And a good friend is glad at your good. When you win the part in the play or the scholarship, a real friend's first feeling is joy for you, even if she wanted it too. Envy is the great thief of friendship, and a friend who can celebrate you is a treasure.

Turn the list around and use it as a mirror as well as a measuring stick. The goal is not to grade your friends but to know what to look for, and to become this kind of friend yourself (unit 8 is about exactly that).

• Loyal: speaks well of you when you are absent; keeps what you tell them.
• Truthful: tells you the truth gently, even when it is awkward.
• Kind: treats everyone with respect, not only the people who can do something for them.
• Makes you better: you leave their company more like the person you want to be.
• Glad at your good: celebrates your success without sulking or competing.

Side by side: how friendships begin

In The Four Loves, C. S. Lewis describes friendship as two people standing side by side, looking at the same thing, where romance is two people facing each other. Friendship, he says, often begins at the moment one person discovers that another shares an interest or a question he thought was his alone. The friends are not mainly looking at each other; they are both looking at the stars, the old car engine, the chess problem, or the question of what is true.

This is very practical advice. If you want friends, go where people are doing something you love: the choir, the robotics team, the Latin club, the trail crew, the youth group service project. Bring the thing you care about and look for the person whose eyes light up at it too. A good opening is simply a question about the shared thing: 'How long have you been building these?' or 'Which book got you into this?'

Lewis also notices that friendship of this kind does not need to be exclusive. A third friend who loves the same thing adds something new, because each friend draws out a different side of the others. That is why a good friendship has an open door.

Choosing friends with care

Proverbs says that the one who walks with wise men will be wise, and Paul warns that bad company corrupts good character. You become like the people you spend your time with, in your words, your jokes, your habits, and even what you think is normal. That is not a reason to be cold to anyone. It is a reason to be thoughtful about whom you let closest.

Seneca gave his young friend a useful order of operations: judge carefully before a friendship is formed, and trust fully after. Many people do it backwards. They tell a brand-new acquaintance their deepest secrets in the first week, and only later wonder whether that person can be trusted. Be warm to everyone right away. Be slow to hand over your heart.

Here are some things to watch, quietly, over a few weeks. How does this person treat people who cannot do anything for them? How do they talk about friends who are not in the room? Do they keep small promises, like showing up when they said they would? Do they respect your 'no'? Do they make fun of what is holy or good to get a laugh? Honest answers to these questions will tell you more than any amount of charm.

• Be friendly to all; be close friends with few.
• Watch how they treat the waiter, the little kid, and the new student.
• Listen to how they talk about absent friends; you will be absent someday too.
• Notice whether they keep small promises before you trust them with big ones.

When a friend leads you wrong

Cicero, the Roman statesman, wrote a dialogue on friendship in which the wise Laelius sets down a firm rule: we must never ask a friend to do something wrong, and never do something wrong because a friend asks. True friendship, he says, is only possible among people who are trying to be good, because it rests on agreement in things human and divine, held together by goodwill and affection.

You will meet the test of that rule. A friend asks you to send your homework 'just to check,' to lie to a parent about where you were, to share a photo of someone else, or to join in mocking a classmate in the group chat. In that moment, a clear and friendly sentence is your best tool. You do not need a lecture. You can say, 'I'm not going to do that, but I'm still up for pizza later,' or 'Nope, I'm out of this one,' and change the subject.

If a friend keeps pressing, makes you keep secrets from your parents, or laughs at your conscience, that friendship is pulling you away from who you want to be. Step back gradually and kindly: spend more time with other friends, stop joining the activities that cause trouble, and talk with a parent, teacher, or pastor. Stepping back is not hating. You can keep praying for that person, greeting them warmly, and hoping for the day the friendship can be good again. If a friend is in real danger, tell a trusted adult right away; that is loyalty, not betrayal.

Friendship inside a larger love

Christian writers did not throw away the old pagan wisdom about friendship; they carried it further. Thomas Aquinas, following Aristotle, taught that charity, the highest Christian love, is itself a kind of friendship: friendship between man and God, made possible because God shares His own happiness with us. Jesus says to His disciples in John 15 that He calls them not servants but friends.

Augustine learned this the hard way. In his Confessions he describes the death of a close friend from his youth and the crushing grief that followed, and he looks back on the sweet ordinary things they shared. He concluded that friends are loved most safely when they are loved in God, because then the friendship rests on something that cannot be lost.

For a student, this means that your best friendships will have a third party in them. Two friends who both love Christ will help each other pray, forgive, and keep going, and their friendship is protected from becoming a little world of two that shuts everyone else out.

Two friendships worth studying

Jonathan was the son of King Saul and the heir to the throne. David was a shepherd boy who had just killed Goliath. By every worldly measure they should have been rivals. Yet Scripture says the soul of Jonathan was knit with the soul of David, and Jonathan gave David his own robe, sword, and bow. Their friendship rested on shared faith and admiration for each other's courage, and it stayed loyal at great cost.

Ruth and Naomi were different in age, nation, and background. Naomi was a grieving Israelite widow; Ruth was her young Moabite daughter-in-law, free to go home. Ruth chose to stay, binding herself to Naomi's people and Naomi's God. Their story shows that a good friendship can cross differences that would normally keep people apart, and that loyalty is shown in choices, not only feelings.

Notice what both friendships share: each friend wanted the other's good more than his or her own advantage, and each friendship was anchored in faithfulness to God. That is Aristotle's friendship of the good, lived out in Scripture.