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The dilemmas have filled advice columns forever. “My friend asked me to—” give her an alibi, smuggle cocaine, lie to her husband, risk prison by helping her die…. Though most of my friends are the law-abiding sort, I dread some future ask that leaves me stymied, torn between ethics and love.
Cicero would have me set aside my qualms. “A friend never asks another friend to do something wrong,” he promises. A true friend, that is. Shed the guilt: just say no.
“Only good people can be true friends,” Cicero maintains. Those with a mean and shoddy disposition can acquire friends, in a tit-for-tat way. But “real friendship requires trust, wisdom, and basic goodness.” Acknowledging that wisdom is rare and elusive, he loosens the definition: “Whoever act and live so that their lives give proof of faithfulness, integrity, fairness, and generosity; and who are free from any low passion, greed, or violence; and are of great strength of character…should be called good.” And those shallow, transactional arrangements with the less-than-good? Such friendships still offer practical advantages. But “true friendship is not a business relationship. It doesn’t seek repayment, and it doesn’t keep score.”
That is the summation of Philip Freeman, who translates Cicero with verve and clarity in How to Be a Friend: An Ancient Guide to True Friendship. The old philosopher is far ahead of today’s psychological studies about proximity: he notes that bonds grow stronger “the closer we are to each other. Thus we prefer our fellow countrymen to foreigners, just as we prefer our relatives to strangers.” Again, no need to feel guilty. Friendships with people of sharply different sorts and backgrounds add texture and insight to our lives, but friendships with those more like ourselves start with a leg up.
Cicero also explains why the bonds of friendship can be judged stronger than blood, however thick. Kinship can exist in hollow form, without goodwill, but “if goodwill is removed from friendship, friendship disappears.” In other words, calling someone your uncle or sister or cousin tells us nothing about your love for them—or your loathing. Calling someone your friend is a deliberate choice. It signifies.
Having grown up short on family—my father died before there was time to make siblings—I take extra comfort in this distinction. The teasing jostle of a safe friendship is as close as I will ever come to having a sister or brother. And having watched more than one family shred and rip apart, siblings fighting one another when the real problem is that they never felt loved enough by their parents, I am left lonely but grateful. Friendship may be a thin substitute, but it is not burdened with other people’s debts, and it carries far less subterranean tension, old scar tissue, and irrational resentment.
Friends are trampolines, waiting to bounce you back up if you fall from the heights. With a real friend, Cicero says, “you are strong even when you are weak.” Watching a big, elaborately carved applique slide down our front door time after time, I find myself in a Lucille Ball skit, slathering more glue and pressing every which way and then stepping back, breath held, doing that a dozen times at least, and finally turning to walk away—only to hear the applique clatter to the floor behind me and break in three places. I curse, I mend it, I google different glues, and then a light fills me, a reassurance no computer or store can offer. I have a friend who is a master carpenter. I am covered.
I exploit every strength my friends possess. What I have to offer is usually less practical, but always available. And when several of us put our heads together? We can solve anything. Dress somebody head to toe for an important occasion. Outfit somebody’s kid for their first apartment. Write a résumé or a personals ad, paint a room, deliver meals after surgery, soothe a broken heart.
You know how mass murderers and serial killers are always described as quiet loners? These people do not have enough friends. Everybody needs someone who can receive and absorb their struggles, doubts, tensions, and dark yearnings, lifting the weight off their shoulders. “What could be sweeter than to have someone you can dare to talk to about everything as if you were speaking to yourself?” asks Cicero. Therapy can be bought, but that is its problem: the acceptance is paid for in cold cash. You are buying not only expertise but a cooling distance, a relief for angst’s burn. Yet the relationship means nothing more, promises no future. When a friend listens, it is only out of love.
Are we falling apart as a society because we have less and less time for friendship? The loss of religion is usually blamed, but one of the comforts of religion is the community of believers. Life is increasingly anonymous, with less workplace socializing, fewer corner bars and clubs and teams. Every immigrant I have come to know well—and their origins include Wales, Egypt, Bosnia, Sri Lanka, Iraq, Germany, Denmark, Uganda, Armenia, Ireland, and the Democratic Republic of Congo—is bemused and sorely disappointed by our lack of fellowship, conviviality, and mutual support.
More and more, we avoid real-life contact, pouring out our souls online and seeking validation from thousands of “friends” we never see. The friendship Cicero praised was far steadier, far deeper. “Wherever you turn, there it is,” he writes. “No door shuts it out, no time is wrong for it, and never is it in the way.” I worry that in our overbusy, hyperdistracted state, we are not as available to our friends. I use the breezy plural “we” for cover, but I am guilty of this daily: rattling off all that I have to do, ending calls and visits with sharp efficiency. I talk wistfully about the days when people sat on their porches and friends came to join them, talking idly all evening long. But I could easily scrap the to-do list and sit on my porch all evening, chatting with anyone who stopped by. And I do not.
Yet here I sit, extolling friendship as the anchor of my life.
“With the exception of wisdom, I’m inclined to believe that the immortal gods have given nothing better to humanity than friendship,” Cicero writes. Even Aquinas agreed: “There is nothing on earth more to be prized than true friendship.” Emily Dickinson called her friends her estate, which was astute. Money vanishes, health dissolves, power fades, sex grows tired. Friendship endures. When someone contradicted Cicero, saying that the highest goal is goodness or virtue, he nodded and told them they were absolutely right. Because “virtue itself gives birth to friendship and nourishes it.” Virtue makes us compassionate, sensitive, generous, wise, forgiving, loving, kind—and available.
I do not need more time or more patience, my usual excuses for not giving enough to friendship. I need more goodness.
Read more by Jeannette Cooperman here.
