Why is friendship so important?
Throughout your life, much of your happiness and success, or loneliness and failure, will depend on your ability to make ‘friends’, momentary or long-term. The essence of friendship is equality. It must be based on liking, mutual interest and shared feelings and thoughts. To ‘like’ someone is very different from ‘loving’ someone. I have heard people say that they love their parents (or their brothers and sisters), but do not really like them much. This is quite possible and, in the end, both are important. What is certain is that pretended friendship, where there is nothing in common and nothing to share, does not work. Friendship is not a static thing. It must always be developing, changing and expanding, absorbing new experiences. Friendship abides by a central rules of ethics, namely that ‘We should treat people as ends in themselves and not as a means to an end’. If you feel a friend is ‘using you, then the friendship ends. Just as true love and beauty cannot be bought or sold, so
