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Feature

Whatsoever Things Are True

Writer and alumna Aritha van Herk on the rewards and risks of friendship

By Aritha van Herk, '76 BA, '78 MA

April 29, 2011 •

More than the tides of love, friendship tests honesty and falseness. Of all the inter-relationships and alliances that human beings form, friendship is the sphere where trust must fully flourish.

But the dynamics of friendship are such that it is also an arena that tests truth and its difficult telling, lies and their inevitable necessity. Friendship is the most reciprocal of connections and yet it requires the greatest flexibility. It is not governed by legislation but by a loose mutual agreement more coincidental than deterministic. Friends serve as mirrors and sounding boards, and see in their campadres their own mistakes and triumphs.

The honesty between friends is fraught territory. While it is important for friends to believe that they are transparent with one another, it is equally important for friendships to practice skillful subterfuge. Nothing can kill a friendship faster than poorly-timed, brutal honesty. But it is just as critical that old friends can be trusted not to leap to judgment when we are stupid or silly or just plain wrong.

Today, Facebook has given friendship a whole new dimension. The designation of "friends" has become a social utility, a communication tool useful for everything from car-pooling to purgation, the confession box after eating that whole tub of ice cream. Instead of the old-fashioned and purer version of friendship, Facebook offers a social graph that filters and enhances who we know and with whom we connect. Friends are now an algorithm of statistics and networking opportunities, and friendship has become a weirdly articulated space for exhibitionism and voyeurism.

"While it is important for friends to believe that they are transparent with one another, it is equally important for friendships to practice skillful subterfuge."

But friendship is, at root, still a link between humans, which means it can be risky. The trust we place in someone can rebound. And the dynamics of friendship are such that it can wreak havoc with our lives, can wound and degrade us. The scalding pain of friendship betrayed is incalculable, for it shakes our confidence in ourselves, an irrevocable shift in our belief in what we thought we knew, understood or could rely on.

An unforgivable rift in a friendship is divulged confidence, one friend revealing another's secrets. Increasingly under pressure in this over-revelatory world, the friend who can keep a secret is better than gold. Shared knowledge cements the closeness between two people, but it is a time bomb that can tempt disclosure as retaliation. Even careless leaking of insider information can provoke a hovering mistrust.

And we can be ambushed. I have never been so wounded as when someone I thought was a friend excoriated me for a fault she perceived in my character. I was sincerely trying to be a good friend, offering support and strategies for mutual challenges we shared, and the sting of what I felt was an unjust accusation left me devastated, not least because the manner in which the judgment was dispensed was cruel.

I went over and over our association in search of what had led to her rancor, and it was only over time that I came to realize she simply did not want to be friends and needed to find an excuse - any excuse - to "unfriend" me. I had outlived my usefulness. That recognition hurt even more. Nothing feels worse than knowing you've been used for someone else's ends, you've been lied to in the name of friendship.

That experience taught me a valuable lesson: be wary and know when to give up. And it made me laugh at Oscar Wilde's acerbic comments on friendship. "He has no enemies, but is intensely disliked by his friends" is one, while another declares "true friends stab you in the front." But in a non-Wildean life, the quality of friendship, like the quality of mercy, blesses the one who gives and the one who receives.

Aritha van Herk is the author of novels, non-fiction and hundreds of articles and reviews. She lives in Calgary, Alberta.

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