Faux Friendship

[Liffrea]

We live at a time when friendship has become both all and nothing at all. Already the characteristically modern relationship, it has in recent decades become the universal one: the form of connection in terms of which all others are understood, against which they are all measured, into which they have all dissolved. Romantic partners refer to each other as boyfriend and girlfriend. Spouses boast that they are each other's best friends. Parents urge their young children and beg their teenage ones to think of them as friends. Adult siblings, released from competition for parental resources that in traditional society made them anything but friends (think of Jacob and Esau), now treat one another in exactly those terms. Teachers, clergymen, and even bosses seek to mitigate and legitimate their authority by asking those they oversee to regard them as friends. We're all on a first-name basis, and when we vote for president, we ask ourselves whom we'd rather have a beer with. As the anthropologist Robert Brain has put it, we're friends with everyone now.

http://chronicle.com/article/Faux-Friendship/49308/

[ironman]

Quote Lifrea;[As the anthropologist Robert Brain has put it, we're friends with everyone now]QUOTE.

I disagree, as an adult male i tend to choose very carefully who i select as a possible friend,to truly have a friend the process is long, the old saying "all men are islands" is very true imo.
The making of male friendship is complex and a very uplifting mental experience, it is like acquiring a brother who is a true friend instead of a rival sibling.

[Liffrea]

Originally Posted by Germanicus
"all men are islands"

I thought the saying was “no man is an island”?

As for me friends are people I would welcome into my house and to be around my family, people I can trust implicitly with my women, children (if I had any) and with my life, oh and will give me back money I have lent them.

There aren’t many characters like that around sadly but I’ve been fortunate to know a few.

[Tom Cat]

My wife is my only friend. Everyone else I associate with is considered an acquantance.

My dad had a practical definition for friendship. He said, "Friends are those who choose to use one another via mutual consent. If one is seen smiling while the other is frowning, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to determine who is gaining the most from the friendship."

It's a cold, calculating world we share, folks. It's up to us to make it warmer.

[Bloodeagle]

Quote Lifrea;[As the anthropologist Robert Brain has put it, we're friends with everyone now]QUOTE.

I disagree, as an adult male i tend to choose very carefully who i select as a possible friend,to truly have a friend the process is long, the old saying "all men are islands" is very true imo.
The making of male friendship is complex and a very uplifting mental experience, it is like acquiring a brother who is a true friend instead of a rival sibling.

I couldn't agree more.

[Aces High]

I thought the saying was “no man is an island”?

The person who wrote that had obviously never met an Englishman.

[larali]

My wife is my only friend. Everyone else I associate with is considered an acquantance.

Same here

[Jackson]

It's the other way round where i am. Everyone in generations above me, family and not, used to know everyone else near by much better. People used to commonly walk into and out of each other's houses. Now lots of people don't even know their neighbours.

[Farah]

Really? I would have thought the opposite, that in modern times, especially as people are became more tech-savvy (or obsessed with technology, more like), actual friendships have been weakened ironically as people are more sheltered by their devices. I don't think everyone thinks of everyone around them as being their friend..it could just be a case of semantics.