friendship 101

We covered friendship today, in Intercultural Communication class.  What it means across cultures, what's expected, and how it's expressed.  To start, everyone in the class has to say what friendship means to us personally, what more close friendship means, and what we give (and expect) from the relationship.  All the answers we gave were then listed on the board.

"Trust" was written all over the place, along with numerous related terms like reliability and honesty.  At one point, the class got into discussing honesty vs hurt feelings.  How honest does honest have to be?  Should we insult our friends, make them feel worse, because we're just being honest?  For the most part, no, of course not.  We tell a friend the hard truths when it stands to help, not just because we feel like it.

In talking about honesty and the need to be brutal about it, there seemed to be another underlying truth.  There was a lot of sentiment along the lines of friends being honest, but not judgmental.  People are more trusting of those who value us, who make us feel worth something.   Too much brutal truth destroys trust as sure as anything. 

This sort of trust apparently goes right out the window, when we think someone is too antagonistic.  It seems unrelated, but makes sense in a way.  Trust has a lot to do with motives.  No matter how good and honest a person is, if they value different things, if they don't value us, their goals are far more likely to be in opposition to our own.

So many behaviors people engage in are developed to facilitate trust.  All these cultural rituals show that we're the same.  We both know how to shake hands, make eye contact, small talk, or whatever else.  When we don't show affinity, trust falls apart.