Friendaholic: Confessions of a Friendship Addict

A false friend is like a shadow: when the sun shines on you, you can't get rid of him, but when clouds gather over you, he is nowhere to be seen

It turns out I wasn't just passionate about friendship: I was addicted to it. I had a physical and emotional dependence. I had an urge to pursue it, even when it came at a damaging cost to my own peace of mind. I was, in short, a friendaholic.

If I let Becca back into my life, I wouldn't be as good a friend to Sathnam. I would have less time for him, yes, but it was more than that. Emotional resources can be finite too. My relationship with him would carry less weight because how can he trust me if, in my desperation to accumulate friends and never let them go, I spread my love so thinly, and allow myself to be treated to badly, with so few boundaries, that the act of my friendship itself carried no meaning.

The purpose of friendship is, in your lower moments, when you need somebody who you trust, and you want to talk to, you can come out and discuss your problems with them — and vice versa, you talk to them about theirs. The more you talk about your problems, it eases that burden that little bit — it does help you to talk to a friend.

Friendship is finding the people who were missing and the people that you needed, or maybe sometimes you didn’t know that you needed them. And then they come along and they fill that inexplicable void.

But if friendship has no survival value, it certainly adds value to survival. We choose friendship — and this, in Aristotle's view, makes it a higher-level love because of the freedom of intention that lies behind it.