A Platonic Ideal... Friendship
Perfume and incense bring joy to the heart,
and the pleasantness of a friend
springs from their heartfelt advice.
“A friendship is one soul in two bodies.”
I start with a title from Plato but end up quoting Aristotle in my first line. I don’t think either of them would mind. They were, after all, friends.
Romance has been… a struggle for me, let’s leave it like that. I know this is pretty rare though, as most people fall in love either with a high school sweetheart or after their first swipe and match on Tinder.
Just kidding. Yet suffice to say, the past few years of mishaps has taken its toll, no lie. I don’t regret any of it, however, because it’s led me to grow quite a bit as a person. But I also think I’m the sort of person who has to lick their wounds a little bit more than most people before I get back out there. With my scars and their extra time needed to heal, however, I’m able to see the scars of others and make them feel less alone when they begin to notice theirs. It’s my calling in life.
I wouldn’t be able to go into the fire of dating and rejection and rejecting others without a full squad of backup. Although the past few years have been rough relationally, in other relational categories I’ve grown exponentially.
I’ve added several close friends. I’ve attained a fellow basketball geek who dwells on hooping of the past, of the present, and especially of the future. I have several brothers for life in the deep battle for wholeness and sobriety. I’ve kept a best friend who’s thousands of miles away on a military base by playing soccer virtually with flying cars. I’ve gotten a mentor who sees me both for who I am and encourages me to be who he knows I will become. And I’ll always have a family who, no matter what, will be in my corner. Always.
I tend to focus on what I don’t have. How things could be better in this way, or how if I knew a lady who was just like this, then all would be well. This blog is dedicated to reflecting, richly, on what I do have in abundance.
Friendship.
The platonic ideal.
I don’t know how I got friends in 4th grade fresh out of homeschooling. Add in some fresh type 4 vibes, being a little too introverted, (I) intuitive (N), and perceptive (P), and not getting the southern Oregon memo that football was cooler than basketball, and I was outcast-y from the start.
I think nerds are passionate people who contain their endless desire through imagination. Far from socially inept and more socially aware to not chase after things that others like if they don’t like them. Spiderman had dropped, and we were web slinging to all delight on the playground. We ditched other kids by tricking them into thinking we’d play with them, tagged each other with cooties from the girls we didn’t like but totally did, and commiserated on shared envy of each other’s video game consoles. At the time I had none, but with a promotion and overtime from dad, and a little extra nudging from my charming older brother, a PS2 was on its way.
The following year dropped a crew member to gain another. Same rules and expectation of brothering but with a few of us burgeoning into puberty and getting wildly awkward in the caterpillar-y cocooned state between being a boy and being a guy. Still, we were the kings of fence tag, kings of Kingdom Hearts, kings of the playground as the jocks were busy on the huge green field in the back with the same team captains and same lopsided teams.
Long before girls, long before comparison, long before social media, it was just us boys learning how to be humans and vying for position as leader of the pack. I never had the chops to be the Alpha, but I noticed who was most well liked of us and became their most liked person so I could be a Delta.
It was like this: Aric demanded hierarchical energy with his quippy jokes, manic, ADD shoe-to-shoe pats, and straight for the jugular verbal cut downs of any potential threat to his social power. One on one, though, he was an absolute sweetheart. Emmitt was the funniest without ever telling a joke. His whole life was a joke, and I mean that in a good way. Frantic, always interrupting the teacher, first to get into trouble and last to be released from consequence, he had a way to distract us from fighting each other by making us laugh at him or other people reacting to him. Taylor upped the ante on ADD by adding an H, running his mouth from the moment he got into the classroom till the moment he closed the door of his dad’s rust truck. His laugh was infectious and heard often. He was the first on the bark chips and the last one to leave. He too, Emmitt as well, behind closed doors, totally kind and considerate, unafraid to let the tears fall. But to each other, while in the group, when each other were watching each other… we incessantly and perpetually insulted.
To build yourself as a man you have to break down other boys. To remain a guy, you have to call boys you’re afraid are becoming men sissies and wusses. Deconstructing others is what constructs you as a boy to a guy to a man. I’m not saying I like it, but it’s what my report card scores back all these years later.
Yet when sixth grade came, Emmitt traded roles with me and became the home-schooled kid. Taylor went back to public school to privately dodge school and friends. And Aric, well… Aric no longer had such a tight hold on me because I wasn’t in a group anymore. No need to be a Delta if I had to always deal with the Alpha. He may have been kind one on one, but three is company and so I succumbed to peer pressure and sold my fantasy dreams for football failures.
This is when my heart for friends broke. I remained tight with Emmitt, but Taylor was out of the picture and Aric got close to the one kid we all agreed never to hang out with. Children may be pure, but so is their cruelty; unfiltered, direct, vicious. I didn’t want anything to do with him anymore.
And that’s when I met Kory.
The same drama I have with romance now I had with friends then. It’s strange, even, to see how it parallels. Jealousy was present for me. Manipulation too, big time. Boundaries? What are those?
I think we are all beginners in relationships. Years into being a brother and son, I still find myself making amateur mistakes. And with God, man do I get sloppy and insincere when I bend my knees and pretend to be close to Him at times when I’m definitely not.
The expectations with friends are similar, if usually healthier than in significant relationships. Without the kissing and sex and idealizations, there’s a lot more wiggle room to try new things, plenty of grace for faulty judgments, and saying sorry is cleaner, easier, and it’s also easier to accept apologies as well.
But even with friends and connections in abundance, I still hunger for more relational depth. Deep calls to deep and I still say “surely it’s not this shallow.” Oversharing is my default, undervaluing spiritual distancing is my cardinal sin. Even with a bus driver or a checker or an urgent care nurse (way more essential to life and society than my “deep” reflections on both), I still think “what’s their biggest fear? Biggest joy? Biggest source of significance?”
Yet friendship is liking the same crap, too. It’s not just the tears and the hugs and the sentimental texts. It’s enjoying watching athletic guys put an orange ball in a white net and struggling to replicate the same thing hours later. It’s watching avant garde sci-fi films and giving a director’s commentary from two different couches and two differing snacking/drinking styles because of the damn corona virus. It’s playing the celebrity naming game on a drive up to Mt. Hood and laughing at things that aren’t funny together.
Connecting on a shallow level contributes depth to a relationship.
So, too, like romance, unlikely people can become friends and like each other. On paper, they might have nothing in common. They could go to different parties, whether it be a college rager or a town hall, yet some sort of similarity supersedes the difference. Maybe even the way they aren’t alike is what makes what they like way more likeable.
You can’t force it. It happens or it doesn’t. It blossoms or it dies. You work to make it effortless or after so much effort you get worked up and pull the plug.
Friendship may be the platonic ideal, but platonic friendship is far from ideal. Those messy feelings come in and broach the barrier of what might otherwise be a solid connection to make only a deeper disconnect.
This has puzzled me since I first tasted unrequited love then secondly mused on whether platonic friendship was even fosterable. Again, when sexual attraction is thrown out, not even conceivable as a potential, it protects the connection from spiraling out into something either a lot better or a lot worse but definitely more confusing.
Augustine said God was closer to him than he was to himself. I feel that, big time. But I also feel, big time, that friendly eyes heal broken hearts. Soft hands mend broken bones. Long, awkward, smelly, and sincere hugs bring wayward souls back to the vessel it travels through we call the body.
Kisses transcend reality.
Maybe God is a friend to me by the friends in my life. So then how is He a lover to me? Because the love I’ve received from lovers has either been hollow and harsh. Unfortunately both too many times. So too, my love to them. Built on a foundation of fantasy and sealed with a roof of fiction. What’s nonfiction is that I feel everything and nothing all at the same time about love.
Another blog for another time.
Back to Kory.
We were friends for four years before we “broke up.” It was a hard choice but it was the right decision.
On paper, lots in common. Deep, passionate love for Star Wars. Puzzling interactions with the opposite sex. Talked about things more than “did” things. Together.
But for all the good words connecting over space wizards and unrequited affection from the ladies, there was twice as much taking pot shots at each other’s intelligence and bluffing with the deepest white lies about life experiences.
Over time, the deconstructing Kory did, got to my barely scaffolded Caleb. I couldn’t take it anymore.
This coincided with a deep infatuation for Addie. While I pined for a girl to tell me who I was, I was constantly reminded by my favorite guy who I wasn’t. That 16 year old kid had no idea who he would be when he grew up because he was constantly told to look down. I might even argue there was unrequited affection on two fronts. I was burning up on both ends.
What’s different, now, is I’m never hit on more than one side at once. In fact, licking the wounds has been wildly easier when I’m out in the wild because I have a pack of brothers and sisters and mothers and fathers looking after me. Sons and daughters that I’m looking after too. It seems tending to the wounds of others helps me as much as tending to myself.
The ideal friendship starts with letting go of the platonic ideal. These things require effort, of course, but are built, established, and maintained by things outside of our control. An ideal is propped up by expectations, and most expectations tear down relationships rather than sustain them. Even putting expectations on God can be troublesome if your relationship to Him is contingent on Him giving you what you want.
So few things in life are guaranteed so I’m choosing to take stock of the blessings I already have rather than pining for blessings I’m not quite sure I will get.
In spite of rejecting the platonic ideal for friendship, I think the friendships I have now are better than I could ever imagined. It’s almost because I never put any fantasy or fiction on to them, like I’ve done with romance, that they’ve bloomed to become so satisfying.
I want to know people, and to be known by people, and the ideal way to do that is take your time, open up space, and play things as they lie. Over exertion is a sign that you’re trying to force something to be good that will, in truth, be mediocre at best.
But sparks work in friendship as they do in relationships. Follow them but don’t necessarily trust them. Yet, absolutely, test them. If the sparks start a fire, then add the kindling of setting up plans and “playdates” to see if the fire can be regularly contained and also sustained. The logs of the fire of friendship are trials and tribulations. If they stay in the midst of yours, if you stay in the midst of theirs, and don’t get too burned up in the process, the light revealed to you and to them will bring life continually.
Life is friendship. We all need friends but we don’t all need romance. I really, really, really want a girlfriend, a wife, a companion, but I’d be dead in the water without my many lifelong friends always providing me lifejackets of purpose, affirmation, and truth. Who I am isn’t defined by an ideal woman; who I am is defined by who I am to men and women. Additionally, more importantly, who I am is defined by who I am in God.
God Himself is friendship. It’s obviously much deeper than that, but up to this point in my life, the deepest moments I’ve ever had were with close friends. Talking about God, crying over women, laughing about kids, dreaming about what the church could be. These things are life. These things are the kingdom of God. These things are the platonic ideal in regards to friendship.
By following the two greatest commandments of loving God with all of your being and loving your neighbor as yourself, you will, inevitably, find ideal friendships.
Because life isn’t about me. And it’s not about you either.
It’s about us. As friends, as lovers, as brothers, as sisters, as family.
That is the platonic ideal. And the ideal is already reality.