{"id":11752,"date":"2025-10-21T19:01:54","date_gmt":"2025-10-21T23:01:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/alain-de-botton-on-successful-friendships-the-marginalian\/"},"modified":"2025-10-21T19:01:54","modified_gmt":"2025-10-21T23:01:54","slug":"alain-de-botton-on-successful-friendships-the-marginalian","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/alain-de-botton-on-successful-friendships-the-marginalian\/","title":{"rendered":"Alain de Botton on Successful Friendships \u2013 The Marginalian"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Profit<\/a>
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\"A<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cPonder for a long time whether you shall admit a given person to your friendship; but when you have decided to admit him, welcome him with all your heart and soul,\u201d Seneca wrote in considering true and false friendship<\/a> two millennia before we commodified the word \u201cfriend\u201d<\/a> in the marketplace of loneliness we call social media. <\/p>\n

It is easy to forget now how hard-earned that entry into the heart and soul is, and how precious. \u201cOld friends cannot be created out of hand,\u201d Little Prince<\/em> author Antoine de Saint-Exup\u00e9ry wrote in the wake of losing a friend<\/a>, mourning \u201cthe treasure of common memories, of trials endured together, of quarrels and reconciliations and generous emotions.\u201d Pulsating beneath his bittersweet lament is the knowledge that the treasure is not found but created \u2014 or, rather, co-created. It is more precious and more total than the romantic love our culture fetishizes, for a deep friendship courses through every true love, and it is always more enduring \u2014 true friends are the other significant others<\/a>, often outlasting spouses, often outpacing siblings in running to the rescue of the heart. Such friendships are the hard work of truth and tenderness, sustained by an unfaltering commitment to showing up, a promise of absolute sincerity, and a quality of presence that leaves each aglow with the sense of being treasured. <\/p>\n

<\/a>
Art from An Almanac of Birds: 100 Divinations for Uncertain Days<\/a><\/em> \u2014 a book of cards. Also available as a stand-alone print<\/a> and as stationery cards<\/a>. More divinations here<\/a>.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

How to do that work, how to attain the skills required for it and bear the vulnerabilities inherent to it, is what Alain de Botton<\/a> takes up in the School of Life primer Secrets of Successful Friendships<\/em><\/strong><\/a> (public library<\/em><\/a>) \u2014 a pointed, poignant field guide to cultivating meaningful connection in a world where loneliness looms oceanic as night. <\/p>\n

At the heart of the book is the insistence that friendship \u2014 something \u201ctender, fundamental, and emotionally sustaining\u201d \u2014 is \u201cas significant and as rare\u201d as romantic love (a case Andrew Sullivan made exquisitely<\/a> two decades earlier), yet our culture gives us no education in it while drowning us in narrow models of romantic love as the pinnacle of emotional achievement. <\/p>\n

This commodification and devaluation of deep friendship is the turbine of our modern loneliness. A century and a half after Thoreau, brilliant and lonely, rued that \u201cwe feel a yearning to which no breast answers\u201d and ultimately \u201cwalk alone,\u201d<\/a> De Botton observes that many of us \u201creturn home from parties dissatisfied and confused.\u201d Defining friendship as \u201ca sense that in the company of a very special person, we will at last be able to share the most vulnerable and fragile sides of ourselves and be witnessed in our true, unadorned state,\u201d he celebrates it as an antidote to the loneliness and isolation of feeling those sides unwitnessed:<\/p>\n

\n

Loneliness can coexist alongside an outwardly highly cheerful and easy manner and even \u2014 paradoxically \u2014 alongside the possession of many so-called \u201cfriends\u201d\u2026 The lonely may hold their own brilliantly at a party; they might be married, have children and more often than not be out in the evenings.<\/p>\n

[\u2026]<\/p>\n

We are lonely because we are refusing to accept as genuine those cheap, counterfeit images of friendship promoted by a sentimental world keen to disguise the challenges of real connection. Those who feel a lack of friendship most deeply may simply be those who cleave most intensely and sincerely to its genuine promises.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

More than a salve for the existential loneliness we are born into<\/a>, the essential purpose of friendship is emotional growth:<\/p>\n

\n

In the company of a real friend, we should aspire to become wiser, more sensitive, more able to cope with the complexity of existence, more resilient and more generous.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

<\/a>
Art from An Almanac of Birds: 100 Divinations for Uncertain Days<\/a><\/em> \u2014 a book of cards. Also available as a stand-alone print<\/a> and as stationery cards<\/a>. More divinations here<\/a>.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Friendship, however, is not a unitary phenomenon \u2014 there are as many species of it as there are species of loneliness. He writes:<\/p>\n

\n

We tend to think of friendship as a unitary category, but, in reality, there are a number of different kinds of friendship, each of which is specifically adapted to addressing a particular kind of loneliness. We might say that there are as many kinds of friend as there are ways of feeling isolated.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

He offers a taxonomy that includes such species as the emotional confidante, the thinking partner, and the counterpoint. (It is the luck of a lifetime to find a friend who can play many of these roles, and the work of a lifetime to nurture that friendship.) <\/p>\n

The deepest friendships offer us a \u201ctrue and fulfilling togetherness\u201d that can help us \u201cfeel reconciled to our own company,\u201d for they are often the twining of two parallel solitudes<\/a>. Such friendships are not a matter of luck \u2014 just as chance and choice converge to make us who we are<\/a>, chance may place someone wonderful in our path, but it is by choice \u2014 a daily choice \u2014 that we endeavor to walk together in the same direction and grow along the way. <\/p>\n

<\/a>
Art by Sarah Jacoby from The Coziest Place on the Moon<\/em><\/a> \u2014 a cosmic fable about how to live with loneliness and what true friendship gives us<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

De Botton writes:<\/p>\n

\n

True friendship is a skill, not a piece of divine inspiration. Those who find it are not simply lucky: they understand certain crucial ideas; they are guided by specific insights into themselves and other people. And these ideas and insights can be explained and described in precise ways. We don\u2019t have to be born with innate talents for being, or making, a good friend; the capacities can be acquired via the right kind of education.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

In the remainder of Secrets of Successful Friendships<\/em><\/strong><\/a>, De Botton offers the rudiments of such an education, from the enemies of friendship (overcommitment, envy, \u201cthe absence of shared challenges\u201d) to its pillars (deep listening<\/a>, acts of service, horizontal conversations) to its fate in the age of AI. Couple it with this excellent Where Shall We Meet<\/em> conversation with Alain de Botton<\/a> about the subtleties and varieties of friendship, then revisit this introvert\u2019s guide to friendship<\/a> from Thoreau and Alain de Botton on romantic love<\/a>. <\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

\"Profit<\/a>
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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