I’ve never been happy with the general definitions of friendship. They lack something tangible, something that can be teased apart to lead to deeper understanding, tweaking, optimizing, and for me – more often than not – fixing.
The working title of this blog is “How to make friends when you’re bad at it.” In it is the underlying assumption that something from the general understanding and having of friends and friendship is lost on me. I am able to sporadically make friends, and much more capable of explosively, expansively, and sometimes with a whimper, losing them.
For my brain, and in my experience, I lack an instinctive understanding of this basic tenet of human-ness. And, so I am taking a different tack to see if I can reverse engineer the social structures that lead to friendship – the getting, the having, and the keeping.
Using armchair propositional calculus, I created my own definition that allows for expansion and true/false exploration into these social systems. Each component will be explored at a later date, hopefully with cartoons, diagrams, and flow charts if I am lucky.
But here’s the first shot across the bow of my albatross…
Friendship – Increased bonding chemicals between two or more parties that is reliably repeated over time and at matching or complementary intensities that adapt over time and fit within the existing social schema of each individual.
Yeah. It’ll make sense later.
The Friend Manual: How to make friends when you're bad at it 