Friending

"I think we should just be friends." Those words have always loomed as a guillotine to any romantic interest. Their weight has crushed many hopeful hearts. They're meant to soften the punch, but they always feel like the kiss of Judas. Just friends? That's it? Well, I have more than enough friends, just look at my Facebook page! But at second glance, I'm beginning to see that I've underestimated the value of friendship in the realm of romance. I've always segregated the two. Now that I think about it, I'm quite the dunce, after all she is called a girlfriend.

I've heard many people say that you should marry your bestfriend. I realize now that my perspective on love had always been so unrealistic and immature that that sage advice never made sense to me. But now I actually believe it. Micheal W. Smitty was right when he sang those ol' campy words "Friends are friends forever if the Lord's the Lord of them." Romance comes and goes, but friendship remains. In 2 Samuel, David said of Jonathan "Your love to me was wonderful, surpassing the love of women." Apparently, what David had with Jonathan and didn't have with women was a deep friendship. Yet, I think it is possible to have that kind of friendship in a marriage.

As I'm trying to decide what kind of a person I should marry, what I'm really doing is deciding on what kind of a friend I want to have for the rest of my life. I now realize that the qualities that I look for in a friend are very similar to what I am looking for in a wife. I think that he who finds a true friend finds a good thing. So the question is what is a true friend? I think that wedding vows mirror the covenant of a true friendship--"for richer or poorer, in sickness and health, till death do us part." A true friendship is unconditional. A sincere friend will love you through your insanity, your failure, your crap. When your world falls apart they will help you put it back together. You can lay down your armor around your friends and know that you're safe. You share a language of unmasked honesty. A good friend is a vault for your secrets, and will go to battle for you when anyone speaks ill of you. A real friend enjoys your God-given personality, quirks and all, and they won't try to change you into someone else. They believe in you, they invest in you. You are on a journey together and will never leave the other behind, come what may. You will both fight for the friendship as if you are fighting for your very lives. You will wrong each other and you will forgive gratuitously because the friendship is more important than being in the right.

I now realize that venturing further into friendship is to be on my way to sublime love. Jesus said "No greater love has a man than to lay down his life for a friend." That's as good as it gets, finding someone who will die for you, and you for them. In hindsight, I've known a lot of people, but I've had few real friends. Some friendships aren't really friendships, some "friends" just take and take and they'll stick around as long as you give them what they want, or be who they need you to be. Oddly enough, it is very possible to build a relationship on selfishness, where there is an unspoken agreement that if certain conditions aren't met then love will be withheld. But that's not love, and that's not friendship. Anyway, I hope to marry a real friend. Or rather, I hope to be a real friend to her. It goes both ways. As the ancient proverb says "He who desires friends must himself be friendly."