Читать книгу Friendship - Markus Seidel - Страница 3

What is friendship? How does it come about? And how does it differ from other relationships between people? After all, we do differentiate quite precisely when it comes to the relationship with our fellow human beings. So we say "my best friend", "a good friend", also: "a friend" or finally only "an acquaintance". In this way we classify the relationships and order them according to their exclusivity, so to speak.

First of all: friendship is more than acquaintance. It is not for nothing that we also speak of a "fleeting acquaintance". There is no such thing as a "fleeting friend" or even "fleeting love", at least I have never heard of it. Rather, such a connection seems to be a contradiction in terms: "fleeting", i.e. "superficial", and "friend" or even "in love" - that doesn't really seem to fit together.

Is love now higher, is it greater than friendship? It seems so. Love as the summit of friendship, so to speak: "First we were friends, then we fell in love." Sometimes, however, friendship seems to be more constant, of longer duration than the feeling of love. If the love breaks apart, often not even friendship remains. If it does, the saying goes the other way: "Love is gone, but we are still friends." Yes, sometimes it seems advisable to emphasize even more in a love the friendly - the communicative, the sincere and open of a friendship.

What distinguishes love from friendship is the exclusivity of the relationship, the uniqueness: Thus, in love there is a more demanding, a more jealous, a more emotional quality. And thus there is also more danger that such a relationship is exposed to.