ll of these traits make friendship a broad and elusive topic for researchers, which still deters many social scientists from pursuing it. Rawlins finds himself reaching far back in time to find other leading friendship scholars. Aristotle, long known as the father of logic, also could be called the father of friendship. The Greek receives significant play in both books Rawlins has published so far, especially his lines about civic responsibility and friendship being essential to a well-lived life. Francis Bacon’s essay “Of Friendship” also has figured prominently, as has Cicero’s “De Amicitia” and works by Ralph Waldo Emerson. Rawlins particularly likes C.S. Lewis’ The Four Loves. St. Augustine of Hippo, whom Rawlins cites regularly, called friendship an “unfriendly, unanalyzable attraction for the mind” in his 1,600-year-old opus, Confessions. “I like to see how all these cultural discourses speak to each other,” Rawlins says. To talk about friends, however, one must talk to friends. Rawlins’ preferred method is to interview two friends individually for about two hours each. Then he uses his observations to craft questions for an hour-long interview together, which he tapes and transcribes for word analysis. This type of interviewing helps Rawlins see the unique story that underlies every friendship. “Friendships are a dialogue of narratives and a narrative of dialogues,” he says. Friends communicate by telling each other stories, epics about morality, cautionary tales, personal triumphs, and stories to entertain. These stories we share with each other form chapters of a much larger friendship narrative, a major theme driving Rawlins’ The Compass of Friendship. Rawlins uses five criteria to define friendship. Friendship needs to be voluntary— no coercion allowed. It also needs to be affectionate. Friends must like each other. A friendship must be personal, between people, and what’s more, something must put the friends on equal ground. Lastly, a friendship is mutual. These criteria come from Aristotle’s concept of true friendship, that friends care for each other for the other’s well-being. Bacon says the first fruit of friendship is affection and the second is healthy judgment. Through his interviews, Rawlins created a model for how friendships come about. When we first meet people, we stick with our social roles and don’t stray too far away
.38
from safe topics. We make small talk on the bus; we complain about a boss or a teacher. In the small talk, we start to see similarities with this potential friend. From there, we’re ready to lay down the friend foundation. Conversations become more substantial. Topics become more personal. We start hanging out. The next stage, we go official: We are friends. We ritualize things. We call each other every Sunday night to recap each other’s weekend. We do lunch the same time every week. Trust starts to enter the friendship, and with it comes more intimate details. Hanging out becomes less arranged and more meaningful. Friends may stay at this point, or the relationships may crest and begin to wane. Friends feel so comfortable with each other that they start to feel independent. Independence leads to personal growth and branching out, something that isn’t guaranteed to keep a friendship cohesive. People drift apart and, well, beware the Ides of March. “Friendships are very edifying and upbeat parts of our lives, but they open up a ton of quandaries, especially moral quandaries,” he says. Friends constantly negotiate a set of tensions, Rawlins says. The first deals with ideals and realities. Problems arise between two friends when one thinks that they should be connected at the hip with many of the same interests and moral positions, but the other doesn’t agree. The next tension is between public and private, or how the friends interact in the outside social setting. If one friend feels the friendship is more intimate than the other, awkward secrets might be shared, people might come off as different in front of mutual friends, or secrets may not be kept. The third tension is on the plane of dependence. A friend that constantly needs a lift and constantly needs advice on his or her love life becomes perceived as needy. Many friendships, though, work perfectly well between people who hardly