What is a good friend?
My daughter once asked me: «What is a good friend?» Good question. What is a friend? And how can I recognise a good one? She was 10 at the time and the question seemed to preoccupy her. I was 40 and it was still on my mind.
«Seneca was an important representative of the Stoics ...», I began to mansplain, until I remembered a tip from a parenting guide that children's questions should not be misunderstood as questions of knowledge, but rather as a desire for exchange.
So I asked back: «What do you think makes a good friend?» My daughter thought about it. Then she said: «She has to be good at playing.» She paused. «Like me.»
With a good friend, you have ideas that you don't have on your own.
Daughter, 10 years
It's interesting, I thought to myself, that there is no verb in German for what friends do. We can love someone, but we can't befriend them. The ancient Greeks still had a verb - freundschaften. It didn't describe what people did together, going to the cinema or eating ice cream, but the activity of being together.
«What does it mean to play well?» I asked my daughter. «You have to have lots of ideas and nobody should decide everything.» She pondered further. «You have ideas that you don't have on your own.»
Friendship as a political category
My daughter's definition of friendship was vaguely reminiscent of the philosopher Hannah Arendt 's concept of friendship. For her, friendship was a place where you experience freedom: «Originally, I experience freedom and lack of freedom in dialogue with others and not in dialogue with myself. People can only be free in relation to each other,» she wrote, «only there do they experience what freedom is positively and that it is more than just not being forced.»
Of course, Arendt was not talking about playmates here, but about friendship as a political category, but her departure from male philosophical self-centredness towards the idea that we cannot experience freedom without the other, that we can only understand the world and ourselves in contact with others, seemed to me not entirely dissimilar to my daughter's definition.
Playing well is more important than comforting
«Is it also important that the person can comfort you?» I asked. «Yes,» she said, «but playing is more important.» Then she jumped up, the doorbell had rung, the girl from downstairs. I stayed behind and thought about what my daughter had said.
And then I asked myself: What is a good friend for me? One who comforts? Or a childhood friend, someone I can play with?
A good friend is someone who shows you the sun when your life is shady, but also stands by you when you are shining.
I decided in favour of my daughter's version. Because many people can comfort, I thought. Maybe because it feels a bit good when others are worse off than you. But a good friend is someone you can play well with.
Someone who shows you the sun when your life is shady, but also stands by you when you are shining. Someone who can stand by you and rejoice with you when you are doing well - even though they are doing badly. That is a friend.
