A Friendly Riddle

Last week, I met a perfect stranger in a cozy Costa Rican café built from someone’s old house. Perhaps it was the chipped-white window ledges with bright blue walls, the gentle creak of the wooden floors or the scent of freshly baked empanadas and coffee in the air-something put us right at home. Amidst such comfort, our brief encounter inspired a lifetime of profound reflections on the all-important question: What is a true friend?

A Friendly Riddle: What Expects Nothing and Accepts Everything?

Our meeting had been scheduled, and what transpired could not have been planned. Armed with banana milkshakes, Mae’s vegan black bean sandwich and my mountain of chicken fajitas with fried plantains, we casually began to discuss her memoir and the how-to of cultivating the courage and emotional awareness to put life’s most intensely raw experiences into words.

Though not typically present at client meetings, my husband joined us, sharing my fajitas and listening carefully to our discussion. Together the three of us connected over progressively more intimate details of our lives, nimbly morphing the café ambiance into one of sheer vulnerability. Low and behold, the topic of friendship surfaced and my husband at last chimed in: “Penelope and I don’t have a lot of friends.”

My heart stopped! In fact, I think I might have blacked out to be stirred again only by a lump of unchewed fried cheese plunging toward my belly. The twisting of Mae’s brow reflected my distress perfectly. Yet all one can do in such a situation—especially with a potential client—is remember: “be present and speak from the heart,” which is exactly what happened as we not-long-ago strangers reflected on what true friendship is.

So what makes a true friend? Let us consider. Someone who prevents us from feeling our loneliness? Someone who flatters us or tells us pleasantries about ourselves and eagerly awaits reciprocation? Perhaps it is someone with whom we commiserate and intoxicate ourselves to avoid feeling? Maybe a secret confidant who indulges us in gossiping about others whom we avoid discussions with? Or that someone who gives us free advice?

In my observation, people loosely label others as friends based on knowing them for a long time, or unknown circumstances that serendipitously drew us to them. And how do I know this? I’ve been there myself. And it seems fair to say people use the “f”-word to categorize familiar people. So how do we distinguish between a friend and an acquaintance?

How to recognize whether there is a motive of control or neediness by either party? If there is a need, can this be true friendship? Interestingly enough, I have noticed that many “friendships,” particularly those that develop during crisis periods, have been forged from the mold of the advice giver and receiver. Only time reveals that many such relationships in no way demonstrate true friendships, particularly when the advice is not solicited.

What I’ve learned is that whenever someone seems generously eager to offer advice, their motives should be challenged. Precisely because the advice might not be the wisdom of experience. In which case, your companion could be experimenting with your life so they do not have to test it their own.

In light of this possibility, the most loving counsel of a true friend usually involves simply listening or asking questions with the intent of observing as you rediscover your own truth, rather than recycling Cosmo rhetoric while seizing the opportunity to appear superior or simply more knowledgeable. A pearl of wisdom I have discovered is that advice is usually sought by one who believes they do not know their own truth. They actually think others know them better than they know themselves, which is silly, because you are the only one who can ever truly know you.

For me, the common ingredient I have found in all my true friends is that they expect nothing from me and accept everything about me. I do not know of any exceptions to this rule.

And though I do not have many true friends, the ones I do have in my life understand me, because they have listened to me. They did not tell me what or how to be, but instead just sat there like a mirror, loving me while I revealed to myself the truth of whatever situation happened to be at hand.

This considered, my husband’s surprise testimony actually summed it up perfectly. Though as a writer I may have taken a slightly more roundabout and poetic approach to communicating this truth, his statement nevertheless worked—the message his its mark. For flavor, I’ll add that true friends should be appreciated and cherished because they are like mangoes…in the Antarctic. I can count them on one sticky hand. How about you?

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