Friends drifting apart

[Sanity Panda]

Originally Posted by Michael Chui

I think your real problem is an excessive interest in implications and undercurrents. This forum generally consists of threads in two entirely different classes: debate and advice. We overlap the boundary flippantly, and this thread is moving from advice into debate.

In advice, it is more effective to dismiss the subtle insinuations for the better goal of actually helping people. In debate, those half-spoken words are as significant as you make them.

You seem to be treating an advice thread as if it were a debate thread. And while I am happy to converse with you on the nature of friendships and relationships in general, it's unnecessary to lambast a group of people who gave advice to someone a year and a half ago.

If you want to disagree with someone's values, then you should ask them to respond directly.

Indeed... I realise that their values on friendship are perfectly valid too.

The focus of what? Others? Ourselves? Where should this focus be, and why?

Good point... I'd say mutual but that doesn't mean anything since the posters above are still mutual. Not to mention this contradicts with the idea that all actions are self-interested anyway...

You're correct. People do stick together for reasons other than common interests. However, would you say that such people consider each other friends, or obligatory necessities? If your family is a cross to bear, why do you carry it? If you had the option between ending world hunger or staying with a friend, which would you choose? Are there things more important than friendship? The right to one's own dignity? The right to choose one's own destiny?

Agreed. They don't have to stay together.

You put a lot of value in implications.

An old man can be as deceitful as an adolescent. They are more likely to be deceptive: they're more likely to be bored and in search of pleasure.

And what is there to trust, in a friendship?

I would be more willing to trust a person (not a friendship) with my life who I met an hour ago, but who I met because he just took a bullet for me, than a friend of 10, 20 years.

Thinking it over... that was a silly statement. What was I really valuing in that case? Probably emotional investment. But that's not always a good thing...

No, such friendships do exist. It is a different question whether or not they should, but they do exist.

Yay.
I'd ask why you feel they shouldn't exist but... perhaps it's best to leave it be. My intentions not to debate, merely to ask.