A friend is someone who respects you enough as a human being to be completely real with you. They deem you cool enough or worthy enough to know who they really are.
More often than not, we find that many people's concept of friendship doesn't extend beyond the boundaries of "they're just people I hang out with and have a good time with." Sure, hanging out is an important aspect of friendship, but friendship goes so much deeper than that. At least, it's supposed to.
Friendship is about bringing down your walls around someone you deem worthy enough to receive pieces of the eternal puzzle that is you. But how does one get to that point with someone they've just met? It's not like you can just walk up to anyone and tell them your life story and suddenly you're best friends, right? No, the unraveling process, the baring of your soul to another human being, is a complex ebb and flow. It is an intricate back and forth dance between two individuals who are just curious enough about the other, to have a genuine interest in finding out more about them at each encounter.
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As such, it can be said that courtship and friendship are very much the same gradual process of getting to know another person. The dance of friendship and the dance of courtship follow the same steps, for the most part. We fail to see it as such because the heteronormative society we live in has placed strict standards/expectations/rules on us all, where anything even slightly straying from the societal expectation of masculinity is stigmatized, shunned, and ridiculed.
A true friendship cannot blossom if one or both people involved are too worried about what other people will think, and therefore do not meet each other on equal levels of sincerity, honesty, and openness. Clearly, I'm speaking more towards male friendships, as it's commonly known that most female friendships do not have this problem (since the society we live in is much less critical of females complimenting each other [and similar activities] than it is of males doing the same thing). A real friendship cannot emerge if people are so worried that their new friend will judge them negatively, that they fail to be real and open with each other at each encounter.
Much like a courtship cannot last if the person you're courting never gets to know who you really are, who the person is behind the mask that you put up for everyone else, a true friendship cannot develop if your acquaintance never gets to know more about you, and if you never get to know more about them. Much like a courtship, a lasting friendship is built over the course of what essentially amount to dates: you compare schedules and arrange to meet up at a mutually agreeable time and place, you meet up, you do things together, and over the course of that meeting you ask each other questions about life, hobbies, musical tastes, etc., then the meeting ends.
After that, if you both enjoyed each other's company, then you agree to meet up again to repeat the process once more and develop the relationship even further by getting to know each other even more with every subsequent meeting. Sometimes, even, gifts are involved, maybe one person pays for the other, or even one of them gets picked up and dropped off for the meeting. So you see, friendship and courtship are an almost identical dance. The only real difference is that in one relationship, a desire to have sex is present.
But society would have you believe that friendship and courtship are two completely separate things, that the process for acquiring a true friend is a completely different process from acquiring a lover. This is the reason that so many people today deprive themselves of true and meaningful deep friendship, because they are too worried that their desire for friendship will be misinterpreted as a desire for a romance-filled courtship. If we could learn to just shrug off societal expectations and standards, and be honest and vulnerable with the people whom we want to develop tight bonds of friendship with, we would be well on our way to developing much more meaningful and dependable relationships.
Like it says at the top of this post, a friend will be real with you because they respect you enough and enjoy your company often enough to spare you from the carefully constructed veneer that they present to everyone else. If you're not sharing your true self with your friends, if you're not being real with them, why even bother calling them your friends in the first place? How are they any different from every other Joe Somebody who has no idea who you really are as a person?
Be your true self with people who you wish to befriend, and eventually you will find a true friend. This is the essence of Friendship In a New Age.