…on Friend and Friendship

“Books! And cleverness! There are more important things – friendship and bravery”

– Hermione Granger

Every Potterhead like me must have been dreaming about having friends and friendship like what Harry had in his journey, but our reality is different from Harry’s reality because we are living in this boring muggle’s universe. Friendship is carved not just popped. Friends need to be made through one or more live-saving or truth-facing incidents.

We’ve been through many stages in our lives, still in one stage and will face many stages in the future. Every stages bring its own experience that sometime with an extended package, it introduce us to people that will stay in our heart and labeled as friend (some will labeled as best-friend-forever).

Since I am a huge fan of Erikson’s Psychosocial Development Theory, I will take his perspective on this post. According to Erikson, I am now in Early Adulthood Stage which crisis is intimacy vs isolation. Characteristics of this stage is we are able to reach out and connect with others and the favorable outcome is become intimate with someone and work toward career.

As an early adult, we are given the liberty of adult but also the responsibility. Our responsibility as an adult is not only for ourselves but also for the community. Society will push us to have a job, career, occupation, passion, or any other name of it. Beside having an income to support our lives, society will begin to push us to have a spouse or significant other, especially if you live in a country like mine where a woman is supposed to get married around 25yo.

According to what Erikson has said about this stage, someone need to acquire a sense of intimacy by accepting oneself and fusing one personality with others in order to accept others. It is the hard part of being an adult with many responsibilities. Sometime we tend to forget that we need someone or even a community to back us up when we are down. We are in a very productive age so we think that we need to pursue our dream as hard as we can even if we have to let many people disappointed at us in the process. As an adult, we are joining the world full of intrigues and hidden agendas, even ourselves had one or two. If we forget the basic principle of making friend and just building a relationship in a very manipulative way, we will have friends but we still won’t sense the intimacy.

Friendship is based on a mutual feeling. People will stick to someone who treasure their presence, because unrequited love is really tiring.