Hardly an adult man is to be found, at least in the Western culture, who has never been told, by a woman he courted and who rejected him, something like this: “…but we can be just friends!”
Just friends? These words usually make me wonder what does friendship mean for women who thus speak. Surely they would not agree with Chekhov, the Russian playwriter, when in “Uncle Vanya” wrote:
MIKHAIL. Are you in love with her?
VANYA. She is my friend.
MIKHAIL. Already?
VANYA. What do you mean by “already”?
MIKHAIL. A woman can only become a man’s friend after having first been his acquaintance and then his beloved—then she becomes his friend.
VANYA. What a vulgar philosophy!
But was Chekhov’s really a vulgar philosophy? I reckon the answer depends on every person’s idea of friendship, on how each of us interprets and understands this word. Unfortunately, our languages are quite helpless in naming the several degrees and types of friendship between two people. In the English vocabulary, we jump from simple “acquaintance” all the way up to “friend”, and that’s basically it. The same goes for Spanish, French, Russian… I always miss some intermediate word for naming those who are more than acquaintances but not as much as friends; or, alternatively, for those friends who are specially close and loyal: those in whose hands you can trust your secrets, property and even your life. On the other hand, and given the fact that languages are usually very good at words for concepts and ideas important for the cultures who speak them, perhaps most people do not care much for distinguishing among different kinds of friendship, and only a few of us are concerned about this. Continue reading