Friendship

ENG101

Friendship

When people think of a good friendship, what images come to mind? Do they envision the guys at school that joke around at the lockers, or do they remember the guy who passed out at a party? While these individuals can be described as friends, what are the characteristics that determine what a good friend is? The best way to determine the characteristics of a good friendship is to have true closeness, respectful sarcasm and sacrifice.

In order to be accepted as someone's friend, one must establish some form of closeness. True closeness is the first, great step in a friendship. There are two ways to develop true closeness, ordeal and competition. Ordeal can best be defined as the experience that one endures with a friend. The guys at school are good friends because they understand all the homework and teachers that each one of them had to go through. By comparing their pasts, the high school students can relate, and thus establish a basic good friendship with the others. The soldiers, on the other hand, train together for weeks at a time and experience something slightly different. Both soldiers have been pulled out of their usual environments by means of some military draft, so they share only that as an experience. The rest evolves out of working together and knowing that each will have the other's life in his hands some day. As training continues, their good friendship is solid by the common fear of death, as D-day approaches, through stories of pre-war life. As a result, both soldiers become each other's buddy or pal. Ordeal is only one way to bring friends together, the other way is through competition. Both the student and the soldier use competition as a way to advance and improve themselves. Competition, draws members of groups together to beat whatever odds that they must beat. For instance, the student must compete against other students in their class; while the soldiers must compete against other platoons that must compete against the enemy. This is a great example of closeness of a good friend.

While closeness is key, it is important to develop respect and some form of judgment in respect to sarcasm. This can turn out to be bad because we, or our friend, will misjudge what the other says. When a new student mixes with a popular group, or anyone else, sarcasm tends to arise in the forms of wise cracks and cruel jokes. A true friend will understand that such behavior is meant as a jest or an ice-breaker; however, people that are new will not understand the situation in that way. These people will take the remark personally and the result will be that the pending friendship will collapse, or develop into an unstable one. Soldiers, unlike