Genuine friendship acts as a light to brighten my soul, with which I disperse the loneliness and sadness in my heart. Real friendship infinitely gives off the warmth when I find that my inner world is cold. I think that it is lucky for me to get a bosom friend or two in life.
Robert, one of my friends, chatted with me on friendship the other day, and he said that a real friendship is hard to find, and harder to tell. True. We may have a lot of friends in different stages of our life, but not all of us know if the friendship is real. Actually, it happens that some friends may need us to spend our whole life time to tell. Long journey can test a horse, and long time can tell a friendship. However, we don't want to spend so much time on distinguish between real and fake friendship. Therefore, it is important for us to understand the basic things about a true friendship.
When we face difficulties, our true friends will come to help. We will find that some will leave us under this situation. In this case, you can tell if it is a true friendship with your friend. Though I have no intention to put you under this kind of situation, I think that many of us would meet some great difficulties in life. The persons who give you a hand offer genuine friendship. It is the stone to test the gold of a true friendship.
When you find that you and your friends can talk heart to heart, you know that your friendship is worth your efforts to keep it going on. I think that in most cases like this, you can say that you have true friends. As Robert Louis Stevenson, a British novelist and poet, said, “Very close and trusted friends share confidences candidly. They feel secure that they will not be ridiculed of derided, and their confidences will be honored.” You can share your inner world with your friends, and your friends would share theirs with you.
Ben Jonson told us, “True friendship consists not in the multitude of friends, but in their worth and value.” The number of friends that we have cannot show that we have genuine friends. A real friendship lies in common value and virtue of life. When you find that you and your friends share common interests, value and virtue of life, you can say that you have real friends. It is a treasure to have this kind of friends in life.
Real friendship gives more, and takes less. “The true friendship seeks to give, not take; to help, not to be helped; to minister, not to be ministered unto.” When your friends are willing to help you without considering what you would return to them, you know that you have real friends. True friendship can afford true knowledge of life. Some say that this is a kind of unconditional help. I agree with this point of view. When true friends help each other, there will be no terms and clauses. There would be no agreement to make all the clauses concerning interests clear to both sides. No party A and Party B, no whereas… When you ask your friend to help you out of some troubles, he or she will not say, “100 bucks” or “if you can agree that…”
The most important ingredient in a real friendship is trust. I think, all of us know this point very clear. If there is no mutual trust, there is no real friendship. If your friend entrusts you to do something very important for him - if you fail to do it successfully, he or she would die or lose all of his or her money - , you know that your friend trusts you so much. If you can entrust him or her to do the same thing, you can say that your friendship is real.
I have talked so much about how to tell a friendship is real, but I don't think that it is wise to test your friends to know if the friendship between you is real. It is because that when you try to test your friendship, you will lose all your real friends. You doubt about your friendship, and it would be fake or terminated. In the sense of test, you can accumulate your experiences with your friends, from which you can tell who are your real friend. This is a kind of issue of trust, too.
“Suspicion is the poison of friendship.” Keep this in mind, and wish you could have a bosom friend or two in life!
