attimes_bracing

I have difficulty with the word friend. Its meaning has been changed since the advent of social media. It is no longer the analog friend/not friend position it used to be. It's not someone I went to school with and know the names of all their pets and siblings.

I suppose that those who grow up with Facebook will not even consider the pre-internet definition. I now have a number of friends on facebook whom I have met a few times and on LJ a few I have never met. I have been fortunate in that in the last 12 months I have only defriended two people; one for posting naked men and one for unwanted repeated game invitations despite polite private messages asking this person to stop. Strangely both of these were people I have known a very long time.

Over time, I have tried to come up with some guidelines for myself when it comes to friendship and so far it has worked:

A friend must, in some way, make my life better.

There must be give and take - if you are in need and I can help, that's part of friendship and I expect the same consideration within reason. I can expect you to come across a small city to help me out, possibly a country, not a continent.

If you specifically ask my advice, I give it, you act against it to your detriment and then you cry on my shoulder and we go back through the dance again and again - then we're not on the same page.

We must have some shared frame of understanding on hot button issues like racism, feminism, pornography and intolerence.

When either of us is wrong/upsets the other, we have the right to call the other on it in calm and reasoned ways. Deal with problems in the time frame they occur, without hosting grudges for years.