Last week I brought a new player into my D&D game, which always involves talking about relationships. As a group of semi-ruthless mercenaries wandering the countryside, they tend to have trust issues around new people, so we always tell some stories about how they knew the new character in the past. Last week was especially good though, because it offered some perspectives on friendship that are weird, broken, and not entirely uncommon.
To Nirav the gnome scout, friends are useful. They provide value. He invests time and energy in them in the hope that there’s going to be some kind of tangible return. When he made friends with Boba Rumblerocks, the halfling priest who we’ll get to in a minute, he figured it would be useful to know a priest with some connections. Given Nirav’s propensity for breaking the law,he finds it really useful to have a friend who can bail him out of jail and make him seem respectable. Nirav’s friends have to provide value, because he’s looking for a return on his investment. If they don’t serve his agenda in some way (preferably without knowing what his real agenda is), they’re no good to him.
Boba Rumblerocks is a priest who wants to save his friends. He made friends with Nirav in order to be an example and reform him from his occasionally criminal ways. He sees himself as an unrequested teacher and mentor who will, through a sort of virtuous osmosis, polish this scoundrel’s heart of gold. His notion of friendship is much more patriarchal, and serves not only to set him apart from his friends but mentally secure him the moral high ground by reassuring him that he’s the example of goodness that others should be following. In essence, he hopes that by investing goodness in Nirav, he’ll get a return in net goodness.
Both of these stories were answers given to “Why are you friends?” but it’s pretty clear that neither of these are examples of friendship. Friends are valuable, but they’re not valuable in a resource-driven way. Philosophical literature typically characterizes friendship as a relationship of mutual caring, intimacy, and shared activities, which seems pretty reasonable on the face of things. It’s not the same relationship you have with employees, or family, or your children. Friendship comes in degrees, certainly, but Boba and Nirav are going to undertake some pretty dangerous things together. Life-threatening. That kind of friendship has to run deep. But I think there’s an important fact about friendship that both characters fail to grasp and that isn’t really captured in the literature.
Sometimes the burden is figurative. Other times not so much.
Friendship is improved by friends burdening each other.
Not all the time, and it’s naturally a relationship of give and take, but overall. The literature gets at this when talking about intimacy, but our characters above are too focused on value to even consider what happens if one of them burdens the other. In fact, they don’t share burdens at all, despite having to depend on each other for their lives sometimes. But sharing those burdens is really the best part. I know that we’re supposed to be overly considerate and that everyone is busy now because we live in the age of running all over the place, but I stand by my original statement. Sharing burdens steadily deepens our knowledge about each other and lets us know who we can rely on when things really get too heavy to carry. Which they always do from time to time.
Friends are the people you lean on when times get rough, which is partly why I was so intrigued that, in the catalogue of of how Boba and Nirav are friends, it didn’t come up except in a utilitarian way “He helped me with this so I’ll help him with that.” Being friends just means “I’ll help him with that,” I think. What do you think? Share your experiences in the comments, or throw me a tweet.
