Psychology >>>> Friendship - advantages and disadvantages

Friendship - advantages and disadvantages.

Friendship is one of the forms of interaction between people in society. It implies the manifestation of positive personality traits - sympathy, emotional attachment, selflessness, mutual assistance, unity of thought, forgiveness, tolerance for shortcomings.

There are many situations in life when it is friends, not relatives, who turn out to be the ones who can help a person stay “afloat”, survive adversity and straighten his life. For people who are not burdened with family, it is often friends who replace family relationships. And true friendship is good because it has no expiration date - friends will always keep you in mind, even if life drives people long distances. But friendship has both advantages and disadvantages.

Friendship has a downside, which opens the door for manipulating friendship and trust, for using friendly relations for selfish purposes (speculation in friendship), and, what is most unpleasant, for creating conditions of vulnerability for a person (both material and psychological).

Friends, as close people, have the opportunity to know all the subtleties of a person's life. And it is precisely these opportunities that give them freedom of action in relation to a friend, and already freedom of action can play a fatal role in the life of a person whose friendship was used as a tool to achieve goals, for example, selfish or destructive.

There is a category of people who enter into friendly relations with a completely meaningful goal - to use these relationships to their advantage or to the detriment of the one who is chosen as a friend. Such an imaginary friendship, when viewed from the outside, is no different from a real one - a person voices good intentions, and may even ask for mutual assistance for a friend who needs to "help".

There are often cases when a person, even without being one of your friends, brags about friendship and can use imaginary friendships for their own purposes. In other words, the concept of "friendship" opens up great opportunities, both for help, and for benefits and harm.

The result of such "friendly" deeds can be disastrous - at best, a swindler friend uses your friendship for his own advancement in society, at worst - he will "drown" you in a friendly way.

It is not for nothing that many sages and philosophers questioned the existence of friendly relations, seeing in such close communication between people the emergence of easy opportunities for approaching a person and manipulating. And sometimes it is worth correctly assessing Omar Khayyam, who wrote:

“With a sober eye, look at your closest friend -

The friend may prove to be the worst enemy. "