Why transactional friendships will always fail
By: Chloe Hill
Tags: Self Improvement, Friends, Relationships, Aristotle, Friendship

So what can we take away from the three forms of friendships?

Well, you can start off by examining the current friendships you have in your life and trying to realise which categories they fall into.

Ask yourself this : is there anyone who you think you can take the friendship to the next level with? If there is, consider the steps you would need to take to start developing a deeper relationship with them as well as what you would need to do to tweak the current dynamics of your friendship.

Then ask yourself again, is there anyone who stunts your growth or stops you from being the best version of yourself? If someone comes to mind, consider enacting a change. Cut them off, or tell yourself not to get any closer to them than you need to be.

Lastly, you should always keep in mind that friendships of virtue don’t come by in a day. To fully have that level of relationship with someone is a lifelong journey of commitment, understanding and infinite patience, but in the end, the results will be so very rewarding.

I think when it comes to friendships, another very very important thing to consider is the stage of life you are at. Personally, as a teen entering adulthood soon, I’ve started to realise that I don’t actually need that many friends, as harsh as it sounds. Over the years, I’ve learnt to be perfectly alright with doing certain things by myself. I can confidently say that I’ve witnessed enough throughout high school — the toxic drama, the popularity chase and social climbers, all of it has only painted the picture clearer for me and I’ve realised that friends come and go.

Photo by Ian Schneider on Unsplash

It’s inevitable.

While there are a few rare friends that may stay with us throughout the course of our lives, we first need to accept that the person who we currently think means so much to us at this very present moment might not be here anymore in five or maybe ten year’s time. It is crucial that you accept this fact before moving on to thinking more about what we want to get out of our current friendships.

It’s also important to remember that in every new stage of your life, from university to work to (possibly) parenthood, you are bound to meet new people through shared circumstances. Life literally puts you in a room full of people similar to you based on the choices you make. You go to school and befriend your classmates only because of a common reference point, and you’ll most likely form friendships of pleasure, and rarely of virtue.

I think I finally understood this for myself during the Covid-19 pandemic (where everything has been shifted online) and I started to ask myself questions like, “If I didn’t go to school with these people, would I have chosen them as my friends?” or, “If I could pick from the pool of everyone else in the world or country, would I pick these people as my friends?”

Truth to be told, even if you put in your best effort to maintain friendships of pleasure, there is rarely any guarantee that it will last through these major life changes. I honestly have lost contact with most of the people who were once my everything (or at least I though so), and they were people I thought I couldn’t live without back then when I was in middle school.

Sure, naysayers may claim that I just “didn’t try hard enough”, or that I didn’t prioritise my friends, and well, you can see it that way, but just know that even if you put in your utmost effort into maintaining and feeding a friendship with all the care and concern in the world, friendship is a two way effort and can only last forever if it is a friendship of virtue. Ultimately, if things don’t fall into that category and there seems to be no hope of you and your friend’s relationship ever progressing to that stage, then maybe the acceptance of that fact is the best thing you can do for your friendship.

In the end, you must realise that if your friendship is a friendship of virtue, then commitment wouldn’t and shouldn’t even be part of the equation. Both parties in the friendship stand to gain so much valuable insight from each other that your loyalties will almost never falter. Only a high quality friendship, where mutual understanding is established, stands a chance of lasting forever.