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Most of us value the opinion of our friends more than the opinion of some stranger off the street. This is true especially when it’s a question of who we think can offer the best account of our character. Unlike strangers or occasional acquaintances, we know our friends and they know us. Indeed, friends tend to know each other better than anyone else. It is my contention that friends know each other better because of the sort of relationship they have. Our friends know us so well not only because we disclose our identities more fully to them, but also because our identities are more closely linked to our friends. Though we have usually developed a sense of self by the time we enter into most of our friendships, once they are entered into these friendships—and typically alter—that understanding.

Like other close relationships, friendship is a relation that exerts a special influence on the self. This relation’s unique capacity to affect personal identity results from the level of intimacy it encourages and the security that it offers the individuals involved. Though the effects of friendship on personal identity may not be as dramatic as the effects of the relations that individuals have with their parents or care-givers during their formative years, the friendships that individuals have in childhood and over the course of their lives do serve to shape their selves. As relational theories like Sartre’s explain, a sense of self not only emerges within a social framework, it is something that is affected continually by social relations. Though our sense of self tends to achieve an increasing degree of stability as we move toward adulthood, our selves are never fixed. Rather, our selves are always evolving. As we grow and change through the course of our lives, so too does our conception of self. Our selves change subtly but constantly in response to our relations to others and the information these relations provide.

Friendships are especially influential when it comes to the self because we let ourselves go with our friends. Unlike in other situations in which individuals may feel that they need to be on guard or otherwise forthcoming with respect to personal information, individuals tend to tell and show all to their friends. Individuals are less reserved in their speech and behavior with friends than they are with others generally. Individuals tend to be more open with their friends because they feel safe with them. The open and honest communications that friendships encourage are important to the formation of self because selves are formed relationally. As Sartre argues, a self is an idea that an individual forms reflexively in response to the information she derives from her social relations. Our relations with others allow us to see ourselves. In order to show us ourselves, others need information. Without ample and accurate information, others cannot do that effectively. Without a reasonable degree of openness, the understanding of self that an individual can derive from her relationships is at best a superficial one.

Real friendships however are not superficial. We trust our friends and tend to be open and honest with them. We are able derive a dependable sense of ourselves from our friendships because we share ourselves more fully with our friends and because we trust the information they offer. Our friendships contribute to the shaping of our selves because of the unique closeness and camaraderie that they promote. Unlike with other individuals, we share our deepest thoughts and dreams with our friends. The trust and closeness implicit in the relation makes it possible for us to tell our friends our most embarrassing secrets. Often without knowing what will result from the activity, we spill our hearts out to our friends. Often to our surprise, the relations we have with our friends make us to realize things we never knew about ourselves. The conversations we have with our friends commonly compel individual insight. The unexpected arguments we engage in often expose deeply held personal principles. The experiences we share disclose to us interests and dispositions that were hitherto unknown. Ultimately, giving ourselves over to friendship gives us a fuller sense of ourselves. Friendships inform our sense of self because the journey to self is one of mutual discovery. Selves are forged through our associations with others. The structures of our selves are affected by each successive relation. Friendships influence the shaping of self more than other sorts of relations because we are so deeply invested in them.

- Jennifer McMahon

Disclosing more of the true self to others is critical in creating intimacy and bonds of empathy. It’s only by being open and vulnerable, sharing our inner being, our plight, and our struggle to be that we establish empathic bonds.

If I were to die today, what would I think about as I die? I would think about the accomplishments I was able to achieve…to turn something from nothing. I traveled the world, learned a great deal, ate different kinds of cuisines, and so on. But then, I would think about my relationships with my family and friends. The friends who knew me well, who I laughed with, cried with, drank with…the people I experienced the highs and lows with. Me being able to be myself around them, to trust them, to confide in them, to reveal myself to them. The long talks…

If you are in passionate love and want to celebrate your passion, read poetry. If your ardor has calmed and you want to understand your evolving relationship, read psychology. But if you have just ended a relationship and would like to believe you are better off without love, read philosophy. Oh, there is plenty of work extolling the virtues of love, but when you look closely, you find a deep ambivalence. Love of God, love of neighbor, love of truth, love of beauty—all of these are urged upon us. But the passionate, erotic love of a real person? Heavens no.

We are shedding our agricultural traditions and, in some respects, returning to our nomadic roots.

Few of us still live in the house where we grew up. Rather, many of us have several places we call home—our parent’s house, the office, our own residence, and perhaps a vacation spot. We migrate between them. We no longer grow our own food. We now hunt and gather in the grocery store and then carry home our catch—as Homo erectus did over a million years ago. (I am not surprised that we like fast foods either, or eat between meals here and there as we move through the day; our ancestors certainly ate as they marched along.) We commute to work again. And we have a loose network of friends and relatives, many of whom live far away.

These are habits from our past. We are shedding the sexual attitudes of farm life too. In preindustrial Europe, a wedding often marked a merger of property and an alliance between families. So marriages had to be stable and permanent. This necessity is gone. A woman’s job was to bear her husband’s seed and raise his young; hence our agrarian forerunners required virginity at marriage. This custom is gone. Many of our farming ancestors carefully arranged their marriages. This practice is largely gone. They banned divorce. This is gone. They had a double standard for adultery. This has changed. And they celebrated two marital mottoes: “Honor thy husband” and “Till death us do part.” These, too, are disappearing.

For the past several thousand years, most farm women had only three basic options: to be uneducated, subservient housewives; to be cloistered nuns; to be courtesans, prostitutes, or concubines. Men, on the other hand, held the sole responsibility for the family income and welfare of the young.

Now vast numbers of women work outside the home. We have double-income families. We are more nomadic. And we have a growing equality between the sexes. In these respects, we are returning to traditions of love and marriage that are compatible with our ancient human spirit.

Other things:

Women have begun to space their children farther apart as well. In societies where woman gather or garden for a living, they tend to bear their young about every four years. This gives the mother uninterrupted time with her infant before she bears a second child. Today this trait, birth spacing, is returning.

Women will continue to work. Female chimpanzees work. Female gorillas, orangutans, and baboons work. For millenia, hunting-gathering women worked. On the farm women worked. The housewife is more an invention of privileged people in ranked societies than a natural role of the human animal. The double-income family is part of our human hertiage.

Margaret Mead once said: “The first relationship is for sex; the second is for children; the third is for companionship.”

Which is getting embarrassing, to be quite honest. I mean—here I am in this sacred place of study in the middle of India, and all I can think about is my ex-boyfriend? What am I, in eighth grade?

And then I remember a story my friend Deborah the psychologist told me once. Back in the 1980s, she was asked by the city of Philadelphia if she could volunteer to offer psychological counseling to a group of Cambodian refugees—boat people—who had recently arrived in the city. Deborah is an exceptional psychologist, but she was terribly daunted by this task. These Cambodians had suffered the worst of what humans can inflict on each eachother—genocide, rape, torture, starvation, the murder of their relatives before their eyes, then long years in refugee camps and dangerous boat trips to the West where people died and corpses were fed to sharks—what could Deborah offer these people in terms of help? How could she possibly relate to their suffering?

“But don’t you know,” Deborah reported to me, “what all these people wanted to talk about, once they could see a counselor?”

It was all: “I met this guy when I was living in the refugee camp, and we fell in love…I thought-he really loved me, but then we were separated on different boats, and he took up with my cousin. Now he’s married to her, but he says he really loves me, and he keeps calling me, and I know I should tell him to go away, but I still love him and I can’t stop thinking about him. And I don’t know what to do.”

This is what we are like. Collectively, as a species, this is our emotional landscape. I met an old lady once, almost one hundred years old, and she told me, “There are only two questions that human beings have ever fought over, all through history. How much do you love me? And who’s in charge?” Everything else is somehow manageable. But these two questions of love and control undo us all, trip us up and cause war, grief and suffering.

- Elizabeth Gilbert

Attraction is essentialist in nature. As Shakespeare put it, “Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind.”