Some are good afar off, some when near... Friends are for use even more than for pleasure... To keep is more important than to make friends. Select those that will wear well... Friendship multiplies the good of life and divides the evil.
Baltasar Gracián, 1647 (tr. Joseph Jacobs, 1892)
This is unsentimental and not cynical. Friends serve, and serving is part of what friendship is for; the error is expecting every friend to serve every purpose. Some are wonderful at a distance and unbearable up close, some are the reverse, some are for counsel and some for company and some for the one crisis they are uniquely built to handle. The wisdom is matching the friend to the hour, and, above that, keeping the proven ones: an old friendship, tested and salted, is worth more than the pleasure of a new acquaintance. Friendship multiplies your good times and halves your bad ones, which is the highest return available on any relationship you will ever build.
Practice
- Know your circle's shapes: the counsel friend, the fun friend, the crisis friend, the distance friend. Ask the right one for the right thing.
- Weight keeping over making; a maintained old friendship compounds where a new one only begins (maxim 111 keeps depositing).
- Be the useful friend in return; friendship you only draw on and never fund will close its account without a word.
Use this when
- Use this in trouble: name the friend actually built for this kind of trouble, rather than burdening the nearest one.
- Use it across distance; the correspondent friend and the present friend are both real, and neither should be neglected for lacking the other's form.
Ignore this when
- Don't reduce friendship to utility; "for use even more than pleasure" assumes the affection, it does not replace it.
- Don't over-draw even a strong friend; the account still needs deposits, and the burdened friend eventually withdraws (maxim 82 stops before the dregs).
A picture of it
When a woman's business hits its worst month, she resists calling her closest friend, who is warm but panics, and instead calls a former colleague she sees twice a year, precisely the person built to be calm with a spreadsheet at midnight. He talks her through the numbers, she keeps the warm friend for the evening that needs comfort rather than accounts, and both friendships stay intact because neither was asked to be something it is not. The crisis is halved, exactly as the maxim promised, because the right friend was matched to the right hour.
Match the friend to the hour, and guard the old ones. New friends begin; kept friends compound.