Everyone's friends situation is different. Some people may be very popular, having a plethora of friends in all different aspects of their lives. Others may only have a few dependable friends. Depending on how many friends and the types of friends that they may have will determine if they have friend groups. Take an average college student. They may have a close-knit friends circle that they spend most of their time with and feel the closest to. Then, there are the classmate friends; those who are in the same classes as our average college student. It's a very casual relationship, without much of the deep connection that goes along with the close-knit friends group and mostly exists due to the common cause of class. You could say that this type of friendship is built on utility according to Aristotle on Friendship.
Moving further along, the average college student may be involved in campus clubs, which involve another set of friends. This group may have a differing level of connection to the classmates group due to the nature of the commonality between people in this case. For example, if our average college student is part of UNCC Puppet Club, their common interest of puppets with the other members may be more of a personal connection than to their classmates in their anatomy class.
Of course every college student had to pass through high school, which means that there may be a high school friends group. This type of friends group might be group that is slowly dying off for our college student as he/she makes new friends in college. The physical distance between these friends if they all go to different colleges or are on different paths in life lead to this disconnection. The commonality of interests and personality goes away due to the personal growth that each person experiences at their respective colleges.
There is a common theme to what categorizes a friends group and that is commonality. Commonality is the thing that everyone within this group has an interest in or is something that they all participate in together. Without the glue of commonality, a friends group can easily dissolve and lose its identity.
I am hereby going to develop a course on Puppet Anatomy to pull in various types of students from around campus who share a common interest in puppetry and anatomy.
ReplyDeleteJust a note: some kids are homeschooled, so not everyone goes through high school.
Several of your classmates also noted this "dying off group of friends" phenomenon: as we move to a new stage of life, those friends who were central to that old stage tend to fade into the background. That makes sense alongside your notion that friend groups are formed primarily around common interests. Friends are thus contextual and chosen. How does that fit into Aristotle's ideas about the types of friends? Are there friend group types that map onto Aristotle's categories?
More importantly, do giraffes ever form friend groups united around a common interest in sticking their heads in wooden bowls?