I have said that there must be mutual self-revelation. Never make the mistake of urging the confidence of your friend. Do not force any doors. If you have not the key that unlocks her heart, try to find it by making yourself worthy. Self-giving must be voluntary or it is in vain. We elicit from others only that which we have the power to make our own. Mutual trust would forever banish all petty jealousy. Your friend is not accountable to you for all her doings, and for you to act as if she were will only estrange her from you. Life is too rich in opportunity for her to be limited by any one relationship. If your friend’s life is to expand, her claims upon others and theirs upon her must be recognized.
If your friendship is a worthy one, you are constantly gaining in patience, in courtesy, and in self-control, for love is the greatest of all teachers. Do you promptly check each impatient word that springs to your lips? Do you show the friend who so easily overlooks your faults the same fine courtesy that you show to the stranger who would not overlook them? What a strange idea we sometimes have that love gives us the privilege of rudeness! Your friend may love you in spite of an occasional fit of ill-temper, but no one ever loved another better for it. To be exacting, domineering, or selfish may not drive your friend completely away from you, but it will not strengthen the tie that binds your hearts together.
There should be a certain equality between friends. I do not mean that love is not able easily to bridge over many kinds of inequalities, as that of a difference in station in life or in age, or even in education. I mean that a friendship is harmful when one of the friends is a parasite, receiving everything and contributing nothing. Self-respect demands that each shall give as well as receive.
In his essay on “Friendship,” Emerson says no truer word than this: “Your friend is he who makes you do what you can.” One must not be a fault-finder or a thorn in the flesh of one’s friends, yet friendship has no more sacred duty than to point out faults by showing the better way. “He who truly loves is irreconcilable to faults in one whom he loves; they blur the vision which always lies in his soul.”
On the other hand, it is especially the office of a friend to recognize the excellencies of his friend. “Your friend is he who tells you of your virtues and who insists upon them most when you are most inclined to doubt their existence.” Who of us is not at times sorely in need of this kindly office of a friend? In our moments of discouragement, when faith in self is at a low ebb, the true friend comes to us and by his faith in us restores the balance of life. And what a comfort then is that belief in us and in our powers and possibilities! Friends who do not perform this office, each for the other, as often as the opportunity arises, have missed much of the blessedness of true friendship!
Those who love know that love is not blind. Love has the truest sight. If you want to know what a person really is, do not ask one who hates him, but one who loves him. Yet love may blind itself. To shut your eyes to the faults of your friend is not the way to lessen those faults. To stand between her and the penalty which her deeds have justly brought upon her is to deprive her of one of the most important means of growth. If your affection is of a poor and narrow sort, you will constantly urge your friend to consult her own pleasure and interests in preference to those of others, in this way stifling in her every altruistic impulse. Acting and reacting upon each other in this way you will find that generous feeling and disinterested affection in both of you will constantly diminish. Any two people who love each other should cherish, each in the other, the spirit of self-forgetful service.
A friendship, like everything else in life, is known by its fruits. “Men do not gather grapes of thorns nor figs from thistles.” The fruits of a worthy friendship are higher and ever higher ideals of life and duty. If your friendship has made you less sensitive to other obligations and less responsive to the call of duty, beware of it! If your love for one has lessened your affection for your other friends, it is not a good friendship. Friendship should expand the heart, not contract it. Everything savoring of narrowness and exclusiveness is a hindrance. You must love your friend so much that you love the whole world better because of her. You must respect and reverence her so truly that all human nature is dignified and ennobled through her.
“All things through thee take nobler form
And look beyond the earth;
The mill-round of our fate appears