Love is giving someone the ability to hurt you, but trusting them not to.
Important relationships all require trust to be properly categorized as real and deep bonds. The term friend has become used in very light ways, to even referring to a random stranger on the internet as a “friend.”
Friend is defined as “a person who you like and enjoy being with,” according to Merriam-Webster. This only demonstrates how people have come to view friendship as merely an acquaintance relation, one that could be forged temporarily and only last for a short period of time.
On social websites such as Facebook, people can be labelled as your “friends” with just the click of a button. Though some people seem to accept this manner of describing friendships, many still hold a different, deeper value of the term. In a study done by Oxford University, a poll revealed that people consider only an average of four Facebook friends as actual trusted companions.
This meaning of the word is almost equivalent to the meaning of ally, rather than a trusted companion. A multitude of political figures describe allies and cooperative efforts as signs of friendships. This further proves that society has come to define friendship as a malleable and mutable word.
When describing someone as a friend, it is easy to confuse others of how deep the trust of the relationship is, needing further clarification to have full understanding.
The misuse of the term “friend” is not only changing the actual views of companionship, but also giving false impressions that can only cause harm in other types of connections.
