I think you are right Right Now. I am a cruiser and always enjoy the American ships more because the fellow cruisers are always so much more sociable than those I’ve encountered on British ones.
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“Friend” is a very interesting word. Same as “responsibility”. Everybody understands it in a different way. Many years ago I had a very small, tiny little book about “friendship”. One of its statements was (hope I translate it correctly from German) “Good friends are rare, however the demand is very low”.
It took me long to understand it. At “our” age of >50 it seems to me that the most people in my area do not need a “real friend” but rather a “nice weather friend”.
In another book I found the expression (which I like): “to be a (genuine) friend, you must be able to be an enemy”.
That is how I personally see friendship: if your friend makes a mistake or needs urgent advice, it is reasonable to be honest and tell him/her your opinion.
But as I said, the demand for that seems to be low. Therefore the third expression from that friendship book: Someone who claims to have many friends normally has none.
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I only have two close friends and one of them is my wife. I’m not disappointed by that though, that’s the way I’ve engineered things. I find having too many friends tends to weigh heavily on me. I spend too much time trying to solve their problems and it leaves me feeling drained and my mental health suffers. It took many years to work this out but I’m so glad I did.
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Sometimes it’s best to ditch friends that have become too demanding or flakey .
They are too wearing .
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The plants are my friends! If you interact with nature you have plenty of good friends!
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