Friendship

Friendship

Friendship is a relationship of mutual affection between two or more people.Friendship is a stronger form of interpersonal bond than an association. Friendship has been studied in academic fields such as sociology, social psychology, anthropology, and philosophy. Various academic theories of friendship have been proposed, including social exchange theory, equity theory,relational dialectics, and attachment styles. A World Happiness Database study found that people with close friendships are happier.
Although there are many forms of friendship, some of which may vary from place to place, certain characteristics are present in many types of friendship. Such characteristics include affection, sympathy, empathy, honesty, altruism, mutual understandingand compassion, enjoyment of each other's company, trust, and the ability to be oneself, express one's feelings, and make mistakes without fear of judgment from the friend.
While there is no practical limit on what types of people can form a friendship, friends tend to share common backgrounds, occupations, or interests, and have similar demographics.

Life Cycle

Making a friend

Three significant factors make the formation of a friendship possible:

• proximity, which means being near enough to see each other or do things together;
• repeatedly encountering the person informally and without making special plans to see each other; and
• opportunities to share ideas and personal feelings with each other.

Ending a friendship

Friendships end for many different reasons. Sometimes friends move away from each other and are forced to move on due to the distance. As long as the two people have met face-to-face in the past, however, digital technology has made geographic distance less of an obstacle to maintaining an existing friendship than it would have been decades ago. Sometimes divorce causes an end to friendships, as people drop one or both of the divorcing people. At a younger age friendships may end as a result of acceptance into new social groups. 

Friendships may end by fading quietly away or may end suddenly. How and whether to talk about the end of a friendship is a matter of etiquette that depends on the circumstances.

Islamic Cultures

In Islamic cultures, friendship is also known as companionship or ashab. The concept is taken seriously, and numerous important attributes of a worthwhile friend have emerged in Islamic media, such as the notion of a righteous (or saalih) person, who can appropriately delineate between that which is good and that which is evil. Concordance with the perspectives and knowledge of others is considered to be important; forgiveness regarding mistakes and loyalty between friends is emphasized, and a "love for the sake of Allah" is considered to be a relationship of the highest significance between two humans.