What is friendship to you?

The day before yesterday when I was about to finish a quiet dinner with a friend of mine at a corner table in a not-so-crowded restaurant, a new-age reporter with a camera in one hand and a Rode wireless microphone in another rattled me by asking this question. They were creating content for the hotel which is organising an event for Friendship Day.

I was unprepared.

Not because I didn't know what it was to me, but because I was at a loss how to capture this enormous multi-dimensional variegated feeling that we all have been living with since our adolescent days in a few casual sentences. I chose to dodge.

But it kept haunting me.

There are friends and there are experiences with friends - two different things. My analytical mind dissected the players and the experience which emanates from their interactions.

We all have the experience of having friends.

If there was one best friend during our school days, we would have lost touch with him after we got transferred. Met new people and made new friends. Some of them would have become our best friends with whom we would have liked to spend most of our available time with. Few of them would have chosen to walk away, and a few we would have liked to drop for whatever reason best known to us. We would have let a few down, and a few would have let us down - bored us, frustrated us, betrayed us, hurt us, disappointed us. In our lives, we see dozens of best friends. So, one can quickly identify who is the current best friend but can't describe all the best friends by giving one overarching definition for all of them.

So, friends are just another relationship - strong, fragile, temporary, and temporal.

If it’s challenging to define friends, it's equally difficult to determine the gamut of feelings a deep friendship offers in one umbrella definition.

We border on the danger of using the words which describe our expectations from a friend as the feelings of friendship. Words like, trust, transaction, dependency, joy, and so many are the human expectations of a relationship - not the feelings of friendship.

But then what are the feelings of friendship?

The answer to this can be found by observing the feelings that we experience with the friends we are currently engaged with?

To me, it's some kind of intimacy that attracts us to spend time with each other in either a physical or virtual way. We are attracted to share and interact on issues that are personal, social, intellectual, recreational, spiritual, of shared interest, or which are our common goals. It's gender, age, and status neutral. It can be between two lovers, between a husband and wife, a mother and her daughter, and two different unrelated people who would have met just a few days ago.

It's that state when you connect a dozen times a day, and keep each other informed about the mundane things happening at that moment. You laugh and giggle forgetting the worries around you.

It's about finding a universe of joy in that moment.

How can there be any relationship if two people don't enjoy being with each other? How pleasant was the experience? That's the beginning of every human relationship smaller or bigger.

What is yours?