"This seems strange, until you consider, as [[Drake Bennett]] puts it in the Boston Globe, that ‘**many of the benefits that friendship provides don’t necessarily depend on perfect familiarity; they stem instead from something closer to reliability**’. "**Friendship may be less about being drawn to someone’s personality than about finding someone willing to endorse your sense of your own personality**. In agreeing to keep you company, or lend an ear, a friend provides the ‘social-identity support’ we crave. You needn’t be a close match with someone, nor deeply familiar with their psyche, to strike this mutual deal. "**And once a friendship has begun, cognitive dissonance helps keep it going: having decided that someone’s your friend, you want to like them, if only to confirm that you made the right decision**. "We don’t want to know everything about our friends, Gill and Swann suggest: what we seek is ‘pragmatic accuracy’. **We don’t base friendships on what we learn about people; we decide what to learn about people, and what to ignore, based on having decided to be friends**." --- **Tags** -- [[quotes]], [[pragmatism]], [[making-friends]], [[relationships]], [[cognitive-dissonance]], [[reciprocity]], **Source** -- [[20241114100017 - B - Help!]]