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26 August 2003
Kaibigan
 "I'M
so jealous," psychologist and former Manila newspaper columnist
Margie Holmes e-mailed me last week after I described how much fun I was
having making new friends at a dog training class.
More out of curiosity, I had agreed to drop in at a clicker training
session of the Dog Scouts of the Philippines, an animal welfare
organization. (Yes, that's their name and I will do another article
about them eventually.) I didn't know any of the members but within an
hour, as the dachshunds went their merry way chasing and wrestling down
Golden Labradors, the dogs' humans were busy exchanging addresses and
phone numbers.
Psychologists have found Filipinos are good with small group
affiliations. We are quick to make friends and to bond. That was why
Margie Holmes was complaining. Based now in London with the apple and
orange and mango of her eye, Jeremy Baer, she misses the congeniality of
Filipinos, the way people come up to you in the street and hug you like
they've known you for ages when really they've known you only from your
newspaper column. More than a year now in London, she has few new
friends; in fact, other than Jeremy, most of the others would qualify
more as acquaintances.
Look at the parties we throw. Even the poor will not hesitate to throw a
big bash, urging friends to bring their friends, who in turn will drag
their friends so the party ends up with all kinds of new networks
formed.
Certainly, we're not unique here. I find many Southeast Asian cultures
are as quick as we are with striking up friendships, but we add on a
Latin flair, treating our friendships with passion. The root word "ibig"
in "kaibigan" [friend] is intriguing, suggesting how intense
our friendships are. There's love involved, not quite as deep as the
love of "mahal," but still with connotations that we would die
for friends. (Older Filipinos in fact will argue that "ibig"
is deeper than "mahal.")
But for all that I've said about Filipino friendships, we also have this
phenomenon where a small town in the United States or in Europe, with 10
Filipinos, might have five different Filipino organizations. (Okay, so I
exaggerate. Let's say three organizations?) We're notorious for
organizational fission, meaning our organizations split easily into two,
and then into four and so forth, much like bacteria.
To explain this paradox, we have to go back to our small group
affiliations. Perhaps our friendship ties are much too intense. We
demand too much of our friends, sometimes adding on feudal notions of
loyalty. In a friendship involving mixed age groups, the older ones
might demand too much time from younger ones. In other cases, older
people, even if "older" means only two or three years'
difference, may resent it when younger friends disagree with them on
certain issues. Certainly I've found this even in universities, where
the notion of "collegiality," of professional cooperation,
gives way to feudal notions of seniority and where older faculty members
demand nothing short of monastic obedience from the younger colleagues.
There is, too, the danger that we use friendships more for building
one's own personal status. Our males especially spend too much time
outside the home with different "barkada" [groups of buddies],
which are looked at mainly as alliances for business or politics. When
friendships have such ulterior motives, they're not bound to last.
I also worry that our friendships and small group affiliations tend to
be built on parochial notions of "us" versus "them."
We bond by differentiating ourselves from other groups, thinking of
ourselves as more special than others by invoking some kind of common
denominator and ordering each other to stick to each other, right or
wrong: "We're all Bicolano" or "We're all Catholic"
or "We're all from UP [University of the Philippines]" or
"We're from PMA [Philippine Military Academy] batch whatever."
Among Filipino expats, friendships are built first because we find a
"kababayan," a fellow Filipino. But this eventually begins to
narrow down to regional or provincial origins, or to religious
affiliations (further broken down into the sects within religions).
In so many words, our friendships are still tribal in nature, and so
while they seem intense on the surface, the bonds can be actually
shallow, friendships transformed into a building of alliances and
connections.
The psychologist Lawrence Kolhberg suggested that as a person moves into
mid-life, what's important is not so much the number of friends than the
quality of friendships. We need to value the intimacy, rather than the
intensities, of friendships. Margie and many of my closest friends are
actually people I rarely see, yet when we do meet up it's always easy
picking up almost like we'd just been together yesterday.
With intimate friends, the most cherished encounters are rarely verbal.
There are the times when we break out in wild jubilant dancing as we
share good news, and times when we just sit in silence, knowing this is
the most appropriate way to extend comfort, encouragement, inspiration.
Sometimes, too, the silence says it all, as in, "I am so angry with
you" or "Do you really expect me to go out with you if you
wear that?"
It's time we learn to emphasize that it's not the number of friends we
have that counts, but the bonds that start out with common interests but
grow with an appreciation of, and respect for each person's
individuality. Friends aren't there to mold in our image. They're there,
a mirror to ourselves and to humanity, showing how much is to be gained
from the friendships that come among the most different of people.
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