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Comment by Gustek | Hacker News Reader

I think there are only 2 questions you need to answer to decide if someone is your friend.

1. Do you trust them?

2. Do you care about them?

Ideally it should reciprocated. The hard part is getting there, usually it comes naturally as you spend more time with the other person out of your own volition. Just because you are meeting someone everyday at work does not mean they will become your friends, do you trust them? do you care about them?

Once you friends you don't need to meet often as long the trust and care is still there. You can become friends in short time as well if you decide to put the trust early into the other person and they reciprocate. Point is, there is no formula or plan to follow.

When I say friend I mean a true friend, not colleagues or acquaintances. Were these meanings mixed into "friend" word before Facebook as well?

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Lou Holtz [0] used to use these questions and one more as the three questions you ask leaders in general.

The other one was "Are you committed to excellence?" which he sometimes described as "Do you have high standards and do you strive to live up to them?"

I always liked his ending statement whenever he talked about this:

"Think of someone you respect. Now think of those questions. Odds are the answer to all three is 'yes'. Now think of someone you are having problems with and, again, think of the three questions. I would bet the answer to at least one of them is 'no'".

0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lou_Holtz

...A college coach who participated in grift and bribery, indirectly or otherwise, in a system that exploited young athletes to play a violent sport with lifelong consequences for health mentally and physically and offered no long term health care and virtually no monetary reward.

No successful NCAA coach is a moral paragon. John Calipari used to be held as the bad boy, but actually he was the most honest of the bunch.

If those were the only criteria, making friends would be easy. People have more built-in tribalism at the very least; the article reads like a '50s science fiction novel about robots making friends.

I trust you are being genuine when you say that, but what an odd comment. The article seemed like a very profound an interesting commentary on what friendship means. I fail to see any kind of science fiction in it. The article even seems to suggest friendship can cross tribal boundaries, but it takes work.

I guess trying to explain how friendship happens seems weird to me? It's obvious enough as it's happening that being forced to spend time together (as with school) generates friendships. Maybe I'm being too critical.

Is building trust and growing genuine care for someone easy for you?

Trust is always a gamble, at extreme you are putting your life on the line and you never know if the other person will decide to betray you next time regardless of what they did in the past.

Caring about someone is even harder as it is not a conscious choice we are making, it is feeling. You can't just decide from today I care about this person so they are my friend.

My point was, how do you know someone is your friend not how to make one. There is no method to make friends, at best some tips or guidelines.

No, it certainly isn't easy to do on purpose; that's a big part of why raising kids is hard.

What if you trust someone and care about them, but don’t particularly enjoy their company? I suppose it would still be normal to call that person a “friend,” although you’d be missing a key part of what most people think of when using that word.

The cynical word for that could be "family".

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