Ringer's Model Of Friendship

To one of my Best Friends, Life is an awful, ugly and intimitading place to not have friends. One cannot enjoy life without having people by their side to share life’s moments with. One also cannot make it through the lows of life without a friend to console them. Together, friends experience adversity, they laugh and fight; but ultimately friends love and establish a relationship unlike others. Our friendship is one unlike any I’ve seen in my 19 years, as I’ve never found someone as weird as me until I met you. There are many views of friendship, as bonds can be established for means such as usefulness, pleasure, and adventure. Yet while many philosophers such as Aristotle, Immanuel Kant and others try to distinguish the true purpose of …show more content…
A friend once mentioned a set of standards for a relationship, very similar to Ringer’s model, which I’ve applied to all of my relationships since. Ringer brings up a valid point when he speaks about this idea of a balance; a mutually pleasure seeking relationship in which both parties aim to please. I have always believed in a set scale for relationships, and I’ve applied this to our friendship, where equal effort should be implemented by both friends. In my model I perceive the entity of friendship on a scale from one to ten. A friendship is at its best when both friends are giving an even five in terms of effort to the other. For example, equal effort is seen in the scenario where I take you out to feel better after your break up and the following week you drive down to campus to have a cup of coffee with me. Both friends are going out of their way to bring pleasure to their friend; to make them feel like someone’s there when the world seems to be against them: and this is what encompasses an ideal friendship to me. Sometimes, when times get really tough for a friend, it’s okay to skew the scale slightly, where one friend can give a six or a seven while the other a three or four; provided that in the future the favor is