The Difference of Friends and Acquaintances

Are you sure that your friends are true to you? Are you sure that who they are with you are also who they are behind your back? If you are asking these questions to yourself while reflecting about who your friends, it means somehow you feel insecurity because you might be hearing bad comments from them about who you are for them. Let us just first put in mind how exactly friendship differ from mere acquaintances.


"There is nothing we like to see so much as the gleam of pleasure in a person's eye when he feels that we have sympathized with him, understood him. At these moments something fine and spiritual passes between two friends. These are the moments worth living." one of the best quotation of Don Marquis that explain what friendship really mean. From this citation, we can have a clear vision that friendship does not take advantage to each other; both or all of them in a group of friends can sympathize with each other and through this they learn the meaning of empathy. Although there are different levels of friendship, true friendship can be acquired if only and only if RESPECT runs in you and your friends. Now after knowing what friendship is, now let us see just how exactly it differ to acquaintances.


According the Reader's Digest Universal Dictionary, Acquaintance means someone whom you just know but who is not a close friend. They can be the people whom you get along everyday in your life but the level of your relationship with them is still not in the level of friendship with respect to one another. If you are familiar with the five(5) symbiotic relationship in the ecosystem, acquaintances can be compared to Commensalism where one benefits to you as a person. In this case, people might thing that he/she is your friend because that particular person always asks your help. Also, acquaintances can be compare to the Parasitism relationship. If you ask me about my opinion about this, I will say that this is the worst kind of acquaintanceship where after someone makes fun of you after giving effort to help him/her. Crazy huh?


So it's better to know your friends first. Trust me you don't want a backstabber as your friend.