Friends are the theatres of our actions

'Your reference group determines as much as 95 percent of your success or failure in life.' 

Dr. David McClelland, an American psychologist of whom I had never heard, noted for his "need for achievement" theory.

Your reference group are the people with whom you habitually associate. He found that changing the reference group completely transforms the way someone thinks.

That seems easy, to me, but for most people it is probably not so easy and not so easy for me, really. 

The actor and raconteur Peter Ustinov said that he thought ones friends are not the people with whom one has most in common but the people who got there first.

I remember a psychopath told me friends were useful.

A friend said it me 'the poets do not sing about friendship' - they should. Adolescent friendships of course the poets did sing about in the Greek Anthology, and that anthology spoke to me in my adolescence. But adult friendships are of immense importance and  breaking up with a friend can be as painful as a divorce. 

The best friendships are between men and women but they are volatile compounds from the chemical point if view, the most durable but least emotional are between men. About friendships between women I can say that they too are beautiful and often volatile. It is not true that women don't like each other, as many think, though they usually prefer men. They are better at friendships and relationships than men.

Friends, as someone said, I think it was George Eliot, are the theatre of our actions. 

When we are young we think we are in a dress rehearsal for life but as we get older we realise that the curtain was up all the time and the audience in their seats.

Who is in the audience matters.

Sybille Bedford said this.

'You see, when one's young one doesn't feel part of it yet, the human condition; one does things because they are not “for good”; one thinks everything is a rehearsal - to be repeated ad lib, to be put right when the curtain goes up in earnest. One day you know that the curtain was up all the time. That was the performance.'