FRIENDSHIP vs ACQUAINTANCE

One may wonder what caused this man to explore this issue, as a matter of fact I have always been a keen observer if not a sincere explorer of conditions which play key role in the making of human relationships at various levels. For more than a year or so, I am struggling to understand a term which defines a sort of relationship generally ranked slightly lower than friendship proper, but yet to realize its significance fully, or in other words more and more its import is revealed before me more I become aware of the futility of this concept.

Out of variety of human relationships, I find friendship most worth noting as it involves comparatively more freedom of choice and its highly mutual nature (in contrast to blood relationships, marital relationships, love relationships etc.). Certainly, this is not to suggest that friendship is a sort of monolithic relationship, rather it’s a kind of multidimensional scale ranging from best to worst friends and placing many somewhere in between. In a discussion, one psychology wala told me that generally friendship is defined as a relationship which has two constituent parts INTIMACY and COMMITMENT. Then, if we take these two above mentioned elements as defining features one may be tempted to characterize acquaintance as follows;

ACQUAINTANCE = INTIMACY – (minus) COMMITMENT

However, my ever doubting mind is yet to accept this (acquaintance) as a sort of term defining human relationships, especially, in the light of this fact that we have multi-dimensional friendship scale. Rather I consider it as a kind of euphemism where one refers to someone as acquaintance if one does not want to hurt him/her but at the same time cannot ignore him/her altogether.