Diana Fritz Cates in her academic book, Choosing to Feel: Virtue, Friendship, and Compassion for Friends muses on friends who choose to share deliberations and choices. Had to share this excerpt on friends, differences and mutual flourishing:
“Friends sometimes find themselves focusing on different aspects of a situation as relevant and significant, reasoning differently about those aspect, perhaps with different emphases on logic and gut reaction, drawing on different emotion-laden experiences, counting different reasons and motives for choice to be the more binding…“Friends who choose to spend their days together choose to deliberate with each other as though they were coparticipants in a single deliberative process.”
As friends engage each other as partners in a common deliberative activity, their separate capacities for perception, thought, and passion are expanded. Both eventually come to take the other’s unique perceptions, thoughts, and passions as seriously as their own…Because this process is mutual and the friends contribute to it equally in the best of friendships, we can see neither one friend “loses her identity” in the other; rather, both extend and enhance their identities by adding to or including the other’s identity in their own, attaching themselves deliberately and, eventually, habitually to the other’s ways of perceiving and understanding just as they remain attached to their own…this process is deliberately chosen by the friends over time. In so choosing, the friends flourish.”
