Mateship AKA Nakama

There's red ships and blue ships, but there's no ships like friendships...

Except for maybe mateships. Nowadays everybody is friends with everybody else. How many friends do you have on your facebook page? 100? 1000? Now how many of those people do you talk to? I talk to maybe ten people of my own volition. Take out the people I live with and my family, and I talk to five...maybe.

So what are the other gazillion people I talk to?

They're still friends, according to mateship. Why is that?

Because with facebook I can 'talk' to them. Be updated on their lives, update them on mine. Pleasant every day fluff talk that doesn't really deal with anything of import. We can get along just fine.

Now say I was in the army, in the war (it could be true...ok maybe not). The people in my brigade/troop, what are they? They could be people I don't know, or I don't get along with. I might not even like them. But they've got my back, and I know that. And I've got theirs.

So are we friends? No.

We're mates.

Or say for example I have a rival. I went to a tournament. And there's this other kid, don't even know his name. The match starts and by the end of it I've lost. The kid comes and helps me up.

Next tournament we both fight again. This time I win. I help him up. This goes on and on for years possibly. Each of us spurred to become better by the other who's name we don't even know.

That's mates. Why? Because if this kid and I were thrown into a Hunger Games/Battle Royal situation, he'd have my back, and I'd have his. And we both know it. There's just no question.

It's this spoken/unspoken agreement that you'd trust each other with your lives, for the rest of your lives. With friends, they may be there for you when you're crushed about being dumped, or when you're bored and you want to hang out. But when the chips are down, you're not 100% sure if you can rely on them.

Mateship is this...manly thing. Where you don't have to talk about things, you just know it intrinsically. You can tell someone you'll always have their back, but it's different from knowing someone has your back. It's a rather difficult thing to explain.

It's almost like family. You may not like your family. And if you had a choice you'd never pick your family. But they're your family so you love them anyway, no matter how much you hate them as a person.

Personally I think the only word that I know of that's slightly akin to mateship/nakama is comrade, or maybe how priests or native americans refer to each other as brother. There's a sense of something beyond what is spoken, a sense of something beyond other people. A deep connection between two people of solidarity, truth, and realness that might not exist in friendship.

I'm not saying you have to hate your mates, or you can't trust your friends. People can be mates and friends.

In the terms of wherever the info came from (can't remember the website for the life of me): You can trust your friends to not drink your beer, but not with you life. Mates, you can trust with your life, but not necessarily your beer.