Consider the following comments on friendship.
A friend is one who knows you and loves you just the same.
Anonymous
It is not a lack of love, but a lack of friendship that makes unhappy marriages.
Friedrich Nietzsche
A true friend stabs you in the front.
Oscar Wilde
Some friendships outlive the people we were when we made them, and we keep them out of habit, not love.
The friend who tells you only what you want to hear is keeping the peace, not keeping faith.
Write a reflective piece in response to one or more of these comments. Your essay will be assessed on the quality of your thinking and the way you express it.
A way into this prompt
A reflective thesis is that real friendship is rarer and more demanding than we admit, because it asks for honesty that can sting and a loyalty that survives change. Open with a particular friendship, perhaps one that deepened through difficulty or one that faded without a single argument. Then work the tension between comfort and candour: the friend who only soothes us is pleasant but not always faithful, while the friend who challenges us is harder to keep. A useful structural move distinguishes friendships that grew with us from those we cling to out of nostalgia for who we used to be. Caution: resist the sentimental conclusion that true friends last forever, since some of the most genuine friendships are also the ones that knew when to end.