"friends"

Was doing my readings for Intercultural Communication and felt a bit shocked when I read something about "friend" from an article.

Being exposed to different cultures for these years, I do understand that people from different cultures see things in very different ways. And I always agree that "words have no meanings, people do". That means a particular word may have very different meanings to different individuals, or if that individual doesn't speak that language, that word will have no meaning to him/her at all. This is what makes communication and especially intercultural communication so complicated.

All these years overseas, I've been observing how people from different cultures behave differently. How do they communicate, how do they greet, how do they organise projects, how do they treat their lovers, how to they behave in class, how to they chat in public, how do they queue in lines... etc.. However, I've never thought about how they view "friendship" differently.

Until I read this tonight:

American friendship differs from that found in many parts of the world, where an individual may have few friends but is likely to have a total, rather than a selective, commitment to them. Individuals may be disinclined to share friends with other friends, since both the quality of friendship and the number of friends are considered limited and hence not to be squandered.
*quoted from Cultural Assumptions and Values by Edward C. Stewart, Jack Danielian, & Robert J. Foster

I always try to be objective when I encounter people from other culture. But after I read this, I feel that I'm still assuming lots of my own values as others' value. This is very dangerous.

As for friendships, in my culture, we have limited friends and we do have total commitment to them (at least I do). I always assume that all others have the same value! And when my foriegn friends told me he/she "value our friendship", I do take it quite seriously. But now I may have to re-value what they said again.

Lucky enough though, as I am from a culture that will only make limited number of friends, I've only made very very few friends during these years overseas.

But let me clarify, when I say "friend" here, I do mean "good friends" that you can share your feelings with, not those you just say hi and bye everytime you meet. I do have lots of those type of friends. =P

But yet, I'm pretty sad after realising this. Now I'm not quite sure about the "friendship" with some particular friends. Even if a particular friend told me that he/she "value our friendship", how can I know what is the definition of "value" in his/her mind? We might have a totally different view on just this simple sentence.

Am I thinking too much again?