In the contemporary society full of pressures, rivalry has crept into nearly every area of our life, which has never failed to attract public attention. Given its ubiquitous presence, many people claim that friends will be pulled apart due to the competition. However, as far as I am concerned, the above claim has oversimplified the situation. Acctually, whether competition between friends usually negatively impacts friendship depends on what kinds of friendship they have established.
On the one hand, the competition between friends will have no negative effect on genuine friendship without any ulterior objectives. As is common sense, in the genuine friendship based on goodness, friends will always desire the good for each other. As a result, competition between them will be regarded as a good chance to achieve self-improvement and thus enhance mutual respect, which will be the foundation of forming a stronger friendship. Take my own experience as an example. Last semester, I and my best friend, steve, competed for the presidents of the student union. In the course of engaging in the contest, both of us gave our best efforts to make well-prepared work, like writing and revising the speech draft, practicing the oral speech repeatedly and so on, which made us achieve great self-improvement. Whatever the result of the contest was, steve and I were more proud of each other for our progress, resulting in a closer relationship.
On the other hand, competitions will undoubtedly tear out the friendship based on utilities. The ground for friendship of this kind is mutual usefulness which means that once one becomes useless or even harmful to another person, the friendship will accordingly break up. As a result, the rivarly between these people will cause major rifts and thus ruin this kind of friendship. A good case in point is the workplace competition. In a company, the relationship between colleges can evolve into a kind of friendship, whose foundation is based on utilities. However, rivalries for a position or bonus are likely to result in workers resenting one another, thus destroying the friendship. The underlying reason is that competitions make them become opponents instead of friends. As a result, every employee in the contest will have win at all costs" attitude. This can result in a gap between the "haves" and "have nots" that may prove to be unhealthy in internal work relations.
In a nutshell, given the complexity the corelation between friendship and comit is an exaggerated claim that competition between friends usually negatively impacts friendships. As a matter of fact, it hinges on the kinds of friendship you have whether rivarly between friends will cause it fall apart.
