Table fields for "friends" ... more of a MySQL Question

[eluser]webthink[/eluser]
It seems we're losing sight of the issue a bit but rweston, I seem to remember something to do with LIKE statements not being able to use indicies. You might want to look into that.
Either way I think for jonnyjon's case the OR solution I provided above is probably the best way to go. That is after all what OR was designed for. UNIONS are typically used to join 2 tables of unrelated data which isn't really what we're dealing with here.