Organization "add as friends" and "friends with" in Laravel?

Question

Laravel

The task is typical: to organize a "service of friends" - to friend, unfriend, display a list, etc. Here: How to make a many-to-many relationship of a model to itself in Laravel? jazzus came up with a good solution:

We do hasMany with User on the user's friends table

public function friends(){
        return $this->hasMany('App\Models\Friend, 'user_id', 'id');
    }

Make 2 ids in this table:
Who adds to friends (Auth:id()) field user_id
Whom the user adds to friends - field friend_id
As a result, using the create method, we make an entry when adding to friends. If the user is added as a friend, the same is true.
we get

$user->friends()->get()
$user->friends()->find($id)

However, this is not clear to me:
- And if I need to get a list of users Who I'm friends with - then what?
Those. typical operations here:
- Add to friends
- Remove from friends
- Display a list of friends
- Display a list of "friends with"
I don't understand the last point.
And one more thing - if I want to make a "soft" removal from friends - this is a flag in the second table, right?
Thank you.