I'm not very good with MySQL statements, so I'm looking for some insight. Let's say a user visits someone else's page. This will send the username as a parameter to a script to check if the current user and the user's page they are visiting are friends.

My simple database structure:

**FRIENDS TABLE** -- `relationship_id, friend1_ID, friend2_ID, status`

**ACTIVE\_USERS TABLE** -- `id, username, email`...etc.

My current SQL statement is as follows:

```
SELECT * 
FROM friends
JOIN active_users ON ( active_users.username =  '$username' ) 
WHERE (
    friends.friend_1ID = '$current_user_ID'
    AND friends.friend_2ID = active_users.id
    AND friends.status = 1
)

```

While this WORKS, I don't feel it's elegant. It returns a row if the two are friends, but this row obviously is a join of the user information row and the relationship row. I would just like to grab the relationship row. Would it be economical to break this up into two statements? For instance, I would query for the visited page's user ID using the username, and then use that variable in a second statement to grab the relationship. Or is there an easier syntax I have not come across? Help is appreciated!