When the fox and the little prince meet for the first time, the fox asks the prince to “tame” him. When the prince asks him what “tame” means, the fox says it means “to establish ties” (21. 16). The process of “taming,” he explains, they will come to mean something to each other and will need each other. Without “taming,” the fox says, the prince will be “nothing more than a little boy who is just like a hundred thousand other little boys” (21.18). And to the prince, the fox is “nothing more than a fox like a hundred thousand other foxes” (21.18). But after the fox is tamed, the prince and the fox will become unique for each other.
What the fox means by “tame” is to “make friends” or “to establish a relationship.” According to the fox, unless you build a relationship with a person and get to really understand him or her, that person will remain indistinguishable for you from the hundreds of thousands of people in the world—and you, too, will not be “unique” or special to him or her.
And how does the prince tame the fox? He sits down on the grass at a little distance from the fox and says nothing because, as the fox tells him, “Words are the source of misunderstandings” (21.37). The fox looks at him out of the corner of his eye and every day, at the same time, the prince arrives at their designated spot and sits a little closer to the fox.
Sounds like a process that requires enormous amounts of time and patience, right? Well, according to the fox, that’s the point. Building relationships and deep connections with people is hard work. The fox remarks:
One only understands the things that one tames….Men have no more time to understand anything. They buy things all ready made at the shops. But there is no shop anywhere where one can buy friendship, and so men have no friends any more.” (21.35)
After the fox is tamed, it is time for the prince to leave, and the fox is about to cry. Because of this, the prince worries that the taming has hardly done any good. But the fox says it has done him good “because of the color of the wheat fields” (21.49). The golden wheat will remind the fox of the prince’s golden hair, which will make the wheat fields a source of happiness to the fox – until he was tamed, the wheat fields meant nothing to him. Thus, according to the fox, it is our relationships that make the world around us significant and meaningful.