同一表上具有附加列的多对多

I have a class User. A user can be a friend with many other users. The relationship is mutual. If A is a friend of B then B is a friend of A. Also I want every relation to store additional data - for example the date when two users became friends. So this is a many-to-many relationship on the same table with additional columns. I know that a middle class Friendship should be created(containing two user ids and column for the date). But I am coming short at mapping this with Hibernate. The thing that stops me is that the mapping is to the same table. I can solve it, if the many-to-many relationship was between two different tables.I have a class User. A user can be a friend wit