On Friendship

On the day I began college at age 18, I just happened to sit down in the cafeteria next to another guy who, like me, was shuffling through the bewildering process of orientation.  Upon comparing class schedules, we discovered that we were assigned to every single course section together.  In a cafeteria full of five hundred freshmen, I happened to sit down, by chance, next to the only other student who had chosen or been assigned to the same six classes as myself.  Richie Secare was the first friend I made in college, forty-five years ago, and we have been best friends ever since.

In the course of that forty-five year friendship, naturally, we have gone through an awful lot of changes, both together and individually.  There have been career changes, marriages, divorces, various periods of separation for various amounts of time.  I lived in Chicago for five years, in Seattle for almost ten years, in Massachusetts for eleven years, in Delaware for ten years.  Richie spent a couple of years in Japan, has traveled to many countries over the years, but still lives in the same town in New Jersey where he grew up.  And through each of those years, we’d manage to see each other a couple of times per year, more often whenever possible.

During most of the rites of passage of these past forty-five years, we’ve been present in each other’s life.  Richie was at my Ordination, my sister’s wedding, my parents’ funerals.  I officiated at his wedding, I gave the eulogy at his mother’s funeral.  At one critical moment in my life, I once called him from the other side of the country at four o’clock in the morning and asked him for two thousand dollars.  And before I could even tell him why, he said, “Is nine o’clock soon enough? That’s when the bank opens.” 

There have been many times over the years when I have wondered at that chance meeting on our first day of college, and how this friendship has been a factor in my life, and what my life might have been like at several crucial crossroads if Richie had not been my friend.  I know that I have been the same for him, and I cannot imagine that we will not be friends for the rest of our lives.

Without getting too sentimental about it, the closest I can come to describing the importance of our friendship is to say that Richie is one of my “compass points” here on this earth.  My ability to know where I am at any given time in my life, both geographically and emotionally – and to know who I am and where I come from – is based, at least partly, on knowing Richard Salvatore Secare.  A guy I happened to sit next to on the first day of college.

There is no question in my mind that friendship is a spiritual issue no matter what your theology.  It is one of the real measurements of our emotional and spiritual health and well-being.  And yet, more than a few studies recently identify friendship as almost a “missing dimension” in modern lifestyle for middle-class America these days.  It’s been cited that my own generation in particular, the Boomers, are experiencing a poverty, if not a complete void, of strong and lasting friendships.

A peculiar mix of circumstances seems to have factored into my generation’s lifestyle that did not so much affect the older generation as drastically or as thoroughly.  Life has speeded up, we all know that much.  We cell phone, we text, we tweet and we twitter, we network and we Facebook, we email, and we iphone.  And for all that, still the work and time demands on middle-class and working-class families today, combined with the reality of a mobile society that takes us thousands of miles away from our hometowns for our educations and for career changes, leaves us stranded – emotionally and sometimes physically – from our early friendships, and these become harder and harder to replace as we get older.

It’s amazing how different we all are when it comes to talking about experiences as general as that of “friendship.”  Not everyone has friendships that are as enduring or as valuable as my friendship with Richie Secare.  If you have only one such friendship in your lifetime, you are blessed, and I know that.  Some fortunate few can claim several over the course of their lives, and if the current research and surveys on this topic are anywhere near correct, that is a very rare thing indeed.

It isn’t that we in modern life don’t have opportunity to meet people.  On the contrary, one author claims that “today’s city dweller comes into contact with more people in one week than the seventeenth-century villager did in a lifetime.” 

When asked to keep track of those with whom they interacted during a three-month period, the average person was found to have an acquaintance pool of from 500 to 2500 people, including relatives, neighbors, service people, officials, teachers, classmates, clients and customers, tradespeople and coworkers.  Of these, how many would you guess might be considered real “friends”?  According to a great variety of studies of children and adults, the answer is between three and seven.”  (See, Among Friends by Letty Cottin Pogrebin. McGraw-Hill Book Company, New York. 1987. pp. 10-11.)

Between three and seven.  If you can count four or five active friendships in your life at any one time, you are somewhere around average to better-than-average compared to most people.  The interesting statistic from various surveys shows that people who suffer from loneliness tend to list the same number of active friendships as non-lonely people. 

Letty Cottin Pogrebin in her book, Among Friends, writes:

“Friendship is like sex: you always suspect that there’s some secret technique that you don’t know about…. How can I know if I’m a good friend?  How can I be better?  Do I really have good friends?  Do other people have more friends?  Closer friendships?  Different ways of being friends?”

What one discovers is that very few people are actually satisfied or feel secure with the friendships they have.  We’re sure that other people must have lives full of “perfect unions” while we must make do with the three to seven ordinary friends we have.

It isn’t so, at least according to one survey that interviewed almost 20,000 people about their friendships.  We have an idealized expectation of friendship that traps us into viewing friendship as an “asset” – something to have a lot of, like money, sex, or possessions.  And so one poll by Daniel Yankelovich showed that 70% of Americans feel that only having four or five self-described “good friends” constitutes some kind of a failure in their lives that they describe as a void.

From our first days in the schoolyard as young children we’ve been taught to fear rejection of our peer group and to worry about whether we are liked by others.  We got a message that we ought  to have lots  of friends, that the more friends we accumulated, the more “okay” we were. And we are still passing that on to our children, as well.  One educator writes that we seem more concerned today with young children’s social development that with their moral development.  An interesting observation.

This idealization of friendship becomes an immediate problem when one tries to define friendship or talk about it in the abstract.  Lillian Rubin writes in her book on the subject (Just Friends: The Role of Friendship in Our Lives. Harper and Row, Publishers, New York. 1985) that,

“We have friends, we have good friends, and we have best friends….. but everyone has their own idea of what those terms mean exactly.”

When Rubin asked hundreds of people, “What is a friend?”  most people tended to give the same ideal list of qualities:  trust, honesty, respect, commitment, safety, support, generosity, loyalty, mutuality, constancy, understanding, acceptance. 

These all seem to be the minimum requirements, if you will, to be counted as a friend.  But when the question gets more concrete and particular – “What is your friendship with Jane like?”  - it’s then that the reality of relationships stands revealed.

Thus, it was entirely possible for James Thurber to say of Thornton Wilder, “The man is impossible: he is stubborn, cantankerous, rude, inconsiderate, self-centered, and almost completely void of redeeming qualities. I should know, he’s been my best friend for forty years.”

There is no perfect friendship because there are no perfect people.  All friendships have their strengths and their deficiencies.  Each friendship is imperfect, and yet precious and irreplaceable.

All kinds of thinkers and writers have tried to articulate the substance and role of friendship in our lives.  I particularly like Emerson’s notion that friendship provides two vital things: truth and tenderness.  Our friends tell us the truth, and they gift us with tender mercies.

Francis Bacon said there are three fruits of Friendship:  someone to confide in,  someone to get counsel from,  and someone to count on  to do for you what your cannot do for yourself.

Psychologist Irwin Sandler put it that we need both “buffers” and “boosters” in our lives:  “buffers to reduce the pain of negative events, and boosters to enhance the pleasure of positive events.  In other words, to heal us when we hurt, and to celebrate us when we succeed.

When I examine friendships I’ve had in my life, I can recognize moments when all of this analysis seems to fit.  I think of those “buffers” and “boosters” who have seen me through my most painful and wonderful moments.  The friend who helped me reframe and rewrite an entire chapter of my dissertation in one day so I wouldn’t have to wait an extra year for my doctorate.  The friend who, without being asked, met me at the airport when my mother died, so I wouldn’t be alone.

Like most people, I’ve been the recipient of some marvelous friendships in my life, and they remain precious to me.  But such friendships are not a constant factor in my life, if I would be honest.  There are times when it seems I have let some of the best friendships in my life slip away for long periods of time, some probably now forever.  And I’m not really sure why. 

I wonder if your experience these days is much like mine.  I live a busy life in a time-demanding profession, like so many of you, and what little extra time I find, I usually dedicate to my homelife and to my very best friend, to whom I happen to be married.  So I do not seem to make much time these days for the kinds of friendships that once sustained me.  I rely an awful lot, more than I have any right to, on past experience with friends to bind me to them. 

Like me, they seem busy with other priorities in their lives just now, and I’m hoping that our unspoken covenant is still as strong as I have assumed.  But lately, I don’t know, that is feeling less satisfactory to me, and I am frankly reconsidering some ways to make more room in my life for friendships and a more joyful balance of commitments in my work life.

I have a fear that I will still be saying that years from now when it is too late, and after all of my friendships have died of neglect.  All the research shows that middle-age men are far more wanting of friends than are middle-age women.  Friendship, of course, is a voluntary activity.  The problem is once you allow a close friendship to wither, a new friendship takes time to build.  It takes time and emotional energy.

Lillian Rubin takes it a step further.  It is through our friendships, she asserts, that we develop our sense of our common humanity.  “It is our friends who provide reference outside the family against which to measure and judge ourselves; to help us during passages that require our separation and individuation; who support us as we adapt to new roles and new rules; who heal the hurts and make good the deficits of other relationships in our lives….. It is with friends that we test our sense of self-in-the-world and our sense of self-yet-to-become.”

Of course, it’s a rare friendship that lasts for a lifetime, or even, in this mobile society of ours, for a decade.  Friends come and go over time; some move away, some die, friends drift apart for all kind of reasons valid and invalid.  Nor can a friendship be measured by time alone.  And, in case you haven’t noticed, men and women seem to have different styles of being friends, though generalizations always break down by exception.

Lotty Pogrebin’s book makes bold to suggest that men and women have things to learn from each other’s ways in friendship.  She quotes from studies of Americans that tend to reveal that men’s friendships are often more fun, but have less intimacy and depth than friendship between women in this society.  The same studies show that women’s friendships tend to have more honesty, and more emotional investment.

Moreover, friendship plays different roles at different stages in our lives.  We need friends in different ways depending on our time of life, our family situations, and our work situations. But one strong caveat emerges in view of the frequency with which friends tend to disappear from our lives in this culture of ours – namely, that those who think new friendships are not important, or that friends are hard to find beyond a certain age in life, are likely to find themselves very lonely indeed, before long. 

Old friends may be compass points and measures of our progress through life, but new friends are vital to a sense of well-being, always.  In old age, for example, when new lovers are rare, and new children rarer, and with family dwindling, there is still and always the possibility of a new friend.

On bright Spring Sunday in May, I suppose there are any number of deep thoughts that could enhance your spiritual life or bring you closer to God or help you find meaning and peace in your life.  The focus I want to suggest to you today is one that is accessible in the simplest of philosophies as well as the most profound of ethical teachings.  I invite you to examine the quality and status of your friendships, such as they are.  And if necessary to take some step this week to shore them up, shine them up, reclaim them, appreciate them, and strengthen them.  A worthy valentine, that, for yourself and for all those friends who, in their own time and in their individual ways, have graced your life.