What Are Friends For

 

I've been truly blessed in my life through friendship, through amazing people I've been lucky enough to call friend and who have cared for me and done life with me in profound ways. It is not hyperbole to say that I am who I am as a result of friends and friendships. 

So I read with great interest the deep dive on friendship in America contained in the 2021 American Perspectives Survey which among other things noted the steep decline men in particular face in close friendships, as well as a recent Atlantic article on whether friends should offer harsh truth or unconditional acceptance. I won't repeat or litigate the key points in either piece, but rather muse about what we are doing to cultivate our friendships and to be good friends. 

The fact of the matter is that, unlike with family, we do choose our friends. And while friend dynamics can complicate things in the way family dynamics do, as far as whether and how to interact with people, it is something we can largely make intentional and active choices about, to spend time and for the time to be both positive and honest as befits two flawed people moving about a messy world.

Alas, so much of our fast-paced modern lives is about having things happen to us. We invest in a relationship only to have that person move away or get too busy. Or we ourselves clutter our lives in ways that create a drifting in once-close ties. It can be frustrating, the dissonance between the importance of friendships to our well-being and the glory of past close relationships, compared with our feeling of isolation and distance when it comes to our friendships in the present.

Like anything meaningful in life, friends and friendships require intentional effort. Some of us are lucky enough to stumble into easy relationships, easy in how we interact and easy in how easy it is to interact. Most of us are not so lucky and have to make choices to invest scarce time to keep a tie warm. These recent articles remind me that investment is a good one. Friends matter, and friendships matter, enough so to work on them and fight for them and cherish them.