Friendship is hard.
It’s particularly hard, I think, when you’re an adult. As a kid, friendship is not easy, but it happens almost by accident: “We sat next to each other in class, so we’re friends now. Oh well.”
As an adult, friendship feels like managing a list of sales accounts: “It’s been three months since we last spoke. It’s time for a reach-out.” This is because old friends live far away and new friends are available for coffee on the second Tuesday of next month. Or maybe three Thursdays from now, if that works better for you.
Come to find out, it’s hard to build a friendship on a coffee every other month.
So what are friendships built on?
Lewis’ great quote suggests that the initial foundation is some secret common thread: “The typical expression of opening friendship would be something like, ‘What? You too? I thought I was the only one.'”
I like that way of putting it very much, but as he says, it’s only the beginning. You can have a you-too moment with a stranger. You must have many you-too moments to make a friend. And to create those moments, you need a shared context, something outside of yourself and the other person around which the two of you can be friends, something you can both return to again and again. You need church, or motherhood, or fantasy football – something. Shared contexts give our friendships meaning, but the bad news is that many of them have shrunk to the size of the screens in our pockets. Deep friendships need something bigger than that.
It’s tempting to vilify culture, and yes, the world seems much more concerned with helping us to be ourselves than it is with helping us to be friends. But I think the chief reason for the difficulty of friendship really has nothing to do with culture.
We harden ourselves.
Alli and I were talking to a couple the other day after church, and as it so often does, our small talk petered into a small silence. We had raced through the shallow pleasantries (“How’s the week been?” – “Oh, pretty good… yours?” – “Can’t complain, can’t complain”) and for about twelve seconds we looked at each other, awkward smiles plastered on our faces, searching for the next joke or easy topic of connection like a drowning man flailing silently for the rope.
Then I cut it off. “Well, I’m hungry. Alli, are you ready to go get some lunch?”
So we left.
I do this sort of thing all the time. I leave. I’m the one who quits the party early, the one who doesn’t respond immediately to texts, the one who pushes the phone call toward its conclusion by saying I have to go do such and such. It’s a defense mechanism against discomfort. I’ve realized that I like to end interactions before I can feel unwanted.
Nobody wants to be rejected.
No wonder friendship is hard.
