How many friends do you have? Are their roots intertwined with yours back into your childhood, or are they social media-spawned acquaintances whose greetings and faces flicker across a mobile device screen?
I’m blessed with four abiding friendships — all men — who occupy different parts of my life like players on a baseball field each manning their assigned position. I talk to each one weekly in person, by phone, or via Zoom.
They are all very different people who have led lives very different from mine. Three of them grew up in households poorer than the one I grew up in. Two of them attained academic success greater than my scholastic achievements. Unlike me, two of them served in the military. I think one of them might have served some jail time, but I haven’t dug too deeply into the subject.
All four have met and talked during social occasions my wife and I have hosted at our home. But I am the common denominator they share and when I get together with each of them, our conversations are defined by humor, insights about children and wives and, every so often, shared gratitude about our friendships and the benefits we bring into each other’s lives.
Google “male friendships” and you get 36 million results. A website called psypost features this headline: “Male and female friendships are maintained by different psychological dynamics.”
That has got to rank among history’s greatest understatements. I’ve always been under the impression women make and keep friendships easier than men. But maybe that’s just media messaging. One of my buddies has fast friendships dating back to boyhood. Another bemoaned recently how he does a lousy job at sustaining friendships with men.
I have two close relatives who have few, if any, friends and I wonder why. Growing up, I was uneasy and awkward with social circle friendships and envied kids who could easily maintain several friendships when I only managed to sustain an enduring friendship with one person.
When I reached my mid-50s, three realizations hit me like a cold shower: I could work harder on improving my health or watch it cycle downward; I could conclude that my career has been a success or regret my failures; and I could work hard to buttress relationships or get intimately acquainted with what the word ‘lonely’ truly means.
Blood-tie relationships can descend into a dormancy reinforced by distance or unresolved conflicts, but they never die. Friendships take work. They are like a tapestry composed of complicated designs and varied colors. The threads the tapestry is created from must be mended, stitched, and trimmed to keep the whole from becoming tattered pieces.
Friendships take this kind of work and I am happy to be doing my part to keep the tapestry from unraveling. But I think we need a societal approach to growing and strengthening friendships, especially in the wake of the blow COVID-19 dealt all of us.
The easiest way may be to find how we can get more people to volunteer and then intersect those volunteer opportunities with social occasions. If you volunteered somewhere two hours a week and coupled that volunteering with a two-hour social function with the same people twice a month, it would be hard to avoid planting the seeds for friendship.
Friendships, if you ask me, are good for your health; they have the potential to reduce political polarization and they make us take a hard look at ourselves. Here’s a suggestion: Call a friend today.
