While it's natural for the circumstances of life and time to change our friendships, some obstacles should be recognized and confronted.
As I get older, I increasingly struggle to hold onto friendships from earlier in life. This is sometimes my fault. It often is no one’s fault.
My friends from high school scattered after graduation. For a while, we would get together a few times a year at the holidays to reconnect, but eventually the common ground we used to share dissipated. Most of us were off at college. Without seeing each other every day, our topics of conversation became stale. It’s still fun to see an old friend and reminisce but the relationships are no longer vital. They feel different, something from the past worth cherishing but very much belonging to the past.
It’s the same story with college friends. For four years, we shared an intense, strongly felt connection. We were all away from home, discovering adulthood together, having the time of our lives in the dorms. Friendships were formed quickly. We had energy to burn and stayed up late, being irresponsible and finding our footing as we explored heady philosophical and political topics.
In youth, every experience is new, each one opens a bright shining path in the mind, and the neurons lock the intensity of the moment into memory. The experiences are intense and feel more important than anything that had happened before or would ever happen in the future.
When I think back, those events still feel like they happened yesterday. We swear to remain friends always, but are rarely able to keep our promises. Soon enough, graduation takes us back to hometowns or on to new adventures. These days, my old college town feels like it’s haunted with the ghosts of College Past.
Even the friendships I formed in my young adult years have shifted. Once I married and we started having children, friendships with single friends became harder to hold onto because we started living different lives. I spend time these days with friends who have children in the same age range as mine, and with friends I’ve made at church. I cannot emphasize enough how valuable our parish has become to my family’s social life. The parish allows us to see the same people multiple times every week. The bonds we’ve formed with them are nourished by continuing contact, unlike the friends I rarely see anymore.
I would reckon that the vast majority of us have felt the guilt of losing touch with old friends. Maybe you’ve even thought about texting one of them and then, for reasons unknown, decided not to. We so desperately want to stay in touch but life has other ideas. Friendship is a valuable commodity - we cannot be happy without at least some good friends – and yet it’s hard to achieve long-lasting, stable friendships.
Beyond the challenges posed to friendship by time and distance, I thought I might share a few thoughts on other factors that create difficulty, and why some friendships that ought to be vital and rewarding end up dying of neglect or conflict.
Over-commitment
One challenge to friendship is, ironically, wanting too much or allowing a friend to demand too much in terms of emotional intimacy or time. Friendships can sometimes become claustrophobic and overly demanding. Sometimes, friends want all your attention all the time. They want a return text right away.
Over-committed relationships ask too much of us and misplace the value of friendship. A friend cannot become a substitute for healthy relationships with God and family.
The solution to this is setting healthy boundaries. This helps to keep the friendship from being weighed down by undue pressure.
Envy
One of the results of over-commitment is envy. I’ve seen friend-groups treat one of their own terribly for simply spending time with another person or trying to introduce a new person to the group. They’re jealous of the new relationship and secretly feel it as a personal insult, thinking it exists because of an inadequacy in themselves. I’ve also witnessed friendships come apart because one person experienced positive changes in their circumstances while the other friend didn’t. One went to college, the other stayed home. One got married, the other remained single. One got involved in church, the other was uninterested. Jealousy attacks a friendship by introducing division.
The cure for jealousy is maintaining an intentional attitude of always wanting the best for each other. Friends seek the good for each other and celebrate each other’s successes, even when those successes introduce changes into the friendship.
Absence of shared challenges
Some of the best friends I ever made is from bonding over mutual suffering. There are my seminary friends and the long hours we spent studying, arguing theology, and complaining about our teachers. There are my fellow priests with whom I feel deep camaraderie over the pitfalls of ministry, liturgies gone bad, and our personal foibles. There are my married friends who we hang out with to swap war stories about parenting and enjoy a precious few hours of speaking to another adult.
All of these friends, I’ve bonded with over shared challenges. We’re pursuing the same goals and get excited by the same things. Friends I’m not as close to anymore, for the most part, have goals that have diverged from my own. We get together when we can and still enjoy each other’s company, but the bond feels less vital because we’re no longer moving in quite the same direction.
The solution to drifting apart can be solved by the introduction of shared experiences and taking an active interest in each other’s goals, and also understanding that, sometimes, the divergence of goals is inevitable.
In the end, it’s important to keep in sight how valuable and precious it is to have strong friendships. A good friend brings tremendous joy, offers new perspectives, and allows us the chance to live in community with others. Sometimes old friends drift away and new friends appear. That’s only natural, but what I’ve learned over the course of my life is that a friendship shouldn’t be taken for granted and casually discarded.
Sure, we don’t strictly require friendship in order to earn money, eat, and survive, but I’m always reminded of the wisdom of C.S. Lewis, who says that even if friends aren’t necessary for survival, they are one of God’s gifts that give value to survival. With good friends, we don’t simply endure life. We thrive.
