I have been thinking a lot about friendship lately for several reasons, the primary reason being that I hear so often from the men I see in my practice that they have no friends. My thoughts have included understanding the very nature of friendship, how it is developed, how people experience friendship differently, the ease of developing friendship in early years, the difficulty of developing and enhancing friendships in older age, the ending of friendships, and finally how we might find a good place for friendships in our lives. The lead article in the most recent Psychology Today had an article entitled “the Friend Effect” that was quite interesting. If you consider your friendships in the past, you will notice that there have been some significant changes, which then leads us to consider our current friendships and the possibility of any future friendships. Let’s look at the nature of friendship, and then go on to study establishing, enhancing, ending, and the value and possible dangers of friendship.

What is friendship?

There are two different origins of the European words for friend or friendship, a Germanic origin, from which we get our English term, friend (in German, freund) and a much different Latin origin, amicus, from which we get words like amicable. Both the Germanic and Latin origins speak of love being at the center of friendship. So, a friend is someone you love, and friendship is the outgrowth of becoming a friend to someone. There is a plethora of theories, ideas, and experiences with friends in the literature over the centuries, most of it written in fiction and poetry, which might say that the whole phenomenon of friendship has been felt, but perhaps not thoroughly studied.

The values of friendship

The Psychology Today articles on friendship noted a great variety of value to friendship including:

• Reducing the effects of aging
• Improving brain functioning
• Improving self-esteem
• Reducing inflammation
• Sharpening social maturity and engagement
• Protects against any social hurt or damage
• Increases creativity
• Increases productivity
• Increases cooperation

It appears that having friends is, for the large part, of great physical, emotional, and social success in life, and perhaps personal/spiritual development. You would think, with all these positive aspects of friendship, there would be many more friendships, lasting friendships, and enhancement of friendship. However, such is not always the case, which we will examine in a moment. Yet, there can be a dark side to friendship.

The dangers of friendship

• Loss of friendship due to circumstances (moving, job change, illness or death)
• A friend leaves the friendship, which can be devasting because you have trusted this person, perhaps received some kind of support from this person, and s/he might have been your best friend.
• A friend becomes some kind of enemy, or in childhood an antagonist or bully
• A friend betrays you in some way, perhaps telling some secret that you have shared, or perhaps taking away your life’s partner
• The danger of having only one friend
• A slow separation in friendship due to developing changes in geography, philosophy, religious persuasion, or politics
• Having a profession that takes an inordinate amount of time and may inhibit the development of friendships
• Conflicts with friends that are hard to resolve for many reasons

One of the reason for such conflicts is that we get older and develop differently.

Friendship and age

When asked what friends they might have, my male patients often tell me that they have no friends, or perhaps just a few acquaintances “at the shop or office or in the neighborhood.” It has become obvious to me that as we age friendship is increasingly difficult to maintain, difficult to enhance, and nearly impossible to establish. There is a natural thing that happens as we age, which is that we find safety in familiarity and in our daily routines. These routines can sometimes begin to diminish other activities. We may play less, read less (occasionally more), attend to responsibilities, contact friends less, and so doing, find a way of living that is unique to ourselves but doesn’t necessarily include other people. I have a 65-year-old patient who, although he is quite expressive and extraverted, twice unsuccessfully married, who has no friends aside from the “chatrooms” that he visits daily. I have a friend about the same ago who has never been married, and although he has developed a busy life, even in his retirement, he seemingly has no close friends. I have several patients who put so much time into their work and family responsibilities that they seemingly have no time left over for simple friendship.

When asked when they had friends, almost universally men say that they the most friends when they were in elementary school and in high school although many men say that they did not really have friends past the junior high years. Undoubtedly, friendship is easier to establish during your younger years, because we are not so set in our ways and don’t look beyond the current day to have a lasting friendship. It is easier to make friends in childhood with someone who is quite different from you because as a child you simply don’t see the differences that in later years cause difficulty in friendships. For children, gender differences are often not very significant. My best friend when I was six was a female, but I had only a vague understanding of our biological differences. Furthermore, when I am a child, I don’t know much about myself, people, and the world so making friends is not so much work as it is simply something that happens. You might become friends with a neighbor, a classmate, or a teammate on a sports team. But you don’t think much about who this person really is, what they think, what they do, or for that matter, what they feel. I remember fondly friends that I had in my elementary school years, but I never cared much about what they believed or what their parents did for a living. Friendship in childhood was largely about play.

It wasn’t until adolescence that we begin to see similarities and differences among people and do a bit of finding people with whom we can have a deeper relationship. Males tend to develop friendships around sports, academics, and organizations, but male friendship during the teen years are a mixture of competition and cooperation. The situation is very different for girls who talk much more about their feelings and relationships. This difference between males and females makes friendship, intimacy, and relationships much different as boys and girls become men and women. These profound differences in the way men and women see a relationship often leads to an actual lack of friendship in an adult committed relationship. Furthermore, when two people couple up, there is a frequent tendency to neglect other friendships for the sake of the intimate partnership, this together with increased responsibilities of life.

It is the responsibilities of life, namely work, marriage, children, property, finances, higher education, and the like that often prevent the enhancement of friendships, much less the establishment of friendships. When asked of their priorities in life, most men tell me of their interest in their marriage (or lack thereof), children (or lack thereof), work, house, savings for their children’s college education, and a bit of involvement in some organization, like a lodge or church. Rarely, do these men put any emphasis on friendships, neither the enhancement nor the establishment of friendships.

This brings us to a discussion of how to enhance the friendships we have, establish new friendships, deal with the loss of friendship, and end friendships that have become deleterious. Here we will be speaking singularly of friendships in adulthood.

Enhancement and establishment of friendship

Enhancement of a friendship is a challenge, and it is often last on the list of one’s priorities. It takes a fair bit of self-examination, perhaps together with a bit of musing about the friendships in our lives, in order to “enhance’ the relationship. This means making a good thing better. Unfortunately, most of us have not had much teaching and learning about what it means to have, maintain, and enhance a friendship in adult life, so we have a thought that adult friendship should be as easy as it was in childhood. The first thing to keep in mind is that enhancing an existing relationship is not easy. The second thing is that it is absolutely necessary for the reasons cited above, not the least of which is one’s physical health that is enhanced by friendship, the second being that we get better at it as we work at it. “Working” on enhancing a friendship starts with the knowledge that you just might be lonely, namely for the easy of friendship that you had when you were a child. This is a start because it means that you need friendship even though you might not know how to develop a friendship. Admitting that “something is missing in your life” just might lead you to the awareness that that something is another person with whom you can talk, play, work, or just be together. This may be hard to acknowledge. The next step in this “work” is even harder. You need to reach out. This reaching out can be a text, an email, a phone call, or a spontaneous visit if that is possible. I see many men who are lonely for a friend but can’t seem to pick up the phone. Again: it was so much easier during childhood when you could just knock on your friends’ door and ask him if he wanted “to come out and play.”

If enhancing a friendship it hard in adulthood, establishing one is much harder: it’s almost impossible. That having been said, friendship in life is essential, and it just might save your life, or at the least enhance your life. So, how do you establish a friendship with someone? Again, the place to start is to realize that you have no friends, together with remembering that you used to have good friends. Then, you just might find yourself looking for some kind of common ground for a friendship. This is essentially triangulating, meaning finding something in common where you might actually meet someone. Ideally, this is a place where something physical is happening, like biking or hiking, places where you can keep quiet as a newcomer and watch the crowd. The other place is some kind of learning, which could be a class, an organization, or some kind of community support. A developing and lasting relationship has several elements: physicality in some way, playful activity, if possible, intellectual conversation if possible, and emotional connection. Too many people seek emotional connection first. Usually, this is the last thing that develops is a friendship. You come to love a friend when you work, play, think, and talk together. However simple my suggestions are for establishing a friendship, almost no one really does the necessary work to find a friend. These things about enhancing and establishing friendship are made in the light of fact that most friendships end, or simply die away, in adult life. Unfortunately, it is much easier to end a friendship than it is to establish one.

The end of a friendship

As in all things that we love, all friendships end: sometimes by choice, sometimes by necessity, sometimes by your hand, sometimes by your friend’s hand, and sometimes by death. I think that friendships end, for the most part at least, because friends haven’t kept up with one another, meaning talking and doing things together so as to enhance the friendship. A friendship that is not enhanced will not grow, and will likely die in some way. Some of these friendships need to end, or perhaps we could say that they “sunset” as you have new sunrises in your life that do not or cannot work with a friend that has been close but now has developed in a different way.

I have ended several friendships over my years, some by direct calling an end to the friendship, sometimes by default, meaning a lack of interest or perhaps neglect. The ones that I have directly ended with words were ones that had served me, as hopefully I also served my friends, but I found them no longer serving me, largely because I had grown in certain ways that my friends had not grown. In these times I have ended the friendships with the statement, “It has been a good run,” meaning that the friendship had been good for perhaps a long time but was no longer good, at least for me. I have an inclination to give to a fault, as many therapists do. As I look at the ending of these friendships, I realized that I had held on to the friendship for too long, and found myself pretending that it was good for me, slowly coming to see that the friendship, however good it had been, was no longer good for me. The friendships that have simply faded away, usually because of geographical distance or different responsibilities, were less painful and easier to look at with nostalgia.

Much of a dying friendship and ending a friendship has to do with feelings, particularly feelings that have not been expressed, feelings that have changed over time but were hard to reconcile with an ongoing friendship. A person I considered to be my best friend has seemingly ended our friendship for some unspoken reason. I believe that I have offended and hurt him in some way, but he has not been able to bring his hurt to me directly. It has taken some time but I now largely look upon this friendship nostalgically, remembering the many hours, days, and years that we spent talking, playing, working, and traveling. If someone has seemingly ended a friendship with you, you need to consider carefully whether or not you might contact your friend and see if there can be fire in the friendship. I have chosen to treat this fading relationship with benign neglect, ready to reestablish and enhance the friendship while being content to live with the sorrow that any end always has. Honest sorrow will lead to nostalgia, never anger or fear.

Some friendships really need to end. I have ended relationships with several friends, some “best friends,” because I found that I had grown in certain ways that these friends had grown in different ways. Furthermore, I foolishly thought that I could bring a friend along on a path that was not good for him, and simultaneously felt stuck on his path. Ending a friendship doesn’t have to be angry or punitive, but it needs to be definitive. Ideally, you say something like, “Friend, you have been very good for me and I treasure what we have had, but I find myself in a different place now, and I can’t seem to maintain what we used to have, so I will need to kindly back out of what has been very good, which is no longer very good, before it becomes bad”…or something like this.

You may have a friendship with an organization or a group that has ended, or perhaps needs to end. I have been involved in three psychological organizations, two of which have distinctly ended, while the third is tangential. I recently ended a relationship with a church, together with a sadness of now not seeing some friends that I have had in that church. I ended a basketball group after 25 years of playing with a bunch of guys, this ending coming because of the apparent lack of continued interest in playing together.

If you take a close look at your friendships, you might discover that you dearly love someone but have lost touch with this dear friend. Perhaps, it is time you reach out to him/her. You might discover that a formally good friendship no longer serves you or your friend, and may need to end. The key is understanding how, when, and why you need to examine your friendships is how you feel. Do you feel the love that you used to have, but have neglected to enhance the friendship, or has your love for this person waned, perhaps necessarily. There are always joys and sorrows with friendship.

Friendships with nature, play, work, and being alone

I can’t speak with authority on the subject of nature because I am not particularly a nature person. I should simply say that you might be friends with things living other than human, or even things no living, all of which are a part of nature. My wife has a deep fondness for rocks, of all things. She also says that one of our local country roads is one of her best friends. Many people are “animal people.” A friend once told me that his “partner” was nature itself. Find your friendships wherever they may be, enhance them, and nurture them. Odd as it sounds, people can have friendships with nonhuman things including property, play, and work. Some people are at their best when they play chess with AI, when they are alone, or when they are working. What or who is your best friend?

Some people are truly friends with work, sometimes their profession or trade, sometimes working on the house or backyard. You’re not an “workaholic” if you are friends with work. You might also be friends with some kind of play, which might be playing chess with AI, play in the garden, or play with other people who are not really friends but simply playmates. Finally, you might be friends with silence, solitude, and privacy. Some people call these times being friends with God.