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Chapter 1

A Case for Friendship — Why Do We Even Need Friends?

“Friendship … is born at the moment when one man says to another ‘What! You too? I thought that no one but myself …’”

— C. S. Lewis

I curled up with my nine-year-old son on the couch as he cried out the hurt he had suffered from his best friend’s decision to “unfriend” him. He sniffled and sobbed and wiped his runny nose on my sleeve. “Why do we even need friends?” he asked me. “What are they even for?” I struggled to explain the purpose of friendship to someone whose heart was so freshly broken and came up with a “mom speech” that was not quite right. The fact is, it was a good question, and one for which there was no easy answer.

After a lot of reading and research, and asking even more questions, I’ve learned that once upon a time friends and community were necessary for survival — there was no way for a guy to kill a mammoth with a stick unless he brought his buddies with him. We’ve evolved past hunting our food with sharp sticks, thank goodness, so what roles do our modern friendships fill? And, are they somehow necessary for our survival?

I asked my eldest daughter — conveniently, she’s a neuroscience student — for the scientific purpose of friendship, if there was one. She began by explaining that human beings are herd animals and therefore have an instinct to congregate in groups for safety. She explained the evolution of the brain with a lot of very big words that I wrote down to look up later. Now that I have, I’m still not sure I understand. What I did get out of that conversation, though, was that there seems to be a biological drive to create friendships. So, there must be a purpose behind them.

The need for people and community is hard-wired into our psyches. Studies of human brain activity show over and over that the presence of a close friend releases dopamine, serotonin, and oxytocin into our brains. Those are the “pleasure” hormones, the same ones that make us fall in love and keep us from killing our children (always a benefit!). We don’t merely get silly or goofy when our friends are around; we get high. Suddenly, my high school and college shenanigans make a lot more sense.

What I keep coming back to is the idea that we still need our friends and family for safety and survival, just maybe not the physical kind. Because of the internet and technology, it’s absolutely possible to work from home, shop from home, bank from home, and have everything we need to keep our bodies functioning delivered right to our front door. There are now services that will even bring your purchases inside your house, making it unnecessary to even step outside onto your front porch. We practically never have to interact in person with another human being ever again. As a result, many of us have become quasi-hermits. We huddle inside the home theaters in our McMansions, eat the dinner that was delivered, build ten-foot-high fences so we don’t even have to acknowledge that our neighbors exist, and text with our virtual friends all night long. (Heaven forbid we should actually call someone.) Then we wonder why we’re depressed and living under the oppressive weight of this modern loneliness.

It’s because we need people. We’re herd animals, remember? We may not be out hunting big game with our Cro-Magnon posse, but that doesn’t change the fundamental fact that we are designed to live in community and have relationships with other people. We need our friends to help keep us emotionally, mentally, and spiritually healthy. Just as nutritious food feeds and energizes the body, our friends feed and energize our minds and souls.

My grandmother is known to remark, “If I want to know who you are, I’ll just look at the company you keep.” I didn’t really understand what she meant until middle and high school, when I saw how the good kids I knew were influenced into doing some pretty bad things. Their reputations were ruined because of the people they hung out with on the weekends. There were crowds of nice kids, and gangs of “the other kind.” In our smallish Texas town, your character was judged by the crowd you ran with, and it was extremely hard to salvage your good name once it was tarnished by hanging with troublemakers. There’s a reason for it, of course. The fact is, most of us will allow our character to rise or fall to the level of the people around us. Therefore, we should surround ourselves with good people.

Over the years, I have learned to discern which friends are worth investing my effort, time, and energy in, and which aren’t. I stopped looking at surface qualities, such as looks, age, or social standing, and began to look instead for people who made me laugh, brought me joy, gave me the gift of their honest selves, and weren’t afraid to tell me the truth when I screwed up. I love meeting new people, seeing who they have in their own inner circles and how they treat them. (My grandmother was right: You can tell everything by the company your friends keep. So, pay attention.)

Friends are there to bring out our better selves

Close friends can also serve as our own Jiminy Cricket, pricking our conscience and fueling our better natures. They may be quick with a joke that raises eyebrows and makes us snort with laughter, but they also make us want to stretch and become the best people we are capable of being. When I was a small girl, my mother told me that the mark of a truly great friend was that they would make you want to be a better person; if they didn’t, then they weren’t really that great a friend.

My best friend and I keep each other on the straight and narrow by calling each other out on our crap. She doesn’t let me get away with anything, and I return the favor. We listen to each other’s excuses when we aren’t as good as we ought to be, and then we say: “That’s a great excuse. What’s the real reason?” We’re hard on each other, but God help the person who criticizes us, even if it’s ourselves.

On a particularly down day a few years back, I cut into her “I’m not good enough/patient enough/whatever enough” diatribe to tell her: “No one gets to be this mean to my friend, not even you. You may be frustrated right now, but you’re talking about the friend I love, and I’m not going to listen to her being run down like this.”

She laughed and sighed, but this has now become a standard thing in our friendship — we don’t let people talk trash about others, not even about ourselves. Instead, we say, “Yeah, I get it — this is hard right now — but here’s where you are killing it …” Those reminders of all the places we’re actually succeeding, even when it seems as if the sky is falling, have pulled us out of plenty of tailspins.

Because we’re so close, we get to see the patterns in each other’s lives, the patterns we don’t often see for ourselves. That gives us the perspective to tell each other hard truths, like, “Every time you spend time with your sister-in-law you become a lunatic crazy person” or, “Spending time with your mother makes you eat all the things; maybe you should clean out the junk food and stock up on carrots before she comes over” or, the painful to hear, “You suck with money; maybe you need to take a class on money management or turn the checkbook over to your husband.” Who else is going to tell you this if it’s not your friends? Who else is going to be close enough to the daily living of your life? Who else wants you there hanging out with them in heaven so that they’re willing to make “being amazing” a group project?

Henry Ford was known to say, “My best friend is the one who brings out the best in me.”

Exactly so.

Good friends help keep us calm and out of jail

There are days when the whole world seems to be working right on my last nerve and I become the teapot from the nursery rhyme: “When I get all steamed up hear me shout …” Boom. Then my head explodes, and I word vomit all over the person next to me, savaging them with the venom of my anger. Or I call my best friend and rant about the state of the world, how much I detest bureaucracy, and how “I’m just done with it all! Done, and I mean it!” She’ll quietly sip her coffee and listen before she goes to work helping me figure out the whole stinking mess.

For the past fourteen years, Kara and I have been the confidante and sounding board for each other. We are the voice of reason, peeling each other off the ceiling, talking the other off the edge of the cliff, and cooling boiling tempers. The ability to help balance us out and remind us of our better natures is part of why having what Anne-with-an-E Shirley called a “bosom friend” is so valuable (my first Green Gables reference in this book). Throughout our lives, there will only be a small handful of people we will trust with the whole truth of who we are, and who will trust us in return. These people are valuable and necessary to our own good mental health. They are the friends we trust to be honest with us — and to protect us from the worst we can be.

They help us chase our dreams

There is a woman I know who took seventeen years to get her college degree. She took her first class when she was nineteen and finally walked across the stage at thirty-six. Along the way she got married, had three children, and moved as a military wife a half-dozen times. But she stuck with her studies. Her friends were there for every step. They listened to her plans and dreams, helped her study for tests, and supported her through the days when she wanted to walk away from it all. On the day she finally graduated, they filled an entire row in the stands and screamed her name as she was handed her diploma. Her victory was also theirs.

Good friends don’t let you quit on your dreams for yourself. They know that being static isn’t growing, and not growing isn’t being alive. There is nothing more exciting than watching the people you love fight and claw and work their way toward the impossible dream, and then watching them actually achieve it. Friends don’t let you sit quietly in the corner and fade into a beige version of the person they love. They push, cheer, and cajole you into seeking and dreaming, and help drag your exhausted carcass over the finish line.

They help keep us healthy and alive

Studies consistently show the health benefits of having friends. People with close friends are less likely, on average, to develop diabetes, heart disease, depression, and dementia. People with close, meaningful friendships live longer, on average, perhaps because they’re having too much fun to die.

Studies on pain tolerance have shown that having a friend nearby after surgery actually lowers your perception of the pain you’re in and means you need fewer drugs to cope. That means friends are a painkiller, which is kind of like a superhero, so that’s pretty cool.

It’s been proven that the emotional ties of close long-term friends and the mental stimulation they provide are even more effective than exercise in protecting long-term health! Having friends is better for your health than having a gym membership and giving up ice cream. That doesn’t mean that you don’t need to exercise, of course, just that it would be even better if you dragged friends along, or made friends while you were working out. And no one should really give up ice cream.

Good friends encourage us on our walk with God

I want to go to heaven, but I don’t really want to be hanging out on those cloud benches and listening to the angelic choirs all by myself. While that would be great, it would be even better if my friends were there with me, singing along. We pray for and with one another and with each other all the time. We discuss theology and parse our way through what we each believe. We know that part of being healthy is being spiritually healthy, and we want that for one another more than anything.

Any time I find myself in the middle of a period of chaos and upheaval in my life, my friend Jen can be counted on to say: “When was the last time you went to confession? Your life always goes sideways when you haven’t been going.” What’s remarkable about that is that she’s not Catholic. She doesn’t stop to think about what she believes. She knows the things that are part of my walk with Christ, and she can see the peace that the sacraments bring me. While we don’t see eye to eye on theology, we’ve both got our gazes firmly fixed on Jesus.

Good friends aren’t shy about holding each other accountable if one goes off the road and starts drifting into sinful behavior. Faithful friends rejoice over God’s blessings for the other and are bold in crying out to him on each other’s behalf. During the most difficult times of life, a good friend will be like Simon of Cyrene, helping us to carry our cross. They truly want what’s best for us and know that that ultimately means heaven. They help us work toward our own salvation even as we help them toward theirs. Friends are brothers and sisters in Christ, and that makes us family.

We are witnesses of one another

My ninety-six-year-old grandmother puts it even more simply: “Our friends serve as the witnesses of our lives. They are there to remind us of the things we have forgotten and the tales we’ve lived along the way. When we are gone, they tell the world that someone like us once lived and loved. Then someday, hopefully, they will come to stand before the Throne of the Almighty and argue on our behalf. On that day, may their tongues be true and their memories a little faulty.” Amen.