On Friends vs. Acquaintances
The Greek playwright Euripedes remarked once that “One loyal friend is worth ten thousand relatives.” He was right, of course, but the making—and keeping—of such friends in the latter years of one’s life is depressingly difficult.
I’ve got a hypothesis that our truest friends are made either in high school or in college, and if you don’t make them at those stages in life, you’re lucky to find them elsewhere.
The one thing, I think, that’ll be common to any of those friendships is innumerable hours doing a bunch of nothing and a lot of stuff that you care deeply about it together.
Anything less than that deserves only the title of acquaintance, which Europeans use often to describe the majority of their relationships and which Americans are afraid to use for fear of hurting a person’s feelings.
Myself, I spent my entire 20s living with a loneliness that I was afraid publicly to admit. Partly it was my own fault. I suffered a pathological need to find elite, Inkling-like friendships and I’d settle for nothing else.
Since my search involved the quest for the impossibly ideal friend, I ended up with no friends. It took the gracious but fiercely determined love of two buddies to expose my broken thinking.
In his book Culture Making, Andy Crouch suggests that all of us have three kinds of relationships in our lives: a 3, a 12 and a 120.
At most, he writes, we’ll have 3 fiercely loyal close friends; we’ll have 12 reasonably kindred friends; and we’ll have 120 like-minded acquaintances. I think Andy gets it right.
But if you lose track of your childhood friends or drift away from your college friends, it’s incredibly difficult to forge new true friends. By true I mean a friend who helps you to move, who doesn’t feel inconvenienced by your issues, and who easily delights in your successes.
That’s where Oscar Wilde also gets it right, though it’s easier said than done in practice, and our American culture tends to fight hard against the generative conditions for meaningful friendship.
I’ve written a handful of prayers in Prayers for the Pilgrimage in order to offer help to folks who might be struggling with it all and I’ve included a couple of them here.
