As part of our series on Friendship, which itself is part of a larger series on Five Things Every Leader Needs, we wanted to document a phenomenon that C.S. Lewis lamented more than a half a century ago: the decline of friendship in the modern world.
What happened to friendship?
Here are ten reasons why friendship has been demoted in the Modern West.
1. “Few value it because few experience it.” C.S. Lewis.
Lewis’s speculation on why the value of friendship has dropped remains the most compelling explanation. We don’t know what we’re missing because so few of us have ever experienced the gift of a true friend. We don’t know what’s possible, so we settle for what we’ve always known.
Having a real friend is like meeting a real Christian: once you meet one it’s hard to go back and be content with the life you knew before, because now you have a sense of what’s possible.
2. The meaning of the word friend has been flattened and cheapened. Our legitimate expectations of what can be possible are too low.
Both Lewis and Aristotle made distinctions among different types of friends. They stressed that relationships we pursue because of shared circumstances, mutual pleasure, or mutual benefit are necessary, even wonderful. Yet, Aristotle did not classify these as the highest sort of friendship. Lewis called them “companions,” to distinguish them from true friendship, from philia (the Greek word for love).
Lewis was clear to say that we don’t diminish silver by distinguishing it from gold. “Companions,” or “acquaintances,” relationships that we pursue because they benefit us in some way – what Arthur Brooks calls “deal friends” – are what most of us are referring to when we say that we have “a lot of friends.” “No,” Lewis and Aristotle would say, “those are companions, not friends.”
When we sketch out the constituent parts of a true friend – the expectations each of you can fairly have for the other – it will be clear that in your whole life if you have 3-4 of these then you should be exceedingly grateful.
I’m not saying we should be persnickety and say “Well, technically, we are not ‘friends’ in the truest sense of that word.” But I am suggesting that most of us have traded gold for silver. We have settled for good companions, which are wonderful. But less than we might aspire toward in our friendships.
3. The idolization of Romantic Love in the Modern West.
In an incredible essay on friendship, Andrew Sullivan writes, “the great modern enemy of friendship has turned out to be love.” Wesley Hill comments, “By ‘love’ he does not mean the care and concern for others which is essential to friendship, but rather what he calls ‘the idolatry of Eros’: the belief that true intimacy can only be found in the romantic sexual union of a couple.”
It’s the myth of the romantic ideal celebrated in every corner of our popular culture: that there is one person out there who can satisfy my deepest needs, and that all other relational pursuits should be subordinated to this quest.
This myth is so pervasive, from Disney fairy tales to the Bachelor, that we no longer recognize how ingrained it’s become as a primary and ultimate good in the mind of every Western child.
Nothing has wrecked more marriages or torpedoed more dating relationships than the idolization of romantic love. But often overlooked is how this myth has demoted friendship among the relationships we value and in which we invest.
Why settle for mere friends, when you’re on your search for your Soul Mate? Why invest in friendship when compared to The One who might meet your deepest needs, cure your loneliness, and finally understand you.
4. The idolization of marriage and family in the local church.
In that essay on friendship, commenting how eros has degraded philia, Sullivan writes this aside, “The Christian churches, which once wisely … held out the virtue of friendship as equal to the benefits of conjugal love, are now our culture’s primary and obsessive propagandists for the marital unit and its capacity to resolve all human ills and satisfy all human needs.” Ouch!
The Bible certainly has a high view of marriage (Heb. 13:4, Eph. 5:25ff) and how God has chosen to work through families (Acts 2:39) and even stresses the special responsibilities of family members to care for our own (1 Tim. 5:8). And yet, the ways Jesus challenges our definitions of family (Mark 3:33-35) is seldom taken with due seriousness today.
In a hundred different ways, it’s rare to find a worshipping community that doesn’t subtly privilege marriage and family, and subtly suggest that a single, celibate life is a less than fully experienced, even fully human life. It’s rarely intentional or even conscious. But the frequent New Testament refrain “brothers and sisters” and how that challenged the societal conventions of both Jesus’ day and our own (Gal. 3:28, 1 Cor. 12:13) is rarely grappled with beyond the tantalizing pictures of the earliest church (Acts 2:44ff).
For example, from its earliest days, the church’s sexual ethic has been out of step with the surrounding culture (1 Thess. 4:3). In our culture, which places such a premium on the freedom of sexual expression, the Bible’s call to limit sexual expression to the confines of marriage simply won’t be credible or seem practicable without a more robust vision and practice of friendship in local churches, where those who aren’t married or who are no longer married are invited, as a regular practice, into others’ homes and families, celebrations and meals.
5. The idolization of work and our increased mobility.
When my then 91-year-old grandmother met my soon-to-be wife, one of her first questions was “Tell me, who are your people?” For better and for worse, identity used to be more closely tied with one’s community, one’s family. To ask, “Who am I?” couldn’t be considered apart from “Of which family or community am I a part?”
But in our industrialized economy and age of increasing autonomy, work has joined romantic love as our culture’s greatest idols. More than ever, we look to work and what we do for a living to give us a sense of significance and purpose. Hence, one of our first questions when getting to know someone is “So, what do you do for a living?”
For the vast majority of recorded history, and still for the majority of the world’s population today, one’s occupation was closely tied to where we were born, who our parents and grandparents were, and what they did, not to mention our place in the birth order, even our gender.
Granted, expanded vocational opportunities have been a great benefit to a great many. But every strength has its weaknesses; every asset its liabilities; every choice its opportunity cost. And the shadow side of this expansion of our work has been elevating career advancement over prioritizing our friendships, in terms of deciding where we live, what we do for a living, and how much we are willing to work. Hence the refrain, “I can make new friends. But I can’t pass up this opportunity in this new city.” Especially in cities or other highly transient contexts, it’s hard to deeply invest our vulnerable hearts in relationships that we know are probably temporary.
6. The loss of place and proximity and the rise of the spacious back porch.
Related to reason five, it used to be not so uncommon that most people were born, grew up and died in roughly the same locale. Today it’s considered a sign of status and wealth to be able to move around as you wish, and also to give yourself space and distance from others, from exclusive tables and resorts to larger homes far removed from curious neighbors.
Think also of the rise of the back porch and spacious back yards, and how rare it is in most neighborhoods to ever see people hanging out on the front porch where just any old neighbor might happen by.
Wendell Berry, in his fiction and non-fiction, extolls the virtues and wisdom of choosing a smaller, simpler, more local life. But today we’ve lost our value of proximity and place in developing deep friendships (and might explain the profusion of “local” emphasis lately – a wistful longing for something lost).
It was only relatively recently that a child would even imagine moving away from his or her parents. More of us, increasingly, aren’t sure how to answer the question, “Where is home?” Again, not all bad, but this loss of a settled place affects our ability to develop and sustain deep friendships.
7. We are WEIRD. The elevation of autonomy and our distorted notions of freedom.
In the Modern West, we tend to think our views are mainstream. But we are the WEIRD ones. W.E.I.R.D. That’s an acronym from the psychologist Joseph Henrich. 10-15 years ago, he said people in the Modern West are WEIRD.
- Western
- Educated
- Industrialized
- Rich
- Democratic
Andrew Wilson points out that there are a lot of wonderful things about those privileges. Living in cities. Industrialized. Technical jobs. Rich. Drinking Starbucks. Democratic with attendant ideas about rights and freedoms. But we rarely stop to think how being WEIRD affects our views on everything from economics and religion, to how we understand friendship.
The acronym has shown to stick because researchers keep corroborating, in study after study, that educated Westerners are not at all representative of most people on earth. For all the wonderful advantages of living in America, it’s just worth noting that we are out of step with 7 of the 8 billion people on earth right now.
Why is that important? To know about ourselves that we are WEIRD? Because when we do so, we can pull back and take note of some of the common barriers, some common reasons why friendship is floundering among us today. A big reason is our elevation of autonomy and personal choice as essential to a good life.
Wesley Hill points out in his book, Spiritual Friendship, how friendship will suffer in “a culture that prizes individualism and autonomy and promotes the myth that the less encumbered and entangled I am, the less accountable and anchored to a particular relationship, the better I’ll be able to find my truest self and secure real happiness…If your deepest happiness is found in personal autonomy, then friendship is more of a liability than an asset.”
8. Our discomfort and lack of familiarity with non-sexual intimacy.
During the Second World War, decades before the sexual revolution, C.S. Lewis already anticipated the need to defend the non-sexual character of friendship against critics who thought that any two men with a close relationship were, in his words, “really homosexual.”
In Homer’s Iliad, Achilles said of Patroclus, “the man I loved above all other comrades, loved as my own life.” Very much like what David in the Bible said when his friend Jonathan fell in battle, “I grieve over you, my brother Jonathan! You were very dear to me. Your love was more special to me than the love of women” (2 Samuel 1:26). Doris Kearns Goodwin, in her book on Lincoln, writes about his friendship with Joshua Speed. Lincoln said, “You know my desire to befriend you as everlasting, that I will never cease, while I know how to do anything.”
Some modern commentators haven’t known how to process these men’s devotion to one another and, fulfilling Lewis’s prediction, have speculated, against all available evidence, about their sexual preferences – so foreign are such expressions of non-sexualized intimacy between same sex friends in our culture.
Goodwin tells of Lincoln sharing a bed with another boy on a cold midwestern night to keep each other warm (which I can appreciate even in these days of central heating). It’s hard to imagine two young boys doing that today without the moment feeling sexualized or awkward.
More recently you’ve noticed the rise of the so-called “Bromantic comedy” – Step Brothers, I Love You, Man, or Superbad – movies that focus on two guys getting to know each other, navigating the ups and downs of learning how to be friends amidst the awkwardness of neither wanting to be seen as gay nor necessarily criticizing it.
A lot has been written recently about the emotional lives of men and what makes for true masculinity. In her book, Deep Secrets, Niobe Way documents a familiar pattern among boys who, while they are younger, are able to talk about their same-sex friendships in surprisingly intimate terms. But Way says, as the boys grew older, by their late teens, most prove to be reticent to speak in such vulnerable and intimate ways, hence the subtitle of her book, …Boys’ Friendships and the Crisis of Connection.
A friend of mine pointed out that even among grown men who may hug one another, we make sure to give three slaps on the back to the man we’re hugging, signifying, “I’m. Not. Gay.” (Wes Hill makes the same observation.)
9. Technology
We could have put technology first as a leading cause of deterioration of today’s friendships. We are more connected than we’ve ever been… and also more isolated.
The research says that the average American spends more than FOUR hours each day on his or her smartphone. That is a staggering number if you consider: if we spend 16 hours awake each day, and we live to be 80, and got a smartphone when we were 12, then we will spend more than 15 years(!) of our waking life on our phones. That’s time we could be spending in face-to-face relationships.
We are addicted to our technology and neglecting our friendships. Our fixation on screens and social media makes it easier than ever to be alone.
Notice at any tourist attraction or exciting communal event that everyone has their phone out and up, recording it. How frequently do we go back and watch those videos? And even if we do, the tragedy is that while recording, we cannot be fully present. We do not experience the event directly and communally, but only through the medium of our phones. It’s a giant communal picture of how our technology has made us, in Sherry Turkle’s phrase, “alone together.”
The more time we spend on our tech, the less comfortable we feel with the awkwardness that real friendships require, the awkwardness of working through conflict and having hard conversations, face to face. We’d rather text.
Technology can be a great boon to friendships. It enables us to keep up with friends across the country and around the world, even see their faces. But technology is like a grab-and-go corn dog at a convenience store – great in a pinch, but never a substitute for a real meal.
Technology seduces us with the sensation of being known when in fact we’re isolated. Justin Early wisely advises viewing all non-physical interactions as a kind of snack, not the main course of the relationship. But if most of us spend more face time with our phones than anyone else, how could our friendships not suffer? Many of us have simply forgotten how to be friends.
10. “I’m too busy,” and “This sounds too hard.”
I like what Kevin Kelly says about this in his book, Excellent Advice for Living:
You don’t need more time because
you already have all the time
that you will ever get;
you need more focus.
We do have time. Our greater barrier, circling back to where we began, is that we don’t value friendship because we seldom experience it. For most of us it’s merely an accessory to our lives. Nice to have – as long as it’s not too burdensome.
But real friendships are hard. They are awkward, messy, and invariably painful. Today, often, the first sign of real conflict signals the end of most friendships. Hanging on feels too difficult, and we aren’t equipped to handle relational ruptures with wisdom and patience. So, we give up. We give up way too easily.
Like love, friendships are inconvenient. They make demands of us. A non-demanding friendship is a contradiction in terms. Friendships also require time and self-sacrifice. A real friend shows up in your hour of need, and never wants to let you down. That’s why, by definition, you can only have a small handful of real friends.
Recovering the art of friendship is going to upend our schedules, our comfort, and our routines. The cost is high. But as with the Christian life as a whole, you only experience the gift of taking up the yoke on the other side of taking it up. The challenge of prioritizing friendship and investing in one or two friends will, I believe, show itself to be essential to your life’s flourishing.
We hope this series can help re-set your expectations and create some conversations.