Everybody loved Ron.
He’d been a pilot, and when he retired, his friends, his family, his church all turned out to fete him. There was cake; there were balloons; people gave speeches.
In the church’s early years he'd taken charge of setting up a rented school gym every Sunday morning, transporting, unloading, and unfolding hundreds of chairs, then tearing it all down every Sunday afternoon. When someone’s roof was leaking, Ron had been there to fix it. When someone needed a pickup truck, Ron provided his. Ron constantly served. Wherever a need appeared, he ran to meet it. He offered his time and muscle and expertise with a quiet, humble professionalism.
He served, and he was a good friend. People told many stories of adventurous hunting trips, comical fishing mishaps, and simple, encouraging conversations around coffee tables and firesides.
Everybody loved Ron.
I loved Ron. He had served me more than once, been a good friend to me. Seeing him being celebrated filled me with joy.
But it filled me with something else, too. Unease. Envy.
I realized, standing there with more than a hundred of his friends all smiling at him and casting our fondness in his direction, that I enjoyed none of his reputation or friendship.
It came to me vividly that if the occasion had centered on me—if I were retiring today, or if it were my funeral, say—far fewer well-wishers would attend. Worse, the tone of the gathering, the feelings and sentiments poured out toward me, would be far less fond. For some reason I hadn’t garnered the same kind of trust and care that Ron had. A similar number of people knew me, but fewer liked me. Few, if any, would have told witty or heartwarming stories about me. Even when I imagined how my wife would express herself toward me, I could not picture deep and unmixed affection. I sensed that at a gathering of my closest family and friends, the tone would be awkward and ambivalent. Along with “so long” there would be a touch of “good riddance.”
Well, perhaps this impression was just my insecurity talking. Probably people liked me better than I thought they did.
In a positive sense, my experience at Ron’s party provided a vision. When my funeral did eventually arrive—hopefully several decades from now—I wanted the people who remembered me to express something like what we were expressing for Ron. I wanted to meet my end surrounded by people who loved me, liked me, respected me, and had happy memories of me.
Of course it’s not really about the funeral. The funeral is just a signpost, a catalyst for the imagination. By the time you attend your own funeral the blessings of friendship have expired. What I really wanted was a life full of rich friendship, and the sooner the better.
In the years that followed that party I noticed more and more medical evidence appearing that shows the importance of friendship for health and happiness. People with more friends live longer. Indeed, almost no other factor more accurately predicts how long you remain healthy than social connectedness does. These studies reinforced my desire to make and keep good friends.
A few years after the party I had a chance to see how my friends really felt about me. Had my impression of lukewarm attachments come from mere insecurity or from insight?
After several years of marriage counseling, my wife’s lack of care for me proved unmistakable and unchanging. We separated. She blamed me for our troubles, publicly, early, and often. And suddenly, within a span of weeks, I found myself almost completely isolated. The church we had attended for twelve years evicted me. Dozens of friends disappeared, often ghosting me or, in a few cases, directly confronting me with some vague suggestion of unnamed wrongdoing. The impression I’d had of being seen in a lukewarm light proved accurate. Most of my friendships had been either bogus or gossamer thin.
After several months of separation we moved into divorce. The upheaval brought both the opportunity and the obligation to forge new relationships, new friendships, a new social world.
How could I get from here to there? Why had my old relationships been so weak? How does one build strong, loving, lasting relationships?
It’s a journey I’m still on, a skill I’m still learning. But I can say that my friendships now are better than they were: more real, more unconditional, more loving. Perhaps I’ll have time in future posts to explore some of the things I’ve learned.