“Are we just filling a gap where people are supposed to put your wife and kids?”

It’s 10 pm on a Tuesday night. One of my best friends asks me this into my headphones while we find ourselves hidden in a bunker somewhere in Guadalajara, dealing with a digital cartel wreaking havoc on the innocent people of the small digital neighborhood we’re in. The question catches me off guard. Predictably, now thoroughly off my mark, I quickly perish in the game. The townsfolk didn’t appreciate this much.

***

It’s no secret that friendship is rarely held to the esteem of romantic relationships and family rearing (this is especially true if you grew up in a church, where marriage is made out as the pinnacle of human life above all other relationships). As I turn twenty-eight, I feel the pressure placed on many of my existing friendships as those I love start to enter new parts of their lives with families. I feel pressure myself as I leave behind a broken engagement and spend far more time investing in friendships in my life—it is all too common to see men in their late-twenties and early-thirties in my position described as “disaffected,” “romantically challenged,” or most bluntly, “alone.”

Friendship is great, but it often comes with a caveat that prioritizing it as you age is a problem to resolve rather than a joyful way to organize one’s life.

That isn’t to say that it’s always been this way. I’ve thought about the way that friendship is reflected upon in books I’ve read just in 2024:

“There is nothing I would not do for those who are really my friends. I have no notion of loving people by halves, it is not my nature.” (Northanger Abbey, Jane Austen)

“What is a friend? A single soul dwelling in two bodies.” (Ethics, Aristotle)

“Friendship is unnecessary…it has no survival value; rather it is one of those things which give value to survival.” (The Four Loves, C.S. Lewis)

For something that has long been said to shake the foundations of human life, friendships rarely seem to register for us as something monumental at all. In high school and college, friendships mostly crop up from an easy homogeneity—going to the same places for the same purposes as people largely coming from the same economic and social background. Even the close friendships many of us have formed over time were often borne out of the trust and exposure that comes from that sameness. Growing up, time is largely abundant, and there is a great deal of time and energy available to meet many people, with deep friendships seeming to crop up from many different social circles.

I don’t think we often think much of how these friendships form. There isn’t a whole lot of thinking going into which ones form, as we mostly follow the principle that without friendship, life is going to be a lot more difficult. When the homogeneity and shared purpose (suffering?) of college disappears, a lot of cracks form in our ideas of friendships. Friendship becomes difficult, seemingly unimportant in the face of challenges, suffering and deep responsibilities found in aging. Friendship is often…almost incidental?

How often do we think about what friendships we make as if it is going to fundamentally alter our souls and our human experience?

We certainly apply this thinking to relationships and dating, which is given pressure and importance from a relatively early age, especially for those of us who grew up in the church. I remember sitting through many sessions at church youth group in middle and high school, hearing the stakes of dating laid out for me—date the right person, you achieve peace, growth, and according to some youth pastors, something near spiritual bliss apparently. Date the wrong person—spiritual death over time, harm, divorce (or something akin to a Disney FastPass to the gates of hell, as one guest preacher once said—youth pastors, please vet your speakers).

Even if you didn’t grow up in such a dating-obsessed dating church-culture infused with Josh Harris’s I Kissed Dating Goodbye and other late 90s/2000s evangelical dating creeds, you probably still encounter the primacy given to dating and relationships in every other corner of the world. The Hallmark movie loses a lot of steam if the “hard-working city girl” gets stuck in a small town and instead just has a cup of coffee to chat with the Christmas tree farmer. So much of modern cultural material follows a similar script, albeit in a more subtle way—the right relationship leads to happiness, success, and emotional richness; the wrong relationship leads to agony, denial of self-expression, or harm.

This isn’t to say that it’s wrong to understand the stakes of relationships—romantic relationships are one of the most emotionally involved and difficult types of relationships to build.

But I’d argue that some of those stakes might be created in part from the implicit idea that romantic relationships are the primary way that we experience the emotional richness of a mature life. When friendship is not seen as an opportunity to build emotional joy and peace with another person at a level which gives meaning to the walk of day to day life, romantic relationships often end up carrying the weight of filling this void. I think both types of relationships suffer because of it.

I think about this back in those youth groups and college groups. We didn’t spend the time to learn how to build the relationships which aren’t just incidental to the life we’re living around us but are active choices to build emotional and spiritual richness between two people in a different way. How to end a friendship that is harming us or is keeping us from expressing the most complete versions of ourselves. Why friendship matters and why it is worth the same level of emotional care as dating relationships.

How would we change if we considered our friendships with the weight of something that can, as Aristotle claimed, “bind two souls together into one,” language we usually reserve for romantic relationships in our sexually and romantically saturated society? What if we thought about how we want those relationships to look for our own growth and our desire for growth of people we live? If we thought about bad friendships as something we can “break up” from?

Would our lives change? Would we start to experience more of human life on the Earth can offer us? Would we all feel less alone, or at least more hopeful about our ability to leave such loneliness?

And would we stop feeling like something is “missing” when we’re sitting at home at 10 pm, doing little to nothing but doing it with a friend to whom we feel ourselves sailing through life with? Would we finally be free from the sense of guilt that time spent in the richness of life talking with a close friend should otherwise “be where we put our wife and kids?”

***

We restart the game. Back to trying (and surely failing) to liberate the people of Guadalajara. The call is still quiet as we’re starting back up.

All I can really say is, “I don’t know, I’m just glad to be here with you.”

1 Comment

  1. Sophia Medawar

    FINALLY! THANK YOU! I was just saying something along these lines to a coworker last night. Beautifully put, and loved the examples you used from other things you read this year. Wish the church talked more about nurturing covenant friendships like we see examples of in both the old and new testaments. Cheers to friends!!

    Reply

Submit a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

post calvin direct

Get new posts from Noah Schumerth delivered straight to your inbox.

the post calvin