How Adult Friendships Eventually Fade To Black

“Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art, like the universe itself (for God did not need to create). It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things which give value to survival.”

That is from C.S. Lewis, and contained within this solid David French opinion column.

I have spilled about six metric tons of digital ink on friendship since I’ve been writing. There are a few very good ones (IMHO), and some crappy ones. I wrote about male loneliness first in a Minneapolis coffee shop in 2013. I guess I was ahead of my time therein, eh? That might be one of the bigger successes of my adulthood. Nice.

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My own arc with friendship is weird, insofar as everyone’s is weird. I’ve moved a few times, which changes friend dynamics without question. I had one good college group for about 20 years, although that started to wither over time via Trump discussions (sadly and honestly), younger kids entering, geographic distance, the wives not being friends whatsoever, etc, etc. I’ve also been divorced, which is a huge blow to friendships. Some of my better friends of adulthood were through my ex, and most of them I haven’t spoken to now since maybe early 2018, if that. That’s about to be six years. Some of them may have new kids I don’t even know about. Weird to type that.

After getting divorced, I stayed in Fort Worth for (a) cost of living and (b) I had some decent friends there by then. Most of my guy friends at the time were scattered, with a small cluster near D.C., but they all had young kids at the time and I knew their wives wouldn’t “let them out” for a beer now and again, so I figured I’d be restarting as the weird uncle figure. I couldn’t motivate myself for that. Then I stayed, I met another cool woman, and I got remarried.

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I have a lot of acquaintances, but I don’t know if I have many friends. I’m also kind of an asshole sometimes, can send dumb texts when I drink, and have opinions about big life buckets that some people recoil from. For some reason, women who love Peloton and $35,000-millionaire men seem to utterly despise me. I’ve never been quite sure why.

As a result, I think and write a lot about this stuff.

This link is the main thing I’ve come to: friendship is not a priority for most, especially Americans. The focal points are supposed to be career and kids. Honestly, and sadly, the third focal point is often spouse, even though we elevate the concept of marriage very high — once you’re actually in the marriage, you’re supposed to make the spouse Option 3, and focus on career and kids first. Odd.

That's the other thing about me and friendship: I’ve never had kids, because my dick don’t work properly, so I’ve missed out on the random “dad” friendships, which are really acquaintances who periodically do an activity together, but I digress.

In that French column above, he talks about how adults drift from each other and then, when questioned, they say “Life happened.” It’s kind of a weird excuse, because a lot of the people who say “life happened” also know the plot of every Netflix show that drops, so they clearly have 10 hours to binge-watch something. You’d assume maybe two of those hours could go back to cultivating friendships, but we all fall into this pattern.

For a lot of people, the concerns are:

1. Their boss is a bully in a suit.
2. Lack of true economic viability.
3. Joneses, Keeping Up With.
4. Juggling the various parts of adulthood.
5. Hoping their kid doesn’t have a tantrum on a plane.
6. Etc, etc.

That’s why the friendship stuff fades. We say “Life happens,” but in reality that just means “Priorities shift.” And they don’t always shift the right way, but they shift in a way that's predictable and comforting to many.

Over the last 14 or so years, I’ve gotten the text or message of “So busy with the kids” about 1,381 times, if I had to guess. There was a period where it hurt or bothered me. It doesn’t anymore. The infertility stuff sucks, and can make you lose faith in any higher order, but I get it — people prioritize their kids and their boss, which is again why it’s comical when far-right YouTube personalities deify marriage. (But in their eyes, marriage is the pathway to kids, and the far-right tends to be pro-birth while claiming to be pro-life.)

The double-sad on this is that most people are so beholden to a boss and deadlines from said boss, and those bosses often don’t understand how important their conduct is within the growth of a family. A bad boss wrecks families, wrecks sex lives, wrecks children’s upbringings, etc. Bosses never seem to understand the importance of the role, and we don’t hold them to it, either.

I’ve seen more than a few guys break down over all this, in small groups and casual conversations. The male loneliness thing is real, but women are lonely in their own right — often trapped in a false emancipation of motherhood.

French’s column is titled something like “Be There” or “Being There.” I’d argue that’s important, and if you lined up 100 people of both genders and asked them what they expect from a friend, they’d say some variation of that. It’s more complicated than that. I tried to write about it once, but I’m not sure I did a very good job.

Showing up is important, though. The first time my wife and I did IVF, I told a few people. I had this friend from college, nice dude, who I had been with on and off for 20 years at that point. We had gone half-decades without seeing each other, and we never spoke on the phone, but I told him about IVF and he never responded. So then I told him it failed, and he never responded. I eventually kinda gave up at that point. At some level, showing up is 90% of the game for anything, from work to friendship to sex. Being there is relevant. It’s not the only thing we expect from friendships, but it’s relevant.

We let life happen and we let life smash one of the most important rocks: having friends, confidantes, and people you feel comfortable with.

What’s your take on friendships and what’s happening in your own life?