Ask Fr. Mike: People say I need friends. Is that true?

I keep being told that I “need friends.” I don’t know that I do. I have enough people in my life (and more than enough stuff to keep me busy) that I don’t think that I need “another thing.”

I appreciate your honesty. And I believe you. I can imagine that, with all of your busyness and all of the people to whom you are responsible, friendship can just seem so unnecessary. And it is likely that there are many people in our culture who would say the same kind of thing; “I understand that I should have a friend or two, but I’m just too busy!”

In fact, there have been numerous articles written recently about the reality of friendlessness in our culture. One article I read described how this is especially pronounced among men, particularly men who are 40 years old and older. These men may have wives and children, people with whom they interact at work, and even some “buddies,” but they experience a friendlessness in the midst of all of this. Even more, there are many people (both men and women) who don’t have families around them or children of their own, they merely have a list of relatively “disposable” relationships that are fine, but not what they might call “friendship.” And the number of people who experience this absence of friendship is growing, not shrinking.

As you wrote, you indicated that you don’t experience friendlessness as a pain at all. It sounds like you are like the person who is being told that they need more calcium in their daily diet, but you don’t experience fragile bones yet, so at this point calcium still seems optional. Sure, you could take a supplement every day, but you aren’t going to feel your bones becoming healthier. Likewise, you could not do anything and you will not feel your bones becoming more fragile. Friendship is a little bit like that: we know that it is good for us, but as long as we are trucking along and staying busy, it is optional.

But you have heard of osteoporosis. And you have heard of loneliness. So you know that there is something to all of this talk about the crisis of friendlessness, even if you haven’t felt it. This could be for a number of reasons, so let’s look at a few.

First, maybe you are very much like the person who isn’t taking calcium supplements who remains relatively healthy because you get calcium from other sources (like your food). There are a few different kinds of friendship as well. Two of these friendships might already be present in your life. They may be serving as a kind of stop-gap when it comes to loneliness.

A while back, Aristotle taught about three kinds of friendship. There are friendships of pleasure, in which you spend time with friends for no reason other than you enjoy yourself with these people. They are the friends that you might most quickly call your buddies. They are the people who like the activities or entertainment that you like, and they are easy to be around. These kinds of friends can be good; they can even be people you genuinely care about.

The next kind of friendship that Aristotle named are friendships of utility. While this might sound the most sterile, friendships of utility can often be enjoyed just as much as (or even more than) friendships of pleasure. These could be the people you work with, the people you play on a sports team with, or the people you like to do projects with. In my experience, they can often have points of contact with the highest form of friendship. Useful friendships don’t have to be reduced to “use” (even though that is in their name), but they are friendships oriented towards a goal; once the goal is gone, the friends will often have to find a new goal to occasion their time together.

It kind of sounds like, in your life, you may have a good number of pleasant and useful friendships. That is not bad. Remember, those kinds of friendships are still friendship. The two downsides of them are that they are both potentially fragile and fleeting. They are “fragile” because the glue that holds the friendship together is weak. Simply having a good time with a person or group of persons is nice, but it is flimsy. They are “fleeting” because they are based on something that is temporary. There comes a time when someone moves on to another company, or isn’t as into fishing as you both used to be, or you no longer have kids in the soccer league together.

Those can be good friendships, but you (and everyone else on the planet) desire something that is stronger and something that lasts. The friendship that transcends the first two that Aristotle described is called virtuous friendship. While the first two are based on mutual enjoyment and mutual help, virtuous friendship is based on the good. Note: When I say “the Good,” I mean it in the capitalized way, not merely the pursuit of “a good,” like winning a championship, helping sick people, teaching in a school, or any other number of good projects that gather people together.

I mean the Good in the sense of pursuing the virtuous life. What knits the two people together is the mutual pursuit of something bigger than them that has captivated both of them individually, that they later discover has captivated them both together.

That might sound highfalutin, but this pursuit becomes the source of the highest kind of friendship. The two (or maybe more) people who are in this friendship will enjoy each other’s presence and will often find this friendship useful, but those are not the reasons why they are in relationship. They experience something bigger than the friendship itself.

Last thing. You may not want that kind of friendship because you are too busy. That makes the most sense. Because the single most important ingredient for friendship is time. If you do not have time, you will not have friends. But take a deeper look into this, please. Often, one’s loneliness is not felt simply because one has busied themselves so fully that they not only do not feel the sting of loneliness, they don’t feel much at all. Don’t be that person. And also, all of the great folks who have written on this topic point out that no one ever has many virtuous friendships; they might be lucky to have one in their lifetime. But you and I will never have that if we are living in a way that makes even one virtuous friendship impossible.

This entire article I have written as if loneliness is a bad thing. While we experience it negatively (for the most part), I do not believe that loneliness is the enemy. Loneliness can simply be a reality of life that we all must learn to deal with. Loneliness can be a gift. Loneliness can lead us to move both inward and outward. It can move us to a deeper interior life with Christ, and it can move it outside of ourselves to learn how to give to others. It can be painful, but it doesn’t have to be bad.

Father Michael Schmitz is director of youth and young adult ministry for the Diocese of Duluth and chaplain of the Newman Center at the University of Minnesota Duluth. Reach him at [email protected].