It’s Your Friends Who Break Your Heart

The more hours you’ve put into this chaotic business of living, the more you crave a quieter, more nurturing third thing, I think. This needn’t mean dull. The friends I have now, who’ve come all this distance, who are part of my aging plan, include all kinds of joyous goofballs and originals. There’s loads of open country between enervation and int... See more

It’s the dying that does it, always. I started here; I end here (we all end here). It is amazing how the death of someone you love exposes this lie you tell yourself, that there’ll always be time. You can go months or even years without speaking to a dear old friend and feel fine about it, blundering along, living your life. But discover that this ... See more

It’s the almost-ness of envy that kills, as Garnett points out in her essay—the fact that it could have or should have been us. She quotes Aristotle’s Rhetoric : “We envy those who are near us in time, place, age, or reputation … those whose possession of or success in a thing is a reproach to us: these are our neighbors and equals; for it is clear... See more

When I consider the people I know with the greatest talent for friendship, I realize that they do just this. They make contact a priority. They jump in their cars. They appear at regular intervals in my inbox. One told me she clicks open her address book every now and then just to check which friends she hasn’t seen in a while—and then immediately ... See more

The problem is that when it comes to friendship, we are ritual-deficient, nearly devoid of rites that force us together. Emily Langan, a Wheaton College professor of communication, argues that we need them. Friendship anniversaries. Regular road trips. Sunday-night phone calls, annual gatherings at the same rental house, whatever it takes. “We’re n... See more

Back in the 1980s, the Oxford psychologists Michael Argyle and Monika Henderson wrote a seminal paper titled “The Rules of Friendship.” Its six takeaways are obvious, but what the hell, they’re worth restating: In the most stable friendships, people tend to stand up for each other in each other’s absence; trust and confide in each other; support ea... See more

Friendship is a bulwark against stasis, a potential source of creativity and renewal.Practically everyone who studies friendship says this in some form or another: What makes friendship so fragile is also exactly what makes it so special. You have to continually opt in. That you choose it is what gives it its value.

What both of these traits have in common is that I seem to live my life as if I’m under siege. I’m guessing my amygdala is the size of a cantaloupe.Most of my withered friendships can be chalked up to this terrible tendency of mine not to reach out. I have pals in Washington, D.C., where I started my professional life, whom I haven’t seen in years,... See more

I’m oversensitive to slights and minor humiliations, which means I’m wrongly inclined to see them as intentional rather than pedestrian acts of thoughtlessness, and I get easily overwhelmed, engulfed. I can almost never mentally justify answering a spontaneous phone call from a friend, and I have to force myself to phone and email them when I’m har... See more