A Manifesto on Friendship

To change the world and to live a full life, get some friends.

In life, what can be seen as ordinary and everyday is much rarer than you think. Water is abundantly available on Earth. Crisp air and beautiful nature on Earth seem never-ending. Our sun provides limitless bounty, but we only know life exists on this planet. Our galaxy alone has 30 billion trillion stars without measurable or observable life; we are one star with abundant life. Water was discovered outside our planet, 12.8 billion light-years away. Reaching it would take longer than the Earth has existed. Never underestimate that what appears relatively common to us is actually impossibly rare.

Friendship is one aspect of life viewed as common as air or water that is truly rare and precious. Friendship is one of those life gifts that no one studies or investigates. We see it as ordinary and plebeian. We pass over hard facts about the rarity of life due to the abundance of the world around us and get easily distracted by the natural envious nature of humanity.

Rare as is true love, true friendship is rarer. -Jean de La Fontaine

In our modern epoch, friendship is a lost art missing from all of our lives. Our culture has forgotten the purpose and meaning of friendship. Tragically, our society idolizes romantic love to the point of human actualization. Media pitches romance as the culmination of meaning and purpose. Our civilization misses the mark on the profound nature of man and woman. It replaces companionship with shallow movies and books that fantasize us into an envious doldrum and depression.

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“Friendship is the hardest thing in the world to explain. It’s not something you learn in school. But if you haven’t learned the meaning of friendship, you really haven’t learned anything.” - Muhammad Ali

History shows us that our current “friendship-depression” is a contemporary phenomenon, and we can change it. Great men and women in history are often defined by their friendships more than their family or marriage. For their lives, success and impact were independent of their spouse. A good spouse always helps, and a bad spouse can be an impossible anchor to carry. Still, several great men and women in history had terrible marriages, which is tragic and should be avoided. What pushed and motivated them to accomplish great things for humanity is still available to us today - good friends. Good marriages should be a priority because family formation is a blessing; however, it is insufficient to do great things in life and the world. Good friends are how great people accomplish extraordinary things that seem impossible at the time. Today, we take it for granted as if it was like clean air and bountiful Earth.

You just call out my name

And you know wherever I am

I'll come running to see you again

Winter, spring, summer or fall

All you have to do is call

And I'll be there

Yes I will

You've got a friend 

James Taylor

What is a friend?

To start a conversation about friendship, we need to define what best describes a friend. Defining a true friend is frankly more complex than defining what romance is. Romantic love (“eros”) is so powerful that it overwhelms us and drives us crazy, making it easier to spot. Friend-type of love (“philia”) is more subtle and builds over time into a deep bond that lasts decades and through numerous trials. Because the horizon is longer but the outcome is more remarkable, several of us have yet to even try to find a good friend or know how to start.

I define friendship in the following categories.

Telepathy - Friends know intimately how each other thinks and can share their emotions and thoughts despite being miles and miles away. Friends didn't aim to share the same mind, but it came organically. With this similar mindset comes an implicit trust between each other, allowing them to do life side-by-side.

• “You can tell how strong the friendship is by the silence that envelops it. Lovers and spouses may talk frequently about their ‘relationship,’ but friends tend to let their regard for one another speak for itself or let others point it out.” - Andrew Sullivan

• “It has been said that a person's religion is best defined not by what he says he believes but simply by what he actually does. Equally, it could be said that one's friends are simply those people with whom one spends one's life. Period. Anything else is a form of rationalization.” - Andrew Sullivan

  

Companionship - Friends walk with you even if it is inconvenient. They sacrifice for you and choose to be uncomfortable because they want to be with you as a partner in life.

• “Friendship improves happiness, and abates misery, by doubling our joys, and dividing our grief.” - Marcus Tullius Cicero

• ​​”What draws people to be friends is that they see the same truth. They share it.” - CS Lewis

• “A critical social institution, as an ennobling moral experience, as an immensely delicate but essential interplay of the virtues required to sustain a fully realized human being.” - Andrew Sullivan

Mission alignment - Friends work with you on your mission in life. They let you take the lead, but operate as an advisor or guide by your side. They prevent you from falling down and help you stand back up.

• “How beautiful it is to find someone who asks for nothing but your company.” - Brigitte Nicole

• “When friendships are real, they are not glass threads or frost work, but the solidest things we can know.” - Ralph Waldo Emerson

• “Things are never quite as scary when you've got a best friend.” -Bill Watterson

• “A true friend never gets in your way unless you happen to be going down.” -Arnold H. Glasgow

Intimacy and Trust - A superpower of friendship is being deeply known without judgment for what brings you shame. They enjoy your company and the rawness of your identity. You can “let your hair down” with your friends. They fully see who you are and where you are going. To a friend, your company alone is worth the time.

• “Lovers seek for privacy. Friends find this solitude about them, this barrier between them and the herd, whether they want it or not…Eros will have naked bodies; Friendship naked personalities.” - CS Lewis

• “A friend is someone who gives you total freedom to be yourself.” - Jim Morrison

• “Close friends are truly life’s treasures. Sometimes they know us better than we know ourselves. With gentle honesty, they are there to guide and support us, to share our laughter and our tears. Their presence reminds us that we are never really alone.” - Vincent Van Gogh

• “A friend is someone who knows all about you and still loves you.” - Elbert Hubbard

• “A principal fruit of friendship is the ease and discharge of the fulness and swellings of the heart, which passions of all kinds do cause and induce.” - Francis Bacon

Edification - Friends push us to be better versions of ourselves. A good friend will tell you the truth even if it hurts. A best friend will tell you the truth. They will correct you and you won’t even notice. Friends make us better every day. Friend love is like taking adrenalin for free for the rest of your life.

• “The capacity for friendship is God’s way of apologizing for our families.” - Jay McInerney

• “Find a group of people who challenge and inspire you; spend a lot of time with them, and it will change your life.” - Amy Poehler

• “My old grandmother always used to say, Summer friends will melt away like summer snows, but winter friends are friends forever.” - George R.R. Martin

• “A friend is someone with whom you dare to be yourself.” - Frank Crane

Enjoyment - Friends bring us immense joy and fun. This happiness is not contingent on works or gifts but by simply being who you are with each other.

• “Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art, like the universe itself… It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things which give value to survival.” - CS Lewis

• “Friends are medicine for a wounded heart, and vitamins for a hopeful soul.” - Steve Maraboli

• “Life is nothing without friendship.” - Cicero

  

Additive love - One of the most amazing superpowers of friend-love is its additive and generous nature, while eros love is the opposite. Eros is focused on the relationship between two people and is supposed to be exclusive. Friend-love wants to be shared and to be additive to others’ lives. When two mutual friends become friends themselves, it is one of the greatest joys in life. Everyone feels more joy and appreciation for each other. Everyone gets better. Friend-love operates like the concept of infinity - unlimited, endless, without bound. This is why Jesus came as a friend to humanity.

• “Two friends delight to be joined by a third, and three by a fourth, if only the newcomer is qualified to be a real friend.” - CS Lewis

• “A friend is what the heart needs all the time.” -Henry van Dyke

• “Friendship marks a life even more deeply than love. Love risks degenerating into obsession, friendship is never anything but sharing.” - Elie Wiesel

Deromanticization of friendship

Friends pursue each other as if running the race of life side-by-side. Romantic partners seek to live life face-to-face, longing for each other to build a life together. The intimacy you can have with a good or best friend is much more expansive than the relationship itself. While the power of intimacy within eros fosters a deep connection to push through the pain and struggle of having a family. The power of eros is resigned chiefly to the bonds of the relationship itself. They live together through the ups and downs as each other's main priority in life.

The power of friendship and the love it brings humanity is regularly confused with eros and is enormously under-appreciated. Romance definitely includes aspects of friendship, but the boundaries of the relationship keep it from fully achieving friend-love. Friend-love is meant to feel like “additive intimacy” that is freely shared with the world, while eros love restricts its intimacy to the couple or within a home or family. Much of what people seek today in relationships is not a romantic partner but a deep and loving friend. People today expect too much from a single individual to fill the needs of both eros and philia love. We treat our romantic partners as a savior, which is deeply unfair to them. Your desire for friend-love was designed to be shared among many, not with a single person.

“The great modern enemy of friendship has turned out to be love. By love, I don’t mean the principle of giving and mutual regard that lies at the heart of friendship [but] love in the banal, ubiquitous, compelling, and resilient modern meaning of love: the romantic love that obliterates all other goods, the love to which every life must apparently lead, the love that is consummated in sex and celebrated in every particle of our popular culture, the love that is institutionalized in marriage and instilled as a primary and ultimate good in every Western child. I mean eros, which is more than sex but is bound up with sex. I mean the longing for union with another being, the sense that such a union resolves the essential quandary of human existence, the belief that only such a union can abate the loneliness that seems to come with being human, and deter the march of time that threatens to trivialize our very existence…We live in a world, in fact, in which respect and support for eros has acquired the hallmarks of a cult.” - Andrew Sullivan

Friend-love fulfills a different type of vulnerability and desire for achievement that is meant to be accomplished beyond a romantic partner. As everyone has experienced, eros messes with our brains in ways that we cannot always predict. Friend-love feels much more aligned with where we want to go in life.

“Friends will never provide what lovers provide: the ultimate resort, that safe space of repose, that relaxation of the bedsheets. But they provide something more reliable, and certainly less painful. They provide an acknowledgement not of the child within but of the adult without; they allow for an honesty which doesn’t threaten pain and criticism which doesn’t imply rejection. They promise not the bliss of the womb but the bracing adventure of the world. They do not solve loneliness, yet they mitigate it.” - Andrew Sullivan

One way to notice the difference between friend-love and intimacy is the reaction to intimacy. Friend-love doesn’t get jealous of their relationships with other people. Eros is designed to get jealous. It is often a struggle for romantic partners to accept friend-love, but this is a desire that should be restrained because the goals are fundamentally and metaphysically different.

“A woman of that sort has a hundred arts to break up her husband’s Friendships. She will quarrel with his Friends herself or, better still, with their wives. She will sneer, obstruct and lie. She does not realize that the husband whom she succeeds in isolating from his own kind will not be very well worth having; she has emasculated him.” - CS Lewis

Best friends always generate a sense of insecurity, especially male friends to wives. This should be expected and is natural, but just because it is natural does not mean it is good. Our overly romanticized culture tries to force every relationship into a box for an idol of comfort and control. Take all the opportunities you can to push through and find real friends because the reward will bring joy to everyone. CS Lewis continues,

“Nothing so enriches an erotic love as the discovery that the Beloved can deeply, truly and spontaneously enter into Friendship with the Friends you already had.”

Amen. Now, let’s look at some friendships from the past that altered history.

Abraham Lincoln and Joshua Speed

Lincoln and Speed were best friends from a young age and pursued much of the forming phases of life together as partners in crime. Speed is credited with getting Lincoln out of depression and encouraging him despite his faults. Speed helped Lincoln realize what he could become and how he can achieve his dreams. Both poured into each life to such a degree that they both credit each other for their wives and families.

Mary Todd Lincoln and Elizabeth Keckley

While Speed is credited by Lincoln for setting him up for success for the rest of his life, Lincoln had a rough marriage. From mental illness to deaths in the family, Lincoln struggled in his marriage to Mary. While in the White House, Mary became good friends with Elizabeth Keckely, a former slave turned dressmaker. Her friendship with Mary helped her push through depression, a civil war, a tough marriage, and the death of her husband

CS Lewis and JRR Tolkien

Lewis and Tolkien win for the most legendary literary friendship of all time. Tolkien is credited with inspiring Lewis to embrace his creative side and help resolve some issues with his Christian faith. Lewis pushed Tolkien to write publicly and gave him confidence that he could achieve his dreams. CS Lewis wrote one of the defining books on love and friendship, and Tolkien wrote one of the greatest literature epics of all time, The Lord of the Rings. In the theme of my commentary on friendship, the Lord of the Rings movies is heavily romanticized and embraces the modern zeitgeist, which doesn't appear in the original books, and ignores the purpose of the series - good friendship will change the world.

Jesus and John

Jesus’ closest friend during His ministry on Earth was John. Out of the Twelve Disciples, John was the only disciple to be both at the transfiguration and crucifixion. John titled himself in his own gospel recording of the life of Christ as "the disciple Jesus loved." Famously at the Last Supper, John laid on Jesus' chest while dining with his friends.

James Madison and Thomas Jefferson

Madison started to become friends with Jefferson when Jefferson served as Governor of Virginia, and Madison served on The Council of State before the US Constitution. Both were political checks on each other's power. They started to get to know each other deeply because Jefferson couldn't do anything politically without Madison's consent. Madison helped rescue Jefferson's career after he had a falling out across the state. They shared a home for many years while working to establish the United States. They shared several common hobbies and exchanged notes extensively about art, culture, and science. They both retired as neighbors and established the University of Virginia. 

Near the end of Jefferson’s life, he wrote to Madison:

“The friendship which has subsisted between us, now half a century, and the harmony of our political principles and pursuits, have been sources of constant happiness to me thro' that long period…to myself you have been a pillar of support thro' life. Take care of me when dead, and be assured that I shall leave with you my last affections.”

Roosevelt and Louis McHenry Howe

The most important friend to President Roosevelt is a relatively unknown man, Louis Howe. He was called the “man behind Roosevelt”. He spoke to Roosevelt daily, and no one knew their conversation's contents. Roosevelt and Louis regularly argued with each other about politics and policy. Bucking modern beta male definitions, Louis was Roosevelt's faithful and loyal friend for decades until his death. Roosevelt trusted Louis more than anyone, including his wife. Roosevelt had a deeply broken and abusive relationship with his wife with frequent infidelity. Despite this, Louis worked with Eleanor to promote her agenda. Despite not liking him at first, Eleanor and Louis eventually became friends. When Louis died, the failures of Roosevelt’s administration can be connected to Roosevelt losing his friend who held him accountable and gave him pushback. Roosevelt wrote upon Louis’s passing, “Devoted friend, adviser and associate of the President.”

Alexander the Great and Hephaestion

Knowing each other from birth, Alexander and Hephaestion were inseparable partners in life, war, and politics. Hephaestion was second in charge and was Alexandaer’s most trusted advisor. Alexander claimed he could not be an effective king or general without Hephastion. Hephastion was the most important friend in Alexander’s life until the very end.

Thomas Edison and Henry Ford

Edison and Ford have one of American history's most famous industry titan friendships. Both were deeply fond of each's intellect, business acumen, spirit of adventure, and each other's families. Ford was thrilled to have one of his heroes as one of his best friends. They prioritized visiting each other on their birthdays. They bought houses next door. They both went on vacation together regularly, and lore says their friendship started the idea of the "road trip".

Hard Work Pays Off

The hard truth for us living today is forming friendships in this culture sucks. From social media to a broken education system, our cultural institutions and civil trust have been shredded. Our ability to build authentic and trustworthy relationships is challenging, confusing, and sometimes heartbreaking. Media and American culture lie to us and tell us that the next thing, whether a purchase or a new relationship, will fix our souls and hearts. Consumerism is the dominant metaphysical theme defining romantic or friend connections. Break that by forming a deep bond with a handful of individuals. Don’t be alone with people. People are hungry to be seen and to be known.

In my life, I feel blessed and quite lucky to call a handful of men my best friends, with several more good friends. All of my friends have a wide range in duration, from a year to 12 years. All of them have different types of relationships with me and each other. Yet, the friend-love between all of us is ever-expanding and growing. My best friends push me to be a better man in all areas of life, from work to love. I push them to be better husbands and leaders. All of my best friends are the most enjoyable relationships in my life. I trust them implicitly, even when it is hard, and the future looks uncertain. For my best friends, we have a profound and rich relationship. They know everything about my past, hopes, dreams, and soul. Despite the joy of friendship, it is still hard work to stay consistent, gracious, and encouraging.

While this sounds scary or intimidating, I cannot fully describe the sense of liberation of being fully known and accepted. Knowing that you have brothers-in-arms regardless of the war you are going into or the crisis that may come gives me the courage and strength to change the world. This doesn’t mean my best friends, and I are always on awesome terms. Everyone has seasons. Life is hard, but knowing that someone can love you for just being yourself, despite your faults, and never giving up on you is one the most joyful feelings on this side of heaven.

“The greatest gift of life is friendship, and I have received it.” - Hubert H. Humphrey