Friendship Factor

1979

CHAPTER 1

The Rich Rewards of Friendship

Life is to be fortified by many friendships. To love, and be loved, is the greatest happiness of existence.

—Sydney Smith

HAVE YOU EVER WONDERED HOW CERTAIN PEOPLE are able to draw others to them and gain the admiration and affection of friends? Some men and women with average looks attract the opposite sex like iron shavings to a magnet. Executives who may not appear particularly brilliant sometimes move in an extensive network of loyal friends, and because of that they advance rapidly.

Such people may or may not be wealthy, witty, or buttressed with an expensive education. But somewhere in their personalities is an ingredient causing them to be respected and admired. It is what I call the friendship factor.

My work as a psychotherapist has furnished me with an unusual window on the interconnections of human beings. I have talked to thousands of people about their closest relationships, and in watching what the successful lovers do, I have learned some of their secrets. The aim of this book is to pass those secrets on to you.

How the Friendship Factor Can Make You an Expert at Intimacy

In research at our clinic, my colleagues and I have discovered that friendship is the springboard to every other love. Friendships spill over onto the other important relationships of life. People with no friends usually have a diminished capacity for sustaining any kind of love. They tend to go through a succession of marriages, be estranged from various family members, and have trouble getting along at work. On the other hand, those who learn how to love their friends tend to make long and fulfilling marriages, work well on business teams, and enjoy their children.

Soon after Jack Benny died, George Burns was interviewed on TV. Jack and I had a wonderful friendship for nearly fifty-five years, Burns said. Jack never walked out on me when I sang a song, and I never walked out on him when he played the violin. We laughed together, we played together, we worked together, we ate together. I suppose that for many of those years we talked every single day.

If we knew nothing else about those two, we could safely assume that they had solid relationships in other areas of their lives. Why? Because friendship is the model for all intimate encounters. The basic ingredients for a good marriage, according to sociologist Andrew Greeley, are friendship plus sex.

And what about our relationships with our parents and our children? Henry Luce, founder of Time-Life, Inc., probably influenced world opinion more than any publisher in his time. His magazines circulated to more than thirteen million people, with international editions in two hundred countries. He not only constructed a financial empire; he also revolutionized modern journalism.

Luce frequently reminisced about his boyhood years as a missionary’s son in Shantung, China. In the evenings he and his father had gone for long walks outside the compound, and his father had talked to him as if he were an adult. The problems of administering a school and the philosophical questions occupying his father were all grist for their conversational mill. He treated me as if I were his equal, said Luce. Their bond was tight because they were friends, and both father and son were nourished by the relationship.

Why Women Have More Friends

Are you close to anybody? I asked. Is there someone you can tell everything to, or almost everything? She was a new client, reeling from a divorce, and I was trying to determine whether she was a candidate for psychotherapy.

Oh, yes, she answered brightly. I never would have made it through this mess without her. Actually, she’s twenty-six years older than me, but we tell each other all our secrets. We’re life-friends.

She is a fortunate woman, and we agreed at the end of the hour that as long as she had such a confidante, she didn’t need a shrink.

Why are such friendships so rare among men? Conditioning, of course. In our society, except to shake hands, men are not even allowed to touch each other. Dick and Paula McDonald explain the phenomenon:

Most men have had neither practice in the art of intimacy nor role models to point the way. Little girls can walk to school hand in hand, hold each other up skating, hug and cry and say, You’re my best friend. I need you. I love you. Little boys wouldn’t dare.

And ultimately, of course, that affects their behavior toward the women they will meet.

Some of America’s leading psychologists and therapists were asked how many men ever have real friends. The bleak replies were not nearly enough and too few. Most guessed at 10 percent. Richard Farson, professor at the Humanistic Psychology Institute in San Francisco, says, Millions of people in America have never had one minute in their whole lifetime where they could ‘let down’ and share with another person their deeper feelings.

Because so few males have been allowed the luxury of openness and vulnerability in a relationship, they are not aware of the gaping void in their emotional lives. In short, they don’t know what they’re missing.

In one study, British sociologist Marin Crawford found that middle-aged men and women had considerably different definitions of friendship. By an overwhelming margin, women talked about trust and confidentiality, while men described a friend as someone I go out with or someone whose company I enjoy. For the most part, men’s friendships revolve around activities while women’s revolve around sharing. A man will describe as my very good friend a person who is an occasional tennis partner or someone he met a few days ago. But are they friends? Hardly.

As Paula McDonald makes clear, young women are newly aware of these issues and increasingly selective. I think more women are looking for a sensitive man today, says Lynn Sherman, and it really doesn’t make any difference to us if he can lift up the couch with one hand or two. I think it’s a responsive friend-type person most younger women want now.

It’s OK to Be an Introvert

In my hometown an obscure nurseryman died some time ago. His name was Hubert Bales, and he was the shyest man I ever met. When he talked, he squirmed, blinked his eyes rapidly, and smiled nervously.

Hubert never ran in influential circles. He grew shrubs and trees, working with his hands the plot of land left to him by his father. He was anything but an extrovert.

Yet when Hubert died, his funeral was one of the largest in the history of our little town. There were so many people that they filled even the balcony of the church.

Why did such a shy man win the hearts of so many people? Simply because, for all his shyness, Hubert knew how to make friends. He had mastered the principles of caring, and for more than sixty years he had put people first. Perhaps because they recognized that his generosity of spirit was an extra effort for someone so retiring, people loved him back. By the hundreds.

When I urge that you devote yourself to friendship, I am not urging you to become an extrovert. Some people suppose that their basic shyness is the problem.

One evening a neurosurgeon and I stood silently at the window, watching the lights of the city far below us. It was not easy for him to begin counseling—that was obvious from the way he nursed his coffee and felt me out with small talk. We had arranged this first meeting at night so he would not have to risk an encounter with any doctor friends in our elevators.

Finally, he took a deep breath, like a man about to dive into a cold swimming pool, and said:

I guess I’m here because I’m messing up all my relationships. All these years I’ve fought to get to the top of my profession, thinking that when I got there people would respect me and want to be around me. But it hasn’t happened.

He crushed the empty Styrofoam cup in his fist, as if to emphasize his desperation.

Oh, I suppose I command some respect down at the hospital, he went on, but I’m not close to anybody, really. I have no one to lean on. I’m not sure you can help me either—I’ve been shy and reserved all my life. What I need is to have my personality overhauled!

How People Change

Had I met this man when I began counseling forty-five years ago—fresh from graduate school and very brash—I probably would have attempted the total overhaul he sought. But the longer I have worked with people the more reverence I have gained for the infinite complexity of the human personality. And the more reluctant I have become to try changing anyone.

One of the dangers of being a psychologist-reformer is that you may be tempted to try to remake all clients in your own image. But God made each of us unique, and there is vast mystery and beauty surrounding the human soul. Good psychotherapists are something like astronomers who spend their lives studying the stars, trying to determine why certain stellar systems behave as they do and why black holes exist. And at the end they are even more in awe of the grandeur of it all.

Although I will never understand my clients fully, my goal is to sit beside them as they search out themselves. The two of us will study the makeup and watch the movements of this person before us, seeking to understand the total system. It would be as presumptuous of me to attempt to overhaul that system as for an astronomer to remake the solar system. If I can help clients understand who God made them to be, and then help them to be those men and women, it is quite enough.

So I told my shy friend that I had no desire to change him into a garrulous and gregarious backslapper. Besides, it was not so much his quiet personality as his patterns of relating that were getting him into trouble. When he exchanged those bad habits for some good relational skills, his life changed. He found himself talking more freely to his patients, and other doctors began to open up to him.

Today he is still an introvert. But he has three or four strong relationships, and the last time I saw him he was clearly a more fulfilled person.

You may or may not be the life of the party. If not, that will have little to do with your learning to love and be loved. In fact, as we will see later, you may be more capable of good relationships than the man who wears lampshades at the party and keeps them laughing all evening.

Friendship: A Valuable Commodity

Jesus placed great value on relationships. He chose to spend much of his time deepening his connections with a few significant persons rather than speaking to large crowds. What is more, his teaching was filled with practical suggestions on how to befriend people and how to relate to friends. The commandment on this topic was so important that he introduced it with an opening flag: I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another (John 13:34–35).

Those words are now two thousand years old, but their currency is demonstrated by a famous study. In his book The Broken Heart, Dr. James J. Lynch shows that lonely people live significantly shorter lives than the general population. Lynch, a specialist in psychosomatic disease, cites a wealth of statistics to demonstrate the unhealthy aspects of isolation and the magical powers of human contact.

Even viewed from a financial perspective, our friendships are our most valuable commodity. Studies many years ago at what was then the Carnegie Institute of Technology revealed that even in such fields as engineering, about 15 percent of one’s financial success was due to one’s technical knowledge and about 85 percent was due to skill in human engineering—to personality and the ability to lead people.

Dr. William Menninger estimated that when people are fired from their jobs, social incompetence accounts for 60 to 80 percent of the failures. Technical incompetence accounts for only 20 to 40 percent.

Your Past Failures at Love Need Not Be Repeated

I have tried over and over, said a musician with a crew cut. And I’d just as well accept it—I can’t make it with people. I’m going to be alone for the rest of my life.

He had come to our office for an antidepressant medication. He didn’t get any pills, but he did get some help with his relationships, and the depression disappeared in the process. My colleagues and I were able to help him forget his track record and concentrate on learning the art of friendship. While in therapy he could analyze his failures as they happened. When he was rejected he learned to pick himself up, profit from his mistake, and try love again. It did not come easily for him, but gradually he began to connect.

At the wedding of that musician, the delight in his bride’s darting eyes confirmed that he had learned the art of love very well. His previous failures had not kept him an emotional cripple.

Abraham Lincoln considered himself to be a dismal flop with people in his early years. Proposing to Mary Owens in 1837, he added gloomily, My opinion is that you had better not do it. And after Miss Owens turned him down, Lincoln wrote to a friend, I have now come to the conclusion never again to think of marrying, and for this reason—I can never be satisfied with anyone who would be blockhead enough to have me.

Yet that man went on to master the art of dealing with people. When Lincoln drew his last breath, Secretary of War Stanton—once his livid enemy—said, Now he belongs to the ages.

If we require further proof that we can learn to love and be loved, we can look at the life of Benjamin Franklin. As ambassador to France he was the most sought-after man in Paris. But was Franklin always this popular? Hardly. In his autobiography he describes himself as a blundering young man—uncouth and unattractive. In Philadelphia one day an old Quaker friend took young Franklin aside and said: "Ben, you are impossible. Your opinions have a slap in them for everyone who differs with you. They have become so expensive nobody cares for them. Your friends find they enjoy themselves better when you are not