Forget rapturous romance, friendship is the love that feeds the relationally malnourished

Look beyond the commercialised celebration of Valentine’s Day.

John Wyatt

John Wyatt is the author of Transforming Friendship. He also writes on ethical, philosophical and theological challenges caused by advances in medical science and technology.

A hand held out is gentle grasped by a turning person.

It’s Valentine’s Day yet again – the annual commercialised binge of flowers, chocolates, tacky pink cards and heart-shaped balloons. This year US consumers alone will spend an estimated $26bn expressing their yearnings for someone or something. A special person that will make their dreams come true, a magic chemistry that will bring meaning and fulfillment, or maybe just plain old-fashioned lust. Valentine’s Day provides an annual and unavoidable restatement of the message that the royal route to personal fulfillment and relational intimacy is mind-blowing sex and romantic endorphins.

A time traveller from a previous era would look at these excesses with astonishment. How was it that sexual ecstasy and came to be seen as the route to human fulfilment, meaning and intimacy? For most of our history, sexual attraction and coupling has been regarded as a relatively minor part of life. Important for reproduction and continuation of the species, no doubt, but hardly the meaning of existence.

There is a pervasive sense of relational deficit, a longing for genuine intimacy that remains unsatisfied.

Dr Freud, obsessed with the hydraulic metaphors of the age, invents the idea of libido, a powerful but unruly fluid which provides the ultimate motive force for the personality. Sexual repression is essential to civilization but also the source of neurosis and other discontents. For decades Freudian psychology remains a minority interest for psychotherapists and creative artists but with the rise of the sexual liberation movement in the 1960s, the invention of the contraceptive pill and the commercial exploitation of sex for marketing, it has become the unquestionable orthodoxy of the age. The conviction formed that sex in all its forms is good for psychological health, that control and frustration of sexual drives leads inexorably to mental illness. That celibacy is a deeply unrealistic and potentially dangerous state, that the impulse for sexual pleasure lies behind much if not all human motivation, that our very identity is defined by our sexual drives and interests – these seem to be such obvious and scientifically authoritative ideas as to be self-evident and unchallengeable. They are part of the agreed presuppositions of twenty-first century culture, and they are all traceable to Freud. Valentine’s day is the ultimate celebration of libido in all its multifarious forms.

But for many of us, February 14th is a painful reminder of what we don’t have. Whether unattached but aching to be romantically involved, or trapped in a dysfunctional relationship, the glossy merchandise packing out the supermarket aisles only seems to twist the knife. Surveys have indicated that half of UK adults report feeling lonely, and seven percent of the population experience ‘chronic loneliness’. The popularity of transactional dating apps, and the surprising rise of simulated AI partners, reflect a desperate longing for something, a relationship that will satisfy our deepest yearnings, bring purpose and fulfillment. There is a pervasive sense of relational deficit, a longing for genuine intimacy that remains unsatisfied.

It is friendship with its genuine concern and caring for the other that must absorb our pain and meet our needs, just as we, in turn, meet the needs of others.

How can we recover and celebrate an older, deeper and more lasting form of intimacy between human beings? To the writers, sages and philosophers of the past, friendship - covenantal, committed, intimate, self-disclosing - was the highest form of human love. To Cicero, friendship was the most joyful gift of life and those who deprive life of friendship ‘seem to take the sun out of the universe’. To JC Ryle ‘Friendship halves our troubles and doubles our joys.’

Our culture’s tendency to read a sexual dimension into all close adult relationships, implies that we have forgotten that non-sexual and yet powerfully intimate, joyful and committed unions can exist between two people. Healthy covenantal friendship, in which our deepest fears, vulnerabilities and longings can be accepted, seen, known, and loved by the other, is inexpressibly beautiful and life-affirming, a form of intimacy which is open to all, unlike marriage or romance. Friendship is the love that our relationally malnourished, lonely society cries out for. Where so many in our society lack biological family or marital ties, it is friendship with its genuine concern and caring for the other that must absorb our pain and meet our needs, just as we, in turn, meet the needs of others.

Romantic love and sexual attraction have their place in our lives, but they have become twisted out of proportion and made into ultimate goals. Sex was never designed to bear the weight of every human need and desire. In a strange and poignant quirk of the calendar, this year Valentine’s Day coincides with Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent, a reminder of mortality and death -ashes to ashes - but also the first day of the great Lenten journey which leads to Easter sacrifice and resurrection. It’s a reminder that ultimate meaning for human beings made out of dust may be found not in libidinous excess but in love and hope that affirm and transcend our mortality.

Article

Books

Change

Mental Health

17 June 2024

5 min read

Reading together helps us read our own lives better

The rush and tumble nearly squeezes the life out of the clock’s second hand.

Jessica Brown

Jessica is a researcher, writer, and singer-songwriter. She is studying at Trinity College Dublin, and is an ordinand with the Church of Ireland.

A painting shows two 19th century women in a carriage, one reading as the others snoozes.

The Travelling Companions, Augustus Egg.

Birmingham Museums Trust on Unsplash.

Even ordinary days seem to have frantic edges. A friend of mine, a salesman and father of four teenagers, said the other day that it felt like he was the hamster in the wheel, but so dreadfully exhausted, he’s flopped over, thumping around as the wheel keeps spinning. If we put a finger on the pulse of our current cultural desires, one pulse would be the longing not only for rest — spots of digital fasting or a day hiking — but an overhaul and renewal of what we’ve done with time. Yet it is difficult to know how to slow down, and it often seems that our attempts for self-care and being intentional are not enough to register that desired sense of slowness.

If we managed this, we would not just be able to slow down, but we would figure out how to bring our experience — the texture, the feel — of our paced lives into something like healing. The rush and tumble of a normal day nearly squeezes the life out of the clock’s second hand, and far too often, most of us reach each evening in some state of exhaustion.

Speaking from my own story, a shift happened when we moved from Los Angeles (which was, to be fair, a great place for us until it wasn’t) to East Clare in the Midlands of Ireland. It was a shift that my whole being needed—needed at a limbic and somatic level, in the spiritual self, as an artist, for family dynamics, and for my partner, a sense of freedom in work. It wasn’t that we merely got more time in our day: it was that our immersion in time, our soul’s experience of the clock, found an ‘easing up’ that — though the daily round is still arduous enough — afforded a little more time in every direction to breathe, think, walk, write; be.

It’s been in the wake of this move, nearly eight years ago now, that I’ve pondered why it felt that the hills here gathered me up into their arms and helped me to actually slow down. Is it these hills, the lovely stretches of variant greens and the countless walking paths hidden among them? Is it the congregation of artists — local artists, who refashioned my ideas about artistic success, inculcated as I was into seeing it as only with a large following? Is it the deliberate decisions to keep family overheads as low as we can, freeing up a bit of time from the understandable and ongoing need for wages?

Among the many reasons for the shift in how I experience time — for the sense, not just of slowing down, but of time affording more space — is the grace of reading with others.

The pastor, physician, and poet—this trio of us still are surprised by the deep, serendipitous connections that our poems make, week after week.

In fact, before this shift there was the keenly disappointing realisation of how little time in the land of adulthood could be set aside for reading. In the last few years, though, the regular habit of reading in companionship has grown into one of the most structural elements of my week. With Monday evening comes lectio divina, an ancient Christian practice for reading scripture in an authentically ‘listening’ way. Two lovely pals from town and I meet (often over a WhatsApp call, but sometimes in person) to read together a passage from the Bible, usually what will be read at a service the following Sunday.

On Monday night, my brother in Texas and I unpack whatever book we’re reading at the moment. We started with Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia, went onto Michael Foley’s School of Life book on Henri Bergson, and after a few more texts, are now reading the stunning poetry collection The Art of the Lathe by the Texan-Kansan poet B.H. Fairchild.

On Tuesday nights, I gather via Zoom with two other women—a minister in Connecticut and a doctor in Sydney; we met at an online course about Rilke in the winter of 2021, and still meet regularly, each bringing a poem to share and the stories of our lives as we’re living through the week. The pastor, physician, and poet—this trio of us still is surprised by the deep, serendipitous connections that our poems make, week after week.

I think too what happens in this reading companionship is that the muscles we use to attend to words together are the very muscles needed to read our own lives.

As these fellow readers and I weave together silence and articulation, listening and exploration, our time together edges eternity. In this, I think I glimpse how God works to redeem the violence we do to time. When we enter into the invitation to holy spaces—like time spent with the Bible, times in prayer, times of friendship—our usage of clock time becomes secondary to the content within that duration, and certainly secondary to the presence of others (be it the writer of the Gospel of John, Emily Dickinson, the Holy Spirit, or a friend down the road). Our experience of time becomes inflected by the psychological richness and the interplay of spiritual growth with another person or persons.

I think too what happens in this reading companionship is that the muscles we use to attend to words together are the very muscles needed to read our own lives. In this, we can suss out how the longing for slowness is an appropriate one and one to listen to. Using metaphors at hand, reading our lives with the modalities of dialogue, listening, and in-time discovery means that our longing for slowness can help us see that we’re looking for a waypoint, a stop along the road; or a few days at basecamp, patching up and cleaning worn gear; or a longer stretch of wintering in the plains before crossing the mountains; or a period of convalescence in a home by the sea. These images for rest, for pause and restoration, can help us see how to open to God’s care in our living narratives, care that seeks to renew and redeem our often grueling experience of time.

The special grace that reading companionship yields is not just the hour’s content that is spent in shared conversation, though this is nourishing and transformative in its own right. It is how this hour sets the context for all the other hours. The humble stance of reading with attention and cherishing the voices of others models a kind of immersed slowness for the rest of our personhood. At the end of the day, I think it’s a radical counterpoint to what we often ask of a day, an infusion of divine grace into the pumping vessels of time.