Friendship As Showing Up
“Why did you do all this for me?' he asked. “I don't deserve it. I've never done anything for you.”
“You have been my friend,” replied Charlotte. “That in itself is a tremendous thing.”
- E.B. White, Charlotte's Web
The older I get, the more I feel like friendship is a function of commitment over interests. It used to be that I would find friends by looking for the people who liked what I liked or did what I did, perhaps because a part of me still harkens back to the days when you could pick out your best friend based on who else had purple as their favorite color. But the older I get, the more I’ve found that making friends isn’t all that easy or automatic anymore. The forced commonalities of shared life throughout grade school and college splinters into far more insular spheres as we become absorbed by our own careers and family lives. Friendships now have to contend with busier personal schedules and account for the effect they have upon spouses and children. We have less emotional energy and time to risk on the open-ended shared experiences that often forge the deepest friendships—instead we go on friend-coffee dates or walk-dates here and there, hoping something sparks.
These realities feel particularly magnified in the Bay Area, where people are rich in every resource but time. Around here, it’s not hard to find someone who looks like me or does what I do; there are plenty of people who think and read and create and parent and doctor and all the rest. What is hard to find are people who show up in my life. Many times, I’ve been struck by how well I connect with another person, how much we have in common, only to find them perennially unavailable. Even harder is finding people who stick around. People are either here for a stint in tech or school, or eventually forced out by the high costs of living. Geographical permanence is rare.
Under these circumstances, friendships tend to become another commodity. It’s hard to keep putting yourself out there on friend-dates. It’s hard to keep trying to get together with someone. It’s hard to invest in someone who ends up leaving. And so you start to ask: what’s in this for me? Is this relationship convenient or useful? How likely is this person going to be around in a few years?
I remember talking with one of the pastors at our church about how hard it is to see friends move away. It kind of makes it hard to keep reaching out to people, I said. She turned around and said, “but Esther—that’s love. Love is the willingness to be hurt.” I remembered that verse in John 15: “Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends.” Not “lay down his life for his kids.” Or spouse. Or parents. Or career. Or ideals. But our friends. And of all the words Jesus uses to describe his relationship with us, that is one he picks the most. Two verses later, he says, “I have called you friends.”
Friendship is not a commodity, though it benefits us. It is not a club, though it can spur our interests. It is a point of sacrifice, and living here, in this stage of life, it’s a sacrifice that feels like time. Like showing up. It feels like sending a text to someone you haven’t heard from in a while. It feels like getting yourself out the door to meet someone. It feels like trying a new gathering even though you’re not sure how it will turn out. It feels like having neighbors or students over even if they’ll only be in the area for a year.
Friendships don’t just happen anymore. They take intentionality, because it’s just too easy to fill our lives with buckets of activity and leisure that revolve around our own needs and comforts. But true friendships, deep friendships, don’t revolve around us. Friendships are for us, but they are not only about us, and the ability to step beyond ourselves for others takes intention. It takes commitment, through risk and messiness and inconvenience and sheer inertia. It takes a whole lot of perseverance and willingness to try again. It takes showing up.
