When I was young and couldn’t sleep, I’d count the people I’d kissed. Now that I’m, well, a little less young, I count the people I can call a friend. Both lists give me happiness. But I’d argue the second list gives me life.
The assessment that friends give life is not hyperbole. In “The Joy of Connections,” her final book before her death last year, Dr. Ruth Westheimer quoted research that shows loneliness may shorten our lives “as much as smoking up to 15 cigarettes a day, and is even more harmful than being sedentary and significantly overweight.” Not that we need a conga line of friends; just a couple will do. But we ignore our need for connection at our peril.
Yet friendship seems increasingly hard to find, hold onto and even to define. So naturally, in the last couple of years, many people are writing about it.
Happy Relationships
By Kimberly Brown
HAPPY RELATIONSHIPS (Prometheus, 171 pp., paperback, $21.95) invites us to look at friendships through the lens of Buddhist teaching. I’m not wise enough to deliver a TED Talk on Buddhism’s four noble truths, but suffice it to say that the goal is to end the human cycle of suffering that comes from craving what we can’t have and, instead, focus on what is. And so it is with friends: the close ones, the ones we love but disagree with, the pains-in-the-butts who we nevertheless want to keep in our lives. Admirable friends, Buddhism teaches, “give what is hard to give; do what is hard to do; endure what is hard to endure; reveal their secrets to you; keep your secrets; don’t abandon you in times of trouble; don’t look down on you in times of loss.”
That’s a pretty good summation of friendship, isn’t it? You don’t necessarily need to share the same values, come from the same background or even have common interests, Brown writes. What’s more important for true friendship, according to Buddhism, is that we treat each other with generosity, vulnerability, diligence and trust. Buddhism assumes a basic decency among human beings, a desire to find commonalities and to lead with compassion. Good luck with that in this not very Buddhism-friendly time.
Finding Your People
By Alexandra Hourigan and Sally McMullen
From the chirpy young women who brought you the podcast “2 Broke Chicks” comes FINDING YOUR PEOPLE (Allen & Unwin, 310 pp., paperback, $18.99). They start with a very good premise — “no friendship is ever a waste of time” — and go on to define the seven different types of pals. My personal favorites are “friend who can make you laugh in any situation” and “friend who knows about all your relationship problems, even though they don’t want to hear them.”
While the chummy language of the book can be irritating — “back off sister, I’m not your gal pal and I’m not up for big cuddles” — much of the advice on how to be a good friend, not just how to make good friends, is welcome. I asked my friend and neighbor what her “friendship love language” was: words of affirmation, quality time, gifts, acts of service, physical touch? After she finished rolling her eyes, we discovered we have very different requirements for feeling appreciated. She feels friendship involves hanging out. I need acts of service. So after she goes and fetches me some takeout, we’ll knock off work for an hour and watch reruns of “Law and Order” together. Win/win.
Hourigan and McMullen make one particularly important point. One of the tropes of friendship (particularly for women) is that lovers come and go, but friends are forever. But what if your friendship becomes a dumpster fire? Do you have to work to maintain friendships with the BFF who sleeps with your ex or the high school bestie who now bores you? No, they argue; people can come into your life “for a reason, a season,” and not necessarily for a lifetime.
Think of this advice as the Gen Z equivalent of Nora Ephron’s “Everything is copy.” As the kids say, I’m here for it.
Astrologic
By Amelia Wood
ASTROLOGIC (Castle Point Books, 176 pp., $20) has a lot of fun advice about dealing with bosses, lovers, children, parents and, of course, friends, based on their zodiac sign. When it comes to being your pal, every sign is, in some sense, stellar: Libras “always want the best for you,” a Leo is a “true, thick-and-thin kind of friend,” “Taureans … make exceptional friends.” (Why is everyone so fabulous? Just once I’d like to read an astrology book where a few signs represent the dregs of humanity — so please tune in for my next project, “Virgos Suck.”)
I’d like to tell you I studied every page carefully. But like everyone else reading about astrology, I immediately turned to the bits about me. You’ll be delighted to know that, as an Aries, I make friends for life, and am generally fun and loyal, though there’s no going back when you’ve hurt my feelings.
And I may be a little too full of opinions.
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