This month I’ve been pondering different types of friends and the important roles that each one plays in our lives. As I wrote I was so excited about each type that I forgot to mention the most important part! These blogs were not a checklist for the type of people you need to go out and find, but to assess the relationships that you have and to check where you are putting your time and energy. I cannot tell you what is the best formula for how you invest your time and energy into friends through receiving, sharing, and giving. Only you can assess your needs, your friends, and your resources.
While you are assessing your self, your friends, and your relational resources, go ahead and assess your capacity for intimacy. “Intimacy is the mutual self-revelation that causes us to know and be known.” - Mathew Kelly
It doesn’t matter what type of people you have around you, if you lack the ability to know and be known you will struggle to make and keep friends. If you are finding that you struggle in this area I suggest you pick the person whom you trust the most, and feel most safe around, and reveal a small piece of you that you don’t normally, not a deep or sensitive piece, but something about you that is below the surface. Should this person reciprocate, then you have not only been accepted by them, but you have deepened the relationship. If the person does not reciprocate, don't worry, that just means that they are not ready to share that part of them yet. Time may allow them to, if not then you know where you stand with them and can try again with another friend.
I remain amazed at the friends I have made, and kept, over the years. I am thankful for them, all that I have learned from them, all that I have shared with them, and all of the hard won wisdom that I have been able to give. What a gift to share life with such amazing people. I am equally amazed of what I have learned of myself through opening up and being known.
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Is it just me or does modern love seem like such a fleeting thing? We hear about these marriages that last for 60+ years and cannot imagine how to create a love like that. We make a thousand excuses for why we cannot find someone to marry, or for why the marriage fell apart, or for why we think long lasting love is a thing of the past. Maybe it is, maybe the problem is we have psychoanalyzed too much and now we are too logical for love. Or maybe, just maybe, we are too afraid to love.
We live in a world where everything is on film and video. The oddest things go viral in a day, and yet we all live in the fear of being seen, really and truly seen and known. The problematic outcome is that to be deeply loved we must be truly seen, good, bad, ugly, secrets, vulnerabilities, accomplishments, humiliations, weakness, and strengths. Anyone who has been loved like this knows that it can be scary because your lover can use this knowledge against you, even so, they choose to accept you anyway. They choose to speak truth to you in all of your mess, with grace and kindness because they want to see you blossom into your best self.
For me one of the most difficult aspects of a deeply intimate relationship is how they consistently show me that I see myself inaccurately. It’s not that I am completely unaware of how I am, but its that they can see my blind spots and I need the mirror of their friendship and love to show me what I cannot see in myself. Great loves have this element of friendship, where we kindly show each other these blind spots so that we can rid ourselves of that which isn’t working for us, and make space for that which will.
I’ve been thinking about the Bible verse that says “to speak the truth in love.” Which is such an interesting concept because love is a verb, its an action, so to speak the truth is an action that we are to do with in an action… I think a better translation would be to speak the truth in kindness. Or speak the truth with grace, out of a place of affection. To build the kind of relationship that lasts a life time we must be brave enough to let someone look at our flaws and speak the loving truth to help us grow through them, while simultaneously being that person for them. This is what true love is, not simply to accept, but to say, hey, lets work on being better humans together.
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