Lost Art of Friendship

"Greater love has no one than this..."

“Friendship is a single soul dwelling in two bodies.” I was eighteen when I first read that line from Nicomachean Ethics. These were the days before phones, so I wrote the quote down in my notebook and sent a letter via snail mail to my best friend back in Texas. In the age of social media (what a funny phrase, by the way, that has become common parlance), we define “friend” as someone who follows our posts in the digital space. But this means that some of my “friends” are people that I have never met. Some of my friends are my mom’s Bible study group. Some of my friends are my neighbors. The assortment of what constitutes “friend” through the internet is varied. Perhaps this misuse of the word “friend” is contributing to the “loneliness epidemic.”

“Alone, all alone

Nobody but nobody

Can make it out here alone,”

sings Maya Angelou in her poem “Alone.” Is it even possible to live life by yourself? Solitary confinement is an extreme form of punishment used as discipline for prisoners. In 1949 the Geneva Convention prohibited solitary confinement for prisoners of war because it is too inhumane; being alone causes severe psychological problems—depression, anxiety, psychosis. The Jewish Torah speaks of the first earthling: “It is not good for the human to be alone” (Gen. 2:18, my translation). Human beings seem made for friendship.