Our understanding of what constitutes a healthy friendship changes at least a few times as we age. In my earliest years, I awaited each playdate with barely restrained impatience, eager to climb monkey bars, roller-skate, or build snow forts with like-minded enthusiasts. Like the poet William Wordsworth, who in childhood “bounded o’er the mountains,” I dashed from playground to soccer field to backyard jungle gym, ending each encounter by sprinting alongside a friend’s departing car and furiously waving an invitation to return.
Middle school tempered such abandon. For a few awkward years, friends served as reliable life rafts amid the social challenges of early adolescence. I clung to companions for security as much as for any collective experience. Late high school and college relaxed apprehensions about loneliness and freed me to approach others for cerebral as well as emotional reasons. Philosophical conversations and deep dives into Scripture sharpened minds and deepened trust among those willing to lovingly challenge each other’s preconceptions.
A return to graduate school three years after getting married introduced another vital dimension to new friendships. A handful of scholars committed to pursuing our own wives and, like the man of Uz, disciplining our eyes (Job 31:1), and we provided support and correction for each other as we sought to upend the tired trope of the licentious literature instructor. Appreciation of expert storytelling in both approved canon and pop culture joined with awe at the narratives God was spinning in our own lives to provide life-giving, spiritual interdependence during challenging times. These are the types of relationships I still value most: those that combine faith, intellectual inquiry, and deep concern for one another’s well-being.
C. S. Lewis saw matters a bit differently.
In the “Friendship” chapter of The Four Loves (1960), the philosopher attempts to rehabilitate a type of love he feels Western society has long neglected. Lewis argues that an abundance of poetry celebrating romance and familial affection—and the relative absence of modern lyrics extolling friendship—mirrors society’s sad dismissal of the latter in favor of the former.
Friendship, he suggests, can offer more than companionship or support. It also provides people with focusing lenses through which they each see more clearly those deep issues that compel their attention. Though Lewis admits we can survive without friendship, he thinks this connection invaluable when it unites individuals isolated by what they had thought important but unique insights or passions.
Oddly, Lewis holds that those invigorated by mutual pursuit of the same vision end up caring far more about that which they jointly seek than about one another. Ideological adventurers united by philia necessarily learn a little about each other’s personal lives but, he argues, do not focus on one another’s pasts, professions, or families. This narrow definition of friendship does not encompass the accountability Jesus recommends among spiritual siblings who lovingly challenge one another about sin (Matt. 18:15–20), or Paul’s encouragement to follow punishment with forgiveness and comfort so that a brother “will not be overwhelmed by excessive sorrow” (2 Cor. 2:5–8).
Lewis’s claim about friendship consistently trips up my students whenever I teach this book, whether or not they call themselves Christians. Churched and unchurched alike intuit the importance of lifting a fallen fellow (Ecc. 4:10), an eventuality Lewis mentions only to dismiss. In his own life, he appears to have compartmentalized roles I have benefitted from melding. His talk with fellow scholars revolved around creative endeavors. Confession was reserved for mentors like Father Walter Adams. Personal matters like marriage he shared not even with close friend J. R. R. Tolkien. (Those interested in a visual dramatization of this complex friendship may appreciate the recent The Mythmakers.)
My own immense respect for C. S. Lewis also stumbles over this passage. I’ll agree that when the truth two people seek is the divine mystery, love of God rises higher than all other loves. In my experience, however, it also deepens our understanding of those we care for, including friends. Surely a love that hopes to exercise patience and kindness (1 Cor. 13:4) requires interpersonal knowledge enough not to be flabbergasted when a friend suddenly, desperately requires emotional and spiritual support?
This brings me to the new movie Friendship. The film, directed by Andrew DeYoung, dramatizes the tragedy of the friendless life—but with enough quirky humor to make us ask whether the problem lies more with the individual than with the societal shifts we tend to blame for today’s loneliness epidemic.
At the center of the film is an impossibly awkward, socially inept buffoon who has somehow managed to secure a job, wife, and child. Craig Waterman (Tim Robinson) treats his coworkers with disdain, though longing to join their circle during cigarette breaks. He responds to his wife’s fears about her cancer’s possible return with tone-deaf optimism and repeatedly fails to connect with his teenage son. He appears constitutionally incapable of nurturing any sort of relationship, an inability likely perpetuated by a job in which he markets addictive apps designed to imprison users in mind-numbing button pushing. His own joyless, friendless life has long accepted the repetition of dull evenings lounging safely alone in a recliner.
When new neighbor Austin Carmichael (Paul Rudd) invites Craig to disrupt the doldrums with a journey into the sewers, Craig experiences that rush of friendly adventure which many of us first encounter as children. Austin introduces Craig to an axe head carved by Neanderthals and to wild mushrooms he can serve up for breakfast, drawing Craig into a number of situations that dirty his shoes and challenge his inhibitions. More importantly, Austin eventually invites Craig into a life-giving, supportive community of middle-aged men willing to share what weighs on their hearts.
In the fleeting glimpses Craig gains of this intimate community before utterly disqualifying himself for participation in it, he misreads the room, betraying an inability to interpret the relative seriousness of others’ actions and words. He treats matters too casually or fails to grant them deserved gravity. Subsequently rejected by both the group and his new friend, Craig slides backward from a mature interdependence he just barely touched and cannot understand into that second, anguished stage I identified with early adolescence.
Lewis said that friends “hardly ever” talk about their friendship—absorbed as they are in a common interest—but all a rejected Craig can do is think about the friendship he’s lost and unsuccessfully try to reproduce with others the brief connection he found with Austin.
Instead of continuing the ongoing conversation about how new tech provides the risk averse with shallow, low-cost options for pastoral care, romance, counseling, and yes, friendship, Friendship suggests that the real problem lies with individuals, not systems. Sin plays no role in the storytellers’ calculations; Craig and Austin and the rest simply are who they are, without any possibility of change. The thick comedy makes it hard to tell whether the movie intends to blame Craig’s failures on an inconceivable dearth of experience (he is married, after all) or on some undiagnosed personality disorder.
Like the comedies Superstar and Napoleon Dynamite, which lay pariahs’ amusing problems at their own feet, Friendship implies that those without the right personality type will forever be stuck at a primitive stage of development, incapable of forming a connection in which two friends “carry each other’s burdens” (Gal. 6:1–2). We can be thankful that the church does not require “people skills” for admittance—though the “renewing of your mind” Paul describes (Rom. 12:2) sometimes, miraculously, extends even to someone like Craig.
Paul Marchbanks is a professor of English at California Polytechnic State University. His YouTube channel is “Digging in the Dirt.”
