Stop Looking For Friends, And Start Making Them

The treasure of true friendship is some of the richest, most valuable wealth in the whole world. If financial poverty eventually makes life unsustainable, friendship poverty makes it unbearable. By true friendship, of course, I don’t just mean acquaintances you enjoy a laugh with every once in a while, or online “friends” you can share pictures of your dinners with. I mean the real thing. The deep thing. The close thing. The uninhibited, understanding, unhurried and unbreakable thing. I mean the people who stick even when other people let go, the people who love you even after you’ve done wrong—and too much to let you get away with it. I mean the people who laugh with you about stupid inside jokes and cry with you about losses and disappointments and who know exactly what you’re thinking just by the faces you make. I mean the people you can trust enough to share life with—not just the social media highlight reel life, but the really real life, in all the mess and joy and shame of it. Friendships like these are more valuable than Blackbeard’s buried treasure (which is still buried, by the way). If we discovered his treasure hoard without ever developing true friendships, our lives would still be impoverished. Which raises the question: how do we find the treasure of true friendship?

Is there a map we can follow, like the pirates in books and films do? Is it 15 paces south, then 27 west, and then a quick right at the skull rock—mindful of the poison dart trap—and start digging? As hard as those maps might be to follow, at least they give clear directions. Tracking down great friendships can seem a lot more complicated. Close friendship feels like a dying art in an age when you’d think it would be thriving on the benefits of all our time-saving appliances and instant-communication gadgets and airplanes and automobiles. When you think about it, we have a lot of advantages. But somehow even with all these inventions (or is it because of them?) we seem to have forgotten how to really know each other deeply and enjoy each other fully. We have unprecedented access to potential friends like no generation before us has ever enjoyed, yet somehow the treasure of deep, fulfilling friendship remains elusive. It’s a curious and strange reality to find ourselves in, but mostly it’s just sad and true. Where is the map? Where is the treasure? How can we find deep, real, lasting friendships?

What if I told you that the treasure you’re looking for is right in front of you? Would you believe me? Maybe not, and I wouldn’t blame you. I know it doesn’t look like treasure. Not yet, anyway. But it can. Have you ever seen what treasure looks like when it’s in the ground? No, not what a chest full of pirate bounty looks like buried in a hole, that’s not what I mean. I’m talking about the ground where that treasure came from in the first place—before it ever became the golden coins and diamond-studded crowns and before it was shiny enough for someone to lock it up in a chest and hide it and murder for it. I’m talking about the mines. 

Gold and silver and diamonds and such are not pulled out of mountains easily. People dig for miles and miles to find them, and when they do, the raw ore they pull from the earth looks nothing like a pirate’s bounty. It looks more like rocks. Rocks with a glimmer of something more in them, but still rocks. But the miners know what they have. And the smelters know what to do. And the diamond-cutters and coin-minters and jewellery-makers know how to make it all shine so brightly that our eyes pop and we would pay a fortune and risk our lives to claim that glittering hoard for ourselves. Amazing, isn’t it? All of this from rocks in the ground.

We all want the treasure of friendship. Of course we do. It’s treasure! We just don’t all want the process that makes the treasure look like treasure. We want to discover a hoard somewhere that someone else worked and fought for, that someone else mined and minted, and we want it all for ourselves to spend and enjoy as we see fit. Maybe that’s why we’re so lonely. We’ve charted the wrong course by hunting around forever for chests full of ready-made friendship, perfectly formed and perfectly suited to our needs and desires. The reason there’s no map for that kind of friendship is because that’s not how friendship works. Deep friendships are not something we find, they are something we form. They do not magically materialise out of nothing, they have to be made out of the raw materials around us—and the raw materials inside us. 

Have you ever considered that the people around you are looking for treasure, too? And what do they see, when they look your direction? I’ll tell you what they don’t see, at least not the first time they look at you: they don’t see a close friend. It’s not because you can’t be their friend, and hopefully not because you won’t to be their friend. It’s really just the practicality that close friendship requires knowledge and understanding of each other, and understanding requires time and shared experiences, and time and experience require investments of ourselves in each other, and if you’ve only just met then obviously you can’t have done that yet, so you aren’t close friends. Not yet. But if you both want the treasure of true friendship (and you should), you can both have it. You’ll just have to make it. Together. And in the process, you’ll make each other, too.