Wellbeing and the Rhythm of Friendship

A few years ago, I read Wellbeing: The Five Essential Elements by Tom Rath and Jim Harter. The book’s thesis is simple: Gallup conducted extensive surveys and research on what people who were doing well in life were specifically doing. If they felt stable and were stable, what mattered most?

They broke it down into five categories: physical, financial, career, community and social wellbeing. The areas are pretty much what they sound like—do you have energy, are your finances stable, is work going OK, do you have friends and do you like where you live? This isn't groundbreaking stuff, but a lot of times important stuff isn’t so groundbreaking.

I’ve been playing with the categories a lot on AI lately, having it create wellbeing plans or measurements for me and then feeding them back into an “overview” AI that takes them all into account. It’s exactly the kind of weird thing I would do, and, well, I’m doing it.

Here’s a quick readout on how I’m doing. My physical health is better than it’s been in at least 19 years. Financially, I’m secure and stable, but I’m looking forward to saving a little more. My work and career opportunities are trending up in big ways. My social life is good, but it’s the area where I’ve wanted to make the most consistent improvements and where I set a personal goal this year to grow.

A few years ago, I was in a pretty rough place. My marriage was ending. My career was imploding. My physical health was in the gutter, and I felt alienated and isolated from my community. Things just seemed to get worse and worse. And, for a good while, they did.

But the funny thing about the lowest points of your life is that they are the times when you’ll get a good read on who your true friends are—the people who will stick by you when you have very little (or nothing) to offer them in return. During that time, I made a list of who those people were, because I knew when I got better I wanted to give back to them and also just to do the things I could to be a good friend to them: To be consistent and to remember the little things.

One of those friends is Matt. He’s a pastor, an educator and someone who has lots of experience talking to people in their valleys. One day we got together for lunch and I went through all my troubles. I detailed my mental and physical health issues. I talked about my alienation and isolation. I skirted around the issues with my crumbling relationship.

“What can I do?” Matt asked.

I told him that I didn’t really know.

“Well, what I think I can offer to you is the rhythm of friendship.”

For whatever reason, that phrase—the rhythm of friendship—stuck in my head. It was, in fact, exactly what I needed in that valley. Matt didn’t detail it too much, but I immediately understood what it meant: consistency, patience and understanding.

Matt and I got together fairly often over the next year—not too much, but we stayed in touch enough to check in. Earlier this year, we got a couple of other friends together for monthly hangout sessions. At the most recent hangout, I mentioned the rhythm of friendship, and Matt said he didn’t really remember saying it.

So, I guess, a couple of years later, the concept of the rhythm of friendship is mine to write.

There’s been a lot of talk about the male loneliness epidemic. The percentage of men reporting having at least six close friends has dived from 55% in 1990 to 27% in 2021. The same study reported that 15% of men said they had no close friends. Men are less likely to turn to their social networks for emotional support. Men are less likely to communicate with friends, and younger men report higher levels of loneliness, which suggests the problem may be getting worse. And the darkest statistic is that men have a consistently higher suicide rate than women do.

And yet the response to this has been anywhere from “meh” to “that’s their problem.” The responses can be dizzyingly contradictory. Some people expect men to be strong and self-reliant, enforcing the stereotype that is likely at the root of the issue. Some view it through a more academic lens and point to male privilege or the patriarchy—certainly real issues, but ones that can also deny the shared humanity and lack of control any individual has over society at large. Some responses are just misandry masquerading as cultural critique.

I suppose all of these responses have a grain of truth to them, but none of them help move society and humankind forward, which, in theory, is what we’re all trying to do here on Earth.

So, anyway, I digress. I was at lunch today with another friend of mine, Ben. We were talking about friendships and loneliness and how it’s getting harder to make time for friends—and I came back to the rhythm of friendship.

So, what does that mean to a man nearing 40 who has been down through the depths of the valleys and is yearning for the greener pastures of comfort, community, friendship and understanding?

I suppose it means a few things.

I think the reason the phrase stuck out to me when Matt said it had less to do with friendship. I know, more or less, what it takes to be a friend. I have hung onto friends from every era of my life since I was a kid. You probably know how to be a friend, too. It’s down there somewhere in your heart and conscience or whatever.

It was the rhythm idea that stuck with me. Rhythms are made one beat at a time—the right beat at the right time. It’s consistency. Some are slower, some are faster. There are different tempos for different songs, different friends, but they persist.

I’m an amateur musician. I’ve played in some bands here and there. I used to write about music. I remember an old blues man telling me one time that if you have a good drummer, you have a good band, but if you have a great drummer, you have a great band. It’s true. The rhythm section is the foundation; everything else is decoration and style. In “Right Now” by Van Halen, Sammy Hagar sang, “Miss a beat, lose a rhythm,” and as goofy of a reference as that is, it’s true. Good drummer, good band. Great drummer, great band.

I was never good at remembering birthdays or some of the smaller but more significant parts of friendship. You could count on me being there for hard times, but sometimes I missed the details. Last year, I started sending birthday cards to the people on my friends list.

Thinking about friendship in this way gave me a new way of showing up for my friends. I am a novice gardener, and one of the things I’ve learned from it is that everything has a season. There are times for planting, watering, pruning and even times to do nothing at all. But it all happens right on time, every year, and starts over. If you stick with it, you’ll almost certainly end up with beds bursting with blooms.

Ben is also a gardener, and he pointed out that friends are more like fruit trees than tomato plants. I suppose he’s right. Friendships bloom again and again at the right time. They push deep roots into the soil. They don’t produce and die in a season.

Ben and I talked about planting trees. The best time, Ben said, to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is today.

We tend to the trees we planted before—the friends we still have from high school, college or our early 20s that we don’t talk to quite as much as we used to. A text, a lunch, an old photo. I have an old friend from high school that I’ve kept in touch with for 26 years. Last year, I was back in my hometown where he works as a doctor, and he pointed out I was his oldest friend. We’ve both been through some hard times, but we like being friends. We don’t see each other much because we live states away, but we left that lunch knowing that we meant something to each other. We text more often now.

We tend to old trees, we plant new trees.

So, I have probably taken this metaphor as far as it can go for now, but the point is this: Stick with it and keep it on a schedule, and you're likely to see your friendships take root and produce fruit.

Men start talking about friendship, and people start cracking jokes, and I guess that’s OK. Let ‘em joke. Friends got me through some tough times, and I hope I can be there for them as well. In a lot of ways, I’m still going through tough times, but things are stronger, more stable. Things are better, and I am happy for that.

There’s something special about male friendships. I have benefited from them my entire life, and the worst time in my life was when I was alienated from them. Male friendships tend to go deeper than people realize, in part because sometimes men go through stuff that is pretty heavy and pretty dark—sometimes we get ourselves into those situations, sure, but it doesn’t really matter how the jackass got stuck in the mud. You just need someone to dig you out while you’re kicking and stepping. You need someone not to judge but to understand and to be there.

I like for these posts to be 2,000 words, but I am struggling for a final act. I think I’ve said all there is to be said. Oh, maybe one other thing.

The thing about the five elements of wellbeing, from my perspective, is that they are all connected. You have to feel good and have energy to contribute to your career, which gives you money, which tends to make life in your community better. Your social life is kinda the catalyst for all of these—friends help you take care of yourself, they give you career opportunities. They make up your community. We tend not to manage our social life better because we’re busy spinning all the other plates. But that’s kind of backward—the rhythm of friendship is the beat of all the other instruments.

Connection. It is what it is. It doesn’t happen by accident.

Maybe I’ll end on male loneliness, because lately it’s been burning my ass that only people talking about men and their issues with any empathy are red-pilled podcasters, and that is not nor has it ever been my scene. But there’s something I learned as I walked through the valley. There’s no doubt that societal issues trigger the issues that many of us face—be it gender, race or whatever other division humans see between themselves. And it’s OK to acknowledge these issues. They are a pain in the ass. Being human is a pain in the ass. As Rilo Kiley once sang, it must be nice to finish when you’re dead.

But the other truth, the hard truth, is that until your number is up, you are still running this human race. To that end, you are responsible for yourself and the next step you take. You are responsible for planting your trees and watering them and pruning them and feeding them and weeding around them. You can’t do it all at once. You can only do it one day at a time. So plant your tree today. And care for the ones you planted 20 years ago. Stay after it, and they will produce fruit.