Deep Friendships

Over the years, I've developed many friendships that are important to me.  And yet, I have found myself lonely.  I started looking at the friendships I had, asking why I was lonely when I had so many friends.

I noticed some characteristics - first, I only saw these friends at events or parties.  I never got together with them one-on-one.  And while they were very warm, and glad to see me, and gave me hugs and wanted to know how I was doing, an insecurity grew in me - did they want to know me enough to be willing to spend time alone with me?

I have a wonderful relationship with a partner.  We live together.  We spend a lot of time one-on-one.  There is tremendous depth in our relationship, partially because of the alone time we spend together.  I realized that if I wanted more depth in my other friendships, we would need to spend significant alone time together, really getting to know each other.

But there were several problem with that.  It was awkward.  I doubted anyone really liked me enough to want to spend hours, just the two of us, talking.  In fact, I didn't want to spend significant time alone with  many of my friends - why would I expect them to want to spend time alone with me?

I started looking over my friends, asking myself, who would I really like to develop a deeper relationship with?  I picked out a few that I felt would enhance my life significantly if I could spend time with them.  Several problems came up.  First, most of my friends were too busy - the first free date they had would typically be a month away.  I could not imagine having a deep friendship with someone I saw once a month at max.  Second, people were suspicious - if it was a woman, a sexual agenda was often assumed.  If it was a man, they would look at me strangely and ask, why do you want to be alone with me?

I finally decided I wanted to pick a guy, as sexual attraction with a woman brought in too many confusing factors, and creating the kind of friendship I wanted was difficult enough as it was.  After a lot of thought, I picked a guy whom I had met several times at different events.  I knew very little about him or his life, but I sensed that he was a kind person with a deep heart, and he was not afraid of closeness with men.

So I approached him and basically proposed to him - I said I wanted to develop a deep non-sexual friendship with a guy, even though I did not have a good idea what that would look like.  How close can two men get?  I thought of stories of brothers who would die for each other, or a father and grown son who spent warm times together.  Obviously it was possible, but could someone just create it?

He was quite surprised - he had had an impression of me as someone who already had plenty of friends, and had it all together, and puzzled over why I would want to spend time with him - but in the end he accepted my proposal, and we began to explore what it meant to be real friends.  It was not easy.  I had to start looking inside for what I wanted from him, what I expected, what I was willing to give, how much time I was willing to give, how deep I was willing to go with emotional closeness.  I had no answers to those questions when we started, and I had to keep searching inside as we got together and talked for what was working and what was not working.

I was so used to a close relationship including sexual attraction that I was kind of lost with what to do with a guy.  But we soon found some deep subjects we had in common, and started by telling each other of our problems and supporting each other in dealing with it.

The subject, ironically, was sex - sex with our partners.  We were both having issues in our relationships, and I found a lot of comfort in being able to detail exactly what was happening and what was not happening, and how I felt about it.  I felt very safe with him, exposing tender feelings, because of the way he handled them.  We could speak graphically about sexual details, as well as deeply and honestly about our troubled feelings and worries and frustrations.

I've discovered what works for me in developing deep friendships - one-on-one vulnerable, uninhibited conversation.