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Key points
- People are happiest when they have real and intimate relationships.
- Friendship is often an ongoing source of satisfaction.
- If a friendship goes awry, you can work on it to make it better.
- You have to work at friendship, like everything else worthwhile.
My patient Larry told me that he “never should have lost” an old friendship and wanted to restore it. That is, he thought he never should have lost it and never forgave his friend for cutting ties. He saw his life since the loss as a natural progression that justified a reconnection. He was willing to finesse why the fissure had occurred.
Larry and Zac had been great friends in college. They met during freshman orientation, and bonded when they joined the same fraternity. They roomed together. They attended Friday night services at the campus Hillel (okay, before they went out to some party). Larry was Zac’s best man at his wedding.
What mattered was that it all seemed so easy.
Until the fissures began to emerge. Zac went to Harvard Law School, and joined a Wall Street firm. Larry, who was academically respectable but no superstar, studied law at a second-tier school and joined a smaller firm; it specialized in wills, trusts, and estates and had ties to a union that sent it business. Okay, so their clients were different, but the friends still saw each other.
The trouble started a year or two later, when Larry was censured by the Bar for commingling client funds with his own. It was a serious ethical lapse. Zac inevitably found out, and the next time Larry called, Zac’s assistant said that he could have no further association with him.
Larry was stunned. His great friend had abruptly turned his back on him. He was sure it was for professional reasons: white-shoe lawyers like Zac fear even a whiff of scandal. So, when Larry came to see me, he was bewildered by their whole friendship. Had it all been a mirage? “I would have stood by him,” he said, “even if I was white-shoe too. That’s what friends do.” But, apparently, not always.
Larry recognized that he had seriously departed from basic legal norms. But he had thought, until Zac disabused him, that if you don’t hurt a friend—as, of course, he hadn’t hurt Zac—then that friend would stand by you. Zac’s rejection seemed like a breach of the logic of friendship.
Larry sought my help, in a vague sort of way, to keep from becoming still more cynical. He was aiming for a two-fer: recovering a friend and, thereby, recovering his belief in strong human ties.
Larry’s line of approach was that he would reach Zac by working on himself. He would become a sufficient peer—professionally, morally—so that Zac would want what he did: to revive their friendship.
So, even though Larry didn’t blame himself for their friendship’s collapse, he was willing to own his professional lapse and take on the onus of restoring the friendship.
It would be a long process. Larry got elected to a position on the union’s advisory board (an extraordinary accomplishment, considering he’d commingled funds from one of its members). He became Secretary of his synagogue (“They’d never make me treasurer,” he quipped, “but they’ll let me take notes”). He got his name in the paper when he organized relays for kids with cognitive impairment. All this activity wasn’t just to get Zac’s attention—he liked being socially active—but he admitted that it might have that effect.
He was beginning to make new friends. Not like Zac, of course, but anyone could see that people liked him. “I don’t want Zac to think that I’m leaning on him, that I’m some loner or something,” he said. “I just want him to remember that I’m worth having as a friend.”
Larry made compromises by taking the initial steps to restart the friendship; now he was making more compromises, accepting a pared-down version of the friendship he’d initially had. Pursuing happiness is about recalibrating our needs and expectations to jibe with what’s possible. Larry knew he couldn’t just wait for Zac to make the first move; he knew as well that any friendship they established wouldn’t just pick up where they’d left off. He had to start, and he had to do so from where he was.
Larry sent Zac an email, this time from his union address, suggesting that they get together with a client of his who might need some corporate work. Zac thanked him, but said he was already working 70 hours a week and couldn’t handle anything more. “Well, he could’ve at least gotten together anyway,” Larry complained and seemed rather deflated. More time went by.
However, a few weeks later Larry saw an announcement in the paper that Zac was getting married—his second marriage, after the first, to his college girlfriend, had apparently failed. Larry wrote to congratulate him and (did he still believe in miracles?), Zac invited him for a drink.
Larry told me that now it was his turn to be frightened. But he showed up. Zac seemed a little downcast, and got right to the point. As it turned out, Zac’s fiancée wasn’t Jewish. No one from his family would attend the wedding. Zac had remembered their Friday nights at the Hillel, and thought Larry would be a good person to consult. “Well,” he later told me, “He wasn’t exactly resuming our friendship—more like treating me as an expert witness. But still, I thought maybe something might come of it.”
Playing along, Larry reminded Zac that according to Reform and Conservative Jewish teaching, if either parent is Jewish and the children are raised Jewish, then they’re considered fully Jewish. “I told him,” he said, “that the promise of Jewish grandchildren (provided his fiancée agreed) could be an opening wedge with his family.”
Zac said he was grateful for the advice. He said he had to get back to his office and, that, apparently, was that.
But then, about two months later, Larry was invited to Zac’s wedding. The invitation included a personal note saying how much Zac had appreciated Larry’s advice.
So perhaps things are back on track—the track being long and winding but still in the right direction. The point is that friendship is unpredictable; restoring it is unpredictable, and it takes a lot of work. Had Larry not “rehabilitated” himself by taking on those social activities, he might not have succeeded with Zac despite the good advice. Who knows? But he still positioned himself to give it a better shot. Pursuing happiness requires an investment.
