Alan S. Oser

In the watches of the night, when brooding takes hold of the mind, it finds a worthy topic in friendships lost. What did I do to lose that friend? What did I not do that I should have done to keep him?

It has fortunately not often happened to me that I have lost a friend I wanted to keep. And when it has happened, I have not always blamed myself. Usually friends drift apart naturally. Their lives and yours diverge. The circumstances that brought you together no longer have relevance, and there are no new circumstances to replace them. New circumstances claim your time, and theirs. They move on, and so do you.

These observations do not help me in the case of K or P. Both are gone from my life and I regret it. I made mistakes that may have driven them away. But how can I know that the fault lies entirely with me, or that “fault” is involved? It was only after I had stopped hearing from them for a long time, after they had stopped answering my letters, that I realized I had lost them as friends. They never told me why.

Friendship matters, and long-term friendship matters more. Unlike the spouse, the friend can listen to the emotional disturbances of your life without becoming emotionally disturbed himself. He will hear you out in sympathetic silence if that is desired, and usually it is. He will tactfully utter the encouraging word at the timely moment. He will be slow to blame you for your problems (unless you discuss marital problems, which you should not do, mainly because such matters are confidential but also because your friend will probably take your wife’s side).

The friend may suggest causes for your sorrow that lift responsibility from your sagging shoulders. He knows jokes you have never heard and he tells them well. He admires your wit. He will lend you $20 in a flash, no questions asked, and forget to ask for repayment. You, however, will remember to repay.

I say “he” because the friends that fulfill these functions for me are men. The contentedly married man can certainly have women friends, but with them I prefer to avoid too high a level of candor and intimacy. For that matter total candor and intimacy are not required in male friendship either. I am happy to have as a friend a man who is unaware of my personal concerns but knows how to appreciate a proper cocktail in my company. Shared pleasure is enough. If he finds me witty and wise, he can be a teetotaler.

I have long brooded on what went wrong in the friendships with K and P. With K, I may have carelessly spoken disparagingly of the woman he intended to marry. How foolish, even though he seemed to goad me into an expression of opinion. Mine was negative, but of course he soon married her. After that I never heard from him.

The P situation was more complex. He was a close friend in college, and I served as best man at his first wedding. Our paths diverged after college but my affection for him never faded, even after he adopted extreme political positions that were odious to me and which antagonized most of his other college friends.

One day a biographical story about him written by a reporter for The New York Times crossed my desk for editing. It was to appear in the following morning’s edition. I knew much more about the subject than the reporter could find out, and I proceeded to alter the story and add information to it, including the names of his first two wives. Again, folly. He had a third wife by then, and although I wrote her name into the story too, she was outraged to read her predecessors’ names in the Times.

P told me her reaction in a phone call the day the story appeared. He said he himself had not minded, and I believed him, but after that I never heard from him. His wife probably wanted him to have nothing more to do with me. Even before that incident we had been out of touch for some time. Later I heard that he had divorced that wife and married a fourth. I suspect he had consigned me to the same ash heap as other old friends whose political views upset him. I heard that he had broken with all of them.

Significantly, both these friendships began when we were young. They began before any of us had married, before careers, before parenthood, before the adoption of the values of maturity. Friendships I’ve formed in later years have been more stable, and probably less profound. In well-adjusted middle age emotional distress fades, although financial distress may replace it. By now, in my 70’s, I feel neither. It is no longer necessary to lean on friends for comfort. If I find myself leaning, I try to straighten up.

“Pull up your pants!” a superior once barked at me at work. He wanted me to stop griping. I saw his point.

As a married man, I must do my part to cultivate couples friendships, an altogether different matter from male friendship. Couples friendships are more complicated, and, in my opinion, inherently superficial. At their best, each man and his wife likes the other man and his wife. At their best, when the couples get together there is one conversation in which all four join. More likely, however, the men will carry on one conversation and the women another, possibly in different rooms. If three or more couples are involved, a conversational breakdown by sex is even more likely.

Couples relationships are harder to start and more subject to breakdown. Complexity threatens the structure. If A of partnership A/B likes C of partnership C/D but not D, and B likes D but not C, while simultaneously C likes A but not B and D likes B but not A, the prospects for continued friendship are bleak.

It is too complicated. I prefer the sort of friendship that was kindled in my life by a bridge game that went on uninterrupted for 17 years over a three-day weekend in Maine. Four men drove to my cabin in the woods on a lake near Augusta, Maine’s capital city, and played bridge day and night all the time we were there. We took time out only for restaurant meals and an occasional swim.

No money exchanged hands, and there was a minimum of conversation. But what little conversation there was was pleasant, since everyone respected everyone else’s card play. Respect is a valuable pre-condition for friendship, and when skill at card play is the only requisite needed to gain it, as it was on these annual expeditions, friendship can blossom into the appealing flower it ought to be.

Even preferable to group friendship is one-to-one male friendship. My friendship with A.J.K. was nearly perfect, especially in retrospect. Unfortunately, I saw too little of him, since for decades he lived abroad. Now he is dead. During his lifetime we corresponded, and I treasure that handful of occasions when we got together. I also remember appreciatively the values he stood for and the ideas he expressed. In this way our friendship has outlived him, which says something about the value of friendship itself.