The Decay of Adult Friendship in America.
When I was in graduate school, studying all things Tamil, I read one of Tamil literature’s classic works by one of its most revered poets - Tiruvalluvar. The book was a modern English translation of his classical Tamil aphorisms.
I made it cheerfully to p.100 and section 80, after which I gulped at the following line -
“There is nothing worse than rash friendships. For friends once made can’t be abandoned.”
Can’t be abandoned? This is certainly not written for Americans. We discard friends and relationships like used clothing and furniture. Or worse, we let them decay, rot, and blow away in the wind years later. We neglect our friends. And everybody seems to be on the verge of being ‘toxic’ or ‘too much’ or ‘annoying.’
I read the rest of Tiruvalluvar’s section on ‘choosing friends’ and was stunned at every line.
Why did I agree so violently with this long-dead man’s advice for members of a foreign civilization (more soon on this)?
In Tamil society, especially in its large towns and cities, friendship is very intense. Male friendship is incredibly fierce. Adult friendships last a lifetime, seemingly much easier than in America today. For one thing, friendship is highly transactional and reciprocal. Friends do a lot of inconvenient things for each other frequently. At the drop of a hat.
Need help finding jewelry? I’ll take you to my friend’s shop directly.
Need a ride into town? I’ll take you.
Injured and in the hospital? I’ll come to hang out with you.
Need help moving? I’ll help find movers and help out.
Need to move furniture around your house? We’ll come over whenever you need us and help.
A lot of what American spouses do for each other gets done by your adult male friends in Tamil Nadu. Men are known to hold hands as a sign of affection, not erotic interest, and lay arms around each other’s shoulders as they sit on a wall together. And they respond quickly when a friend needs help. In most of urban India, friends are a crucial networking tool across lines of caste (and class) to obtain access to better healthcare or the best deal on a Samsung washing machine (in a country well known for highly variable, case-by-case customer pricing).
Assuming this style of intense friendship based on never-ending reciprocal favors is an ancient pattern in Tamil society, Tiruvalluvar’s warnings and advice point to the inherent weakness in Tamil friendship. Because it is highly transactional and you need friends to cross lines of kin and caste easily in India, it is straightforward to force these relationships into existence simply by doing an initial favor for someone you barely know anything about. Tamil adults don’t have the habit of politely refusing offers to help like my WASP peers (to the point of being obnoxiously self-reliant).
As a foreign ‘VIP,’ I was a magnet for this forced friend behavior, with all sorts of folks trying desperately, every day, to become my ‘friend.’ It was hard not to become cynical.
As I lived in Tamil Nadu in the late ‘90s, I often reflected on how sad the state of adult friendship for men had become in America. As men become more wealthy and educated, they tend to make their spouses their best friends. And hardly any other friend can even be located. This is especially true for the introverted.
Why is this?
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American society’s extreme individualism, electronic financial system, and thoroughly impersonal consumer retail setup mean that most adults can obtain 99% of their essential needs without real social networking of any kind. The system we live in is established mostly on impersonal trust. Every ordinary product or service in America is available without fear of corruption (unlike venture capital terms sheets). Leveraging high-trust friends to get things done is almost unnecessary outside of sophisticated business activities. No lifestyle transaction requires the help of a friend. But more importantly, the more affluent we are, the less we prefer to ‘impose’ on friends for anything (unless we are in college).
The last time I recall having lots of friends who did things for each other (reciprocal favors) was in college. And then it stopped. Abruptly.
Friends for adult men, especially, have mainly become a source of entertainment. This is an extension of friendship in general in our society. Rather than a fundamental networking tool we rely on, they are entertaining, interesting, or fascinating. OR we do lifestyle activities sporadically with them (skiing, kayaking, hiking). Nothing epitomizes this friends-as-entertainment mode better than the behavior in the long-running ‘90s sitcom - Friends. Friends become party favors, butts of jokes, and joke-tellers (entertainers).
I have had folks who enjoy my weird sense of humor (and little else). If entertaining enough, one attribute or habitual behavior seems to earn you ‘friend’ status in America. That’s a measure of how ‘weak’ these relationships are if we can even call them relationships. We are a nation of weak ties beyond child-parent bonds and the romantic dyads we overly depend on as we age.
Tiruvalluvar was concerned about Tamil folks naively getting into Tamil friendships, full of reciprocal obligations, inconveniences, and reputational risk. You can get trapped in cycles of obligation with very unsavory folks if you start tossing around favors.
I’m sorry, but I’d much rather have a culture with that risk to friendship than what we have today: friends as entertainment or as live theatre—easily replaced because we don’t allow reciprocal cycles of obligation.
There is a movement to get friendship back on track in America, and it is now a frequent self-help topic in our alienated country. The theme is about getting back to an older friendship style in the west where men and women shared their problems and travails with same-sex friends. It’s not that this doesn’t happen at all; it’s the dramatic decline in the frequency of live conversations like this that has. And the decrease in the number of folks we have available to process our lives with beyond our spouses (who get tired of us).
The Atlantic writes about the dilemma of modern friendship continuously, perhaps because its authors epitomize the educated, elite, hyper-individualist anti-friend culture I just described.
I’d be curious to hear your thoughts in the comments…
Definitely rings true! I see it in rural Iowa where better-off transplants (like me I hate to say) often pay for a service that in "the old days" would've gotten done through relationships with neighbors. When we moved out here, I spent most of my time and emotional energy building those relationships with neighbors so they would call and us and we could call on them. I rejoice when it happens, though rarely. The suburbs are the worst this way with everyone's entry to their house through a garage closed before they get out of their car, all of them owning their own snowblower and lawnmower, hiring in a plumber or electrician...It breeds this false sense of individuality and independence. There's a loss there. Thank you for voicing it.
Broadly what you say about male friendships rings true-- for college educated white upper middle class folks. I suspect there is a significant amount of reciprocal obligations that define friendships among especially non college educated whites and non-whites. Also, intimate male friendships are highly correlated with male control of public space. Historians and anthropologists who have studied male friendship have noted how its decline is strongly correlated with women entering the public sphere-- this appears to be true across cultures.
See, for example, Daphne Spain’s “The Spatial Foundations of Men’s Friendships and Men’s Power” from the edited volume by Peter Nardi Men’s Friendships.
Spain explores the hypotheses- 1) that male friendships are strongest in societies with a high degree of gender segregation and 2) this reinforces men’s power advantage relative to women.
What this line of thinking suggests is that the withering of robust male friendship-- at least among college educated upper middle class whites--is a casualty of greater gender equality between men and women in this group.