The Incredible Value of Intimate Relationships

For a lot of people, the relationship they place above every other is the one they have with God. Christians, Muslims, Jews, Native Americans, and plenty of others treat that spiritual bond as the center of a life well lived. The logic goes that the nearer you move toward that Ultimate Reality, the less you lean on anyone else to feel whole. Not many people travel far enough along that road to actually arrive there. And the ones who do still tend to want company. Wanting company is fine. No one really thrives in isolation, and even scripture makes the point that it is not good for a person to be alone.

So what has happened to friendship over the past few decades? Good friends seem harder to come by. People want to run their own race, keep their own schedule, stay inside their own bubble. Men have it worse here than women do. Two guys who are genuinely close often get read as a couple, and that suspicion keeps a lot of men at arm's length from each other. Women don't carry that baggage. A woman will carve out a ladies' night no matter how slammed her week is, while a man will point to work or family and call it a day, sometimes for real reasons, sometimes as cover for not wanting to risk looking soft or looking gay.

If you want to wade into uncomfortable territory: same-sex closeness, stripped of any sexual charge, probably isn't the menace people assume it is. Read about how male friends behaved in the nineteenth century and a fair amount of it would get labeled homosexual by a modern reader. The label itself barely existed back then; the word only entered the language in the back half of the 1800s. When women are that physically and emotionally close today, nobody blinks.

The erosion isn't limited to friendships between men, or between women. Relationships between the sexes have thinned out too. Ask a lot of women why, and they'll tell you men forgot how to be men. There's something to that. We no longer hunt, we no longer gather, we no longer fix much with our own two hands. Most work now happens at a desk, inside our heads, and that is a strange, deflating substitute for the physical labor that defined male life for centuries before the Industrial Revolution rearranged everything.

There's a case to be made for learning to live small and self-reliant again. Spend less, chase the paycheck less, and some of the pressure lifts. You pick up practical skills in the bargain. Going against the current takes real inner work, though. It usually starts with one person willing to be the odd one out, and then a second person copies them, and then a few more, and the thing spreads.

Commitment is the other half of why men and women struggle to connect. Someone got burned in a past relationship and now flinches at the idea of handing their heart over again. Layer on the rising number of people carrying childhood sexual abuse, some of it so severe the person never climbs back out and ends up walking through life solo. Money and sex have always been the two places where people are most easily wrecked. Some can't commit; others are so locked onto a career that settling into family life never fits. When one parent is expected to stay home, two people both chasing careers rarely make it work as a couple.

Then there are the people who simply don't want to marry. Family and friends press them toward the altar, or they've never clocked that staying single carries its own advantages. If you hold to the idea that drawing closer to God leaves you needing nothing else, a spouse starts to look optional rather than essential. That doesn't downgrade the gift of finding the right person. Both paths feed the soul in their own way.

A different group genuinely wants marriage but skipped the step of figuring out who they are first. You spend the bulk of your adult life at work, so if the job doesn't light you up and you're only there for the check, the burnout eventually arrives. It spills into the home. A couple can mistake that general unhappiness for a problem with the marriage itself. No counselor can patch that, not if neither partner is willing to grow or to get honest about what they actually want out of a life.

Married or single, close friends still matter. You may collect dozens of acquaintances and still have only one or two you'd call intimate. For some people that short list begins with God and runs to whoever they choose as a life partner. The underlying point holds: you can't really love another person, partner included, until you've done the work on yourself and learned to love who you already are. Only then does the old instruction, love God and love your neighbor as yourself, have anything solid to stand on.

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