Real Friends Are Rare

I was thinking this week about friendship.

Not the casual kind. Not the word we use too easily now. I mean the kind of friendship you only recognize fully when one friend is gone and another friendship has changed in ways too private to explain.

I have been lucky in my life to have two people I considered real friends.

That may not sound like many.

But I think it is.

Real friends are rare.

C. S. Lewis wrote about friendship as one of the four loves, and he treated it as something uncommon. Maybe even one of the rarest kinds of love.

I understand that more now than I did when I was younger.

Friendship is not as biologically obvious as affection or romantic love. It is not demanded of us the way family love can be. It happens more quietly than that.

Two people meet somewhere along the way, look in the same direction, and somehow recognize each other.

When we are young, we may think friendship is about having people around.

People to laugh with.
People to travel with.
People to call.
People to share meals, stories, work, trouble, and foolishness with.

And it is some of that.

But real friendship is something deeper.

It is being known without having to explain yourself every time.

It is someone remembering who you were before life took some of the shine off you.

It is someone who can hear what you are saying and also hear what you are not quite able to say.

One of my closest friends passed away a few years ago.

And another friendship, deeply important to me, has changed in ways I do not need to explain publicly.

That is enough to say.

Because some grief does not belong entirely to us. Some of it touches another person’s privacy, another family’s pain, another story that is not ours alone to tell.

There is a particular kind of loneliness in that.

The memories are still alive, but the conversation has gone quiet.

And you realize how much of friendship lives in small things.

A voice.
A look.
A joke that only the two of you understand.
A story you have told before but tell again because it belongs to both of you.

I do not have a lesson to wrap around this neatly.

I only know that friendship is more precious than we often admit while we still have it.

Maybe that is because real friendship does not announce itself loudly. It does not demand much attention. It just stands beside you for years, steady and familiar, until one day it is gone or changed, and you realize what a holy thing it was.

So this week I am thinking about friendship.

About the people who come into our lives and quietly become part of who we are.

About the ones we lose.

About the ones we still carry in ways too personal to explain.

And about the gift of having been truly known.

That is no small thing.

Maybe it is one of the rarest loves after all.

Thank you for reading. If this brought someone to mind, I hope you will take a quiet moment to remember them, reach out to them, or simply be grateful for having been known.