Lament for a friendship unhappily lost

A former friend of mine was back in my thoughts over the last few days.

I'm not entirely sure why. It's been ages now since I came to the definitive realization that he was ghosting me. ("Ghost" in this sense is one of the finest recent additions to our vocabulary.) That realization long ago ceased to sting, and the unpleasant memory of the loss, like a quick, sharp, bitter taste, barely experienced before it disappears, rarely returns. It returned this time, strangely enough, in the company of a very good friend whose company and conversation I was enjoying tremendously.

Aristotle, who knew a thing or two about friendship, explains that the stability of friendships depends on a certain equality between the friends when it comes to whatever the basis of the friendship is. In a friendship of pleasure, one based on the enjoyment each friend has in the other's company, the friends need to have roughly the same kinds and amount of pleasure if the friendship is to continue. Otherwise, one party incurs an intolerable fun deficit. Likewise, in a friendship of utility, one based on the friends' capacity for mutual benefit, the benefits need to be roughly even--or else there has to be some accommodation to the lopsidedness of the profit-and-loss statement so as to rectify the imbalance. As Aristotle wryly comments, utility-friends often don't even like each other or enjoy each other's company. The absence of affection means that such friendships are even more brittle: there is nothing to keep the friendship going when the business relationship turns sour.

But in the noblest sort of friendship, one based on shared interests and devotion to shared ideals, a large measure of equality--and therefore, one hopes, of stability and permanence--is already built in. People of good character, Aristotle says, see their friends as "another myself." We see our deepest values, our truest commitments, our virtues and aspirations, mirrored in them. And character, unlike fun and business, goes deep. As Aristotle likes to say, character is second nature; and second nature, like first nature, is enduring and reliable.

Equality in fundamental interests and values, then, combined with the stability of character, argues for a permanence in the best kind of friendship that lesser forms of friendship cannot hope to imitate. I will always be up for conversations about the saving work of Christ, the Church generally, and the doctrine, discipline, and worship of The Episcopal Church in particular. I will always bring my best self to a slightly detached and endlessly amused examination of the foibles of fellow clergy or academics. Anyone who can talk church music with me in the way I like will always have my affection, and anyone who has an endless repertoire of nineteenth-century revivalist hymns for every occasion in his mental Rolodex will always find in me a ready singing partner (to the manifest consternation of those forced to listen to an impromptu medley of Blood hymns in A-flat).

Seriously, what is it about A-flat?

So what happened with my ghost? We had enough in common to sustain the right sort of friendship. But there was an unsustainable inequality, not of interests or of character or even (I think) of affection, but simply of importance, of space. There was much more room in my life for him than there was in his for me. I have a very small (though utterly wonderful) circle of friends; he has two or three sprawling networks of friends. I had, at the time, a fairly undemanding job; he was cobbling together a living from several different sources, and our get-togethers often had to take place in the narrow window he had between one gig and another.

I never really minded that I was a much smaller figure in his life than he was in mine. That sort of thing, I figured, is inevitable. Aristotle could have warned me, though, that smallness is the next thing before vanishing altogether.