Once was the time back in California when my wife and I were fighting.
We had been married 16 or 17 years, and I had lost my job and wasn’t having any luck finding another one. She was angry with me and I overreacted, saying at one point that I didn’t know why she would want to stay with me if I was such a failure.
We were both in tears by then, and the answer she gave me practically ripped my heart out of my chest.
“Because you’re my friend.”
Of course I had been loving her for a lot of years, but that one statement lifted it to a whole new level.
There are few things that matter more to me than friendship, and I am proud to have four friends in my life with whom my relationships go back 50 years or more. I met all four of them between the ages of 13 and 23, and while my contacts with them have been sporadic, all are people that each time we meet, we pick up right where we left off.
Two of my most heartbreaking experiences in the last 15 years have been the end of friendships. One was when a friend died unexpectedly in his mid 60s and the other was a shorter friendship that ended after 13 years due to a disagreement. He essentially cut me out of his life and refused to listen to anything I had to say.
I still occasionally dream about him.
No one matters more to me than my wife, my children and my grandchildren, but past them and my siblings, there has never been anything that matters to me more than friendship.
I know this is a topic I write about frequently, but think about it. Our friends are the only people in our lives that we associate with by choice, the only ones we maintain relationships with by working at them.
Old Tommy Aquinas had it right.
Nothing matters more than true friendship.