Kate was Danish, and she was probably the most intelligent person I have ever met; well, not that it has any real importance, intelligence barely has any importance in a friendship let alone in a romantic relationship, it has less weight than a good heart; I mention it particularly because her incredible intellectual agility and her unusual capacity for assimilation were truly a curiosity, a phenomenon.
Serotonin: A Novel
Michel Houellebecq
Category: FRIENDSHIP
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No relationship, however deep and intimate, can ever fully take our loneliness from us. And as long as we go through life expecting this, we are doomed to constant disappointment. We also do constant violence to our friendships and love relationships because we will demand from our friends something that they cannot give us, namely, total fulfillment. For example, a goodly number of persons get married precisely because of loneliness. They see their marriage as a panacea for loneliness. After marriage, they discover that they are still lonely, sometimes as lonely as before. Immediately, there is the temptation to think that there is something seriously amiss in the marriage, to foist blame on the marriage partner or on the self, to become disenchanted and seek out new relationships, hoping of course to someday discover the rainbow of total fulfillment.
The Restless Heart: Finding Our Spiritual Home in Times of Loneliness
Ronald Rolheiser -
“The truth is that the more intimately you know someone, the more clearly you’ll see their flaws. That’s just the way it is. This is why marriages fail, why children are abandoned, why friendships don’t last. You might think you love someone until you see the way they act when they’re out of money or under pressure or hungry, for goodness’ sake. Love is something different. Love is choosing to serve someone and be with someone in spite of their filthy heart. Love is patient and kind, love is deliberate. Love is hard. Love is pain and sacrifice, it’s seeing the darkness in another person and defying the impulse to jump ship.”
— love is deliberate. -
Among the items that waste time are friendships and spending too much time in speaking about what is beneficial and non-beneficial (more so in what is non-beneficial). It is rare for two people to sit together and build each other speak of what is mutually beneficial.
—H.H. Pope Shenouda III, Monastic Treasures for All of Us -
She hates her friends when they try to soften her grief; she will not take food, she wastes away, and in her soul’s deep dejection has a strong longing only for her death, a longing which often lasts till it comes.
—St. Gregory of Nyssa, On Virginity, Chap. 3 -
We have seen that creative people are used to solitude, and we have explored some of the reasons for this. Instead of seeking friends in whom to confide, or counsellors to whom to tell their troubles, they use their gifts to come to terms with, and to make sense of, their sufferings. Once a work is completed, it can be shared with others; but the initial response to depression is to turn inward rather than outward.
Solitude, a Return to the Self
Anthony Storr -
The greed of Self-Love, say holy counselors, will often spawn Envy. As one who is discontented looks around and sees people blessed with better lives, fewer problems, greater gifts, more secure families and friendships, envy can occur. Much discontent produces envy even of the unborn, because they are free of pain, as the Preacher showed when he said, Rather than the living, I envy the dead; better than both of these is one who has not been born to have to see evil (Ecc. 4:2,3). Another said about his life: Cursed be the day when I was born. Cursed be the man who brought the news, because he did not kill me, so that my mother might have been my grave…. Instead, I came out of the womb to see labor and sorrow (Jer. 20:14-18). For anyone gripped by dissatisfaction and pain, and hatred of the way life has gone, here’s a prayer that can lift a soul up from that discontent, if one faithfully stays with it.
Lord Jesus Christ, forgive me and deliver me from hating life.
—Dee Pennock, God’s Path to Sanity
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You have a lovely text threads with friends from your childhood or your 20s that pop off every few days.
But let’s be real: it’s just not enough. When you let yourself think about it, you feel incredibly isolated.
The Dark Heart of Individualism
Anne Helen Petersen -
As we read in the Book of Proverbs, “In the multitude of counselors there is safety. Therefore, one channel is the Scripture. Another channel is my spiritual father. A third channel is the godly friends in my life. A fourth channel is the Church Fathers. So all these, and the voice of the Holy Spirit within me, are different channels that will help me to know the will of God.
—H.E. Metropolitan Youssef, How to Know the Will of God
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“I literally couldn’t function and I was struggling very mightily and not showing it to anyone in the world…I didn’t even talk to most of my friends because simply talking about it was so upsetting to me because of the possibility—the thought that this was me for life—that if I talked about it, it would become real and I didn’t want it to become real. I still had hope that maybe one day it will go away.”
—Jonathan Fields
