How to build real friendships

What we’re really looking for and need in the world I don’t think is connection. That’s like an electronic metaphor, it’s not really what we’re built for. We’re built for love, and love is built on trust. So the real question is: How do I develop trust? And I’m borrowing here from a friend of mine Curt Thompson who says trust is built through rupture and repair. This may be a counter-intuitive idea, but actually trust is built when there’s some separation between us, and then we bridge the separation. So you might think you trust people when nothing has gone wrong, but that’s actually not true – until things have gone wrong, and you’ve repaired something that went wrong, you can’t really trust. So real friendship is built – there’s three layers of it. One is absence and presence. So we separate, we go apart from one another for a while, but when we come back together, you realise, “Oh, you came back, you want to be with me again,” and that builds trust. Then there’s failure and recovery. So this is where something goes wrong in the environment around us – it may not be anybody’s fault, but there’s some problem we have to overcome, and if we can solve that problem and recover from that failure together we trust each other more. And then the third layer, using Christian language, would be sin and forgiveness, or you could think of it as betrayal and reconciliation. Because there are times when it’s not just that something goes wrong around us, like something goes wrong with us; we fail each other. And when you acknowledge that you failed and you say, “I’m sorry, that was wrong, will you forgive me?” and the other person says, “I will forgive you,” that’s in some ways the deepest repair. So real friendship comes from real trust which actually comes from repair of rupture. So you’ve got to be willing, at least to have absence and presence, you’ve got to be willing to do things that have a risk of failure that you’ll recover from and learn you can trust each other, and inevitably, if you go far enough in a friendship, you will disappoint each other and fail each other and sin against each other, but on the other side of that is forgiveness, and on the other side of forgiveness is real trust and real friendship.