Finding Your Real Friends

It's a truism that that you only find out who you're real friends are when you're in a crisis. Now that many Americans are losing homes, losing jobs, even losing their faith in themselves, many people are testing that truism in real time.

I returned home to California in August and discovered how much friendship meant. When my husband and I needed a place to park two large moving vans until our tenants could move out of our house, we had friends who let us leave the trucks outside their homes, despite neighbors' complaints. We also had friends on vacation who said, “Stay in our house as long as you need,” so we didn't have to camp out with sleeping bags among boxes and disassembled furniture. Friends offered us meals, welcomed us back, said those sweetest of words to a returning family, “We really missed you.”

Since those late days of summer when we were heady with the excitement and joy of returning to a place we love, my family has also experienced the downside of a rapidly deteriorating economy. I'm not finding a job as quickly as I had hoped. My husband just lost his, and we have to plan carefully how we will use his severance and our savings to start a new company in a business climate where starting a new venture seems crazy to most people.

But we aren't crazy, and we aren't cock-eyed optimists. We have creativity, energy, and vision, and most of all we still have real friends – people who are there to share ideas and advice, to give a referral when we need it, and to listen when we have a down day.

Of course, there are always people who offer to help you network, or to meet you for coffee, and then never follow through, or who listen politely but with barely concealed skepticism to your dreams, or who promise to help in some way but make it clear that you are way down their list of priorities. Those are the people you cull from your mental list of “friends,” often with some pain, but also with the realization that you've tested a relationship and found it wanting.

Sadly, some of the friends you may test and find wanting may be members of your own family, but even so, you can take courage and hope from the unexpected expressions of friendship that come from people you never thought would be willing to come through for you. And even more valuable are the people who hoped you could depend on and who proved that your faith was warranted: those are the friends worth keeping – in good times and in bad.

P.S. Since posting this blog, something kept nagging at me, and I realized that I don't actually "cull" friends as ruthlessly as I seem to imply. If did, I would have written off my best friend and the man I married over twenty years ago. He was one of the major testers of my definitions of friendship. I wrote him a letter the summer he took a bus from New Haven, Connecticut to Portland, Oregon after having been hospitalized for severe asthma. I just wanted to be sure he got home okay, but my well-intentioned letter received no response, and I returned to school the next fall determined not to have anything more to do with him. Fortunately, he made a determined effort to win my good will back, and he's not the only one on the list of people who don't answer emails for six months or return phone calls for years etc. that I've welcomed back into the fold of those I call friends. After all, you're not really a good friend unless you can forgive a breach of friendship.