Real Marriage_ The Truth About Sex, Friendship, and Life Together - Mark Driscoll [17]
We have a few true friends. There are people we do not choose to do life with but simply have them in our life by circumstance (for example, family, coworkers, classmates); those who are not godly, trustworthy, or loving; those who are not peers (both those ahead of and behind us in maturity and life lessons); and those with whom our lives happen to intersect but there is no intentionality to live life together (for example, neighbors we barely know).
But the word friend is too often used for relationships that are not friendships, including online “friends” on social networking Web sites. This can lead to unreasonable expectations or someone being hurt and disappointed. So the word friend needs to be used carefully. We are to be friendly toward all people, but only friends with a few.19 We make a mistake when we call anyone we are friendly to a “friend.” This is an especially important distinction for extroverts, those in ministry, and those in serving professions, where you know and help a large number of people.
Marital friendship requires both the husband and wife to be willing to invest what it takes to be a good friend. Friendship is costly in everything— time, energy, emotion, and sometimes money. Those who want their spouses to be friends without seeking to be good friends in return are selfish and demanding. And those who want to be good friends but do not help their spouses reciprocate are prone to be taken advantage of, abused, neglected, and suffer from their marriages.
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In our marriage, we have made the mistake of assuming we were friends and not working on our friendship as we ought to. Instead, we invested countless hours on a long list of people we were trying too hard to make our friends. Over time, nearly all those people left. Only a few have remained and become true friends.
Through it all, we have learned that friendships take so much time, energy, and investment that you can only have a few friends—maybe two or three real friends. In the same way, Jesus had many foes, many fans, and only three real friends—Peter, James, and John—who had the most privileged access to Him. To be sure, Jesus in humility calls us His friends,a and as God now glorified in heaven where He is without any limitations, He alone can have innumerable friendships, whereas we are finite and limited to a few.
The sad truth is that we live in a world that encourages selfishness, independence, convenience, isolation, and using people rather than loving them. Curiously, people holding these same values simultaneously complain about the lack of community, kindness, hospitality, love, generosity, and friendship in our day. Perhaps more than ever, we must acknowledge that friendship is desperately needed, and the first step is not whining about our lack of friends, but rather becoming good friends. This is why Proverbs 18:24 says, “A man who has friends must himself be friendly.”
Marriage often starts out as a journey between friends. It gets off course as friends become business partners trying to pay the bills, parents trying to raise the kids, caregivers trying to tend to aging parents, cab drivers trying to shuttle family members to various events, event planners trying to pull off everything from holidays to birthday parties, and lovers trying to keep the flames of passion hot. Perhaps the key is to always be working on the friendship, because in the end the rest of marriage seems to come together more easily and happily when you are working on it with your friend. As a fun way to look at the issue, here’s what we believe it means to be married F-R-I-E-N-D-S:
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F—Fruitful
Friendship with our spouses, like