By Dr. Lisa Dunne
It’s the Hallmark week of love, and, big surprise, the world system has this topic all twisted up. We see the fallout in the trail of broken relationships, the ghosting phenomenon, the attachment crisis, and the tragic stats on anxiety and depression in the youngest generation.
My colleague Professor Brian Reiswig and I are currently studying the impact of artificial attachments on lifelong commitment for our forthcoming book The Bachelor Epidemic. The research is staggering: Kids and parents alike are attached to all kinds of immaterial, nonsensical, temporal devices that dim and dull their true and meaningful relationships.
The attachment crisis is so common that these time stealers and distractions have become uncontested, familiar foes. We vie for time with our significant relationships. Life is cluttered with what Neil Postman called dangerous nonsense. And it all sounds like bad news for the future of marital bliss and happy ever afters.
But did you know there is actually a faith-based formula to friendships?
I didn't grow up knowing this.
In fact, when I was 19 years old, I boarded a plane bound from Miami, Florida to London, England, and on the flight, I penned these angry words in my journal: “I will never fall in love again.” Through a series of relational wounds, abuse, and abandonment, I had allowed a proverbial layer of ice to settle around my teenage heart. But little did I know that the God who ordained every day of my life had prepared for me to meet a young man on the very first day of that trip, a man who would melt the icy crust off of my heart and become my husband.
We’ve now been married 35 years.
Maybe you can relate to this feeling of icy-heartedness. Dr. Henry Morris, founder of the Institute for Creation Research<https://www.icr.org/>, once called this a “spiritual cardiosclerosis,” an intentional hardening of the heart. What are some of the reasons we close ourselves off to others? Maybe we have been wounded and lost trust, maybe we’ve been raised to think of ourselves as overly self-sufficient—as fiercely independent rather than interdependent.
C.S. Lewis said in the four loves that we can lock our heart up safe in a vault where it won’t be broken; instead, it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. “To love at all,” he says, “is to be vulnerable.”
All across America today, we see a trend toward isolationism. It’s not a new social disease, but it has been exacerbated, I think, by counterfeit mechanisms that can make us feel connected temporarily but which are ultimately poor substitutes for the real thing: F2F relationship. The rise of social time online (65% of teen social time is spent on a screen) and a perceived sense of general, constant busyness: Couple this with the stats on loneliness, bitterness, and general anxiety, and we definitely have a recipe for socio-emotional disaster.
I love these word that Paul gave to the church in Corinth: “We have spoken freely to you, Corinthians, and opened wide our hearts to you. We are not withholding our affection from you, but you are withholding yours from us. As a fair exchange…open wide your hearts also.” Instead of closing ourselves off emotionally from others, God calls us to “open wide our hearts” and love one another.
Friendships are tremendously beneficial, physically and psychologically. An article in the Journal of Psychiatry (2016) notes a reduction in heart rate, blood pressure, cortisol levels, fewer incidences of disease, and even a longer life span for those with socially supportive relationships. But we often face obstacles in mindset and methodology.
Let’s talk about some of the myths and missteps of friendship.
Many of our GenZ friends have grown up in a culture that taught them to “live and let live,” and that leads us to Myth 1: A friend should never challenge you or cross you. On the contrary, a friend speaks the truth in love. Proverbs 27:6 says, “Faithful are the wounds of a friend, but an enemy multiplies kisses.” In other words, someone who flatters you is not necessarily your friend. Friendship is defined here as the willingness to speak truth, even if it hurts, when it’s for the good of the person or the relationship. A true friend will call you out to call you up.
Myth 2: You can be friends with everyone! Proverbs 12:26 says a righteous person is cautious in friendship, that she chooses friends carefully. As Christians, we have a biblical obligation to be friendly to others, but that doesn’t mean that every person you meet should become part of your inner circle of closest relationships. Our closest friendships, whether virtual or interpersonal, will influence our behavior. As 1 Corinthians 15:33 says, “Do not be deceived. Bad company corrupts good morals, or good character.” We need to choose our influences from people bearing good fruit. We will eventually become like them.
Myth 3: The perfect BFF can meet all your relational needs: No one friend is going to meet all your relational needs, and that includes your spouse. You will never share every single value, hope, dream, goal, like, dislike, and favorite ice cream flavor with another person. That’s just not realistic. If you have a few close friends, each one of them will likely represent one aspect of your unique relational needs. You can’t be intimately close friends with everyone. Anthropologist Robin Dunbar <https://www.psy.ox.ac.uk/people/robin-dunbar> looked at consistent patterns in human relationships and found that on average, most humans can handle 5 intimate friendships, 15 good friends, 50 close friends, and 150 friends. As the circle extends, the potential for relational closeness decreases, so for most people, that real circle is about five.
In the social sciences, we look for patterns of behavior that can inform our intentional interactions. From studies in interpersonal communication, we see that friendship is actually pretty formulaic. If that sounds robotic or simplistic, let me give you an example: You can’t gain emotional closeness with another person without revealing something of yourself. That’s a formula.
Another formula or pattern we see in human behavior is that social media use breeds isolation and perfectionism—the enemies of authentic friendship.
One of my favorite relational patterns in the social sciences was theorized by Dr. Mark Knapp, a professor at the University of Texas. He developed a model that provides formula of relational development – it’s called Knapp’s stages of relational development. The model is a two-sided staircase, with the left side being the steps to a budding relationship and the right being the steps to a dying relationship.
What’s so fascinating is that you can really see these patterns of behavior in relationships all around you. Most importantly, you can take action if you see the relationship heading toward destruction! Pretty dramatic wording, I know, but if we assess and address these relational patterns in our lives, we can develop lasting, meaningful relationships. Instead of seeing people as the equivalent of paper plates that we throw away when we’re finished with them, we should value them as heirloom china: precious, unique, irreplaceable.
Look up Knapp’s stages here for more info, as I want to focus here mainly on the top of the stair step. The final step in the coming together side of Knapp’s stages is called individuation. This is a phase where we develop or display a strong sense of individuality within the relationship – we understand our uniqueness, but we also understand ourselves as a we: A me and a we. Now this is a tricky phase, because if we fall too far into the other side of the parallel stairstep, differentiation, then we get too focused on how different we are from the other person, and that becomes a point of contention.
The other side of the stairwell shows the stages of coming apart, or relational disintegration. On the “coming apart” stage, we have differentiating, circumscribing, stagnating, avoidance, and termination. Differentiation is where we start thinking as a “me” instead of “we” on a consistent basis, where we become less willing to work for the good of the team and more focused on serving our own needs and interests. Now again, this is a balance, because we do need a healthy dialectical tension between individuation and differentiation, but we can’t fall too far to one side or the other for very long without the relationship being adversely affected.
After this stage, the inevitable termination usually follows. If we don’t make the efforts to move the relationship back to that sweet spot at the top of the stair step, the relationship generally ends.
Other patterns that emerge from this research are the importance of unity, the “we/me” balance and the appropriate use of self-disclosure. This is a vital pattern to highlight from the research: If there is no self-disclosure in the relational initiation stage, there will be no relational development. Period. We simply cannot have deep and meaningful relationships with another person if we can’t yield to self-disclosure.
If all of your relationships seem superficial right now, this is the likely culprit. Ask the Lord to show you what you're holding back and where you need healing to be able to trust.
Self-disclosure is not just sharing our success stories, our Instagram highlight reel. It’s peeling back the veneer and sharing our trials as well as our triumphs. Something important to note is that self-disclosure should be reciprocal in nature. If you share something, and the other person doesn’t open that door back to you, that might be a red flag.
Do you remember the scene in Star Wars where Princess Leia finally admits her feelings for Hans Solo? She takes a risk to self-disclose by saying, “I love you,” and how does he respond? Instead of reciprocating, he says, “I know.” That is definitely not the level of reciprocation we are talking about here. In a healthy relationship, there should be a mutual sense of deepening affect, emotion, and trust on both sides.
On the terminating side of Knapp’s staircase, GenZ style, we see the rise of ghosting, which is a conflict-avoidant formula for relational destruction. It’s certainly not a biblical model or a healthy conflict model, but it’s definitely prevalent today. GenZs tell me they think these shifts stem from being raised in a culture of idealistic movies, social media, and parents who said “do the opposite of me.” They need role models, examples, of conflict resolution.
Parents, we need to model this well in our own marriages and friendships.
Our cultural rulebook tells us to be independent, to celebrate personal freedom and autonomy. But without others to challenge and sharpen us, we will remain stagnant or fall into the cultural cesspool of isolationism and its emotional and physiological downfalls. God has given us support systems that can help others and help us serve as the hands and feet of Christ. That is really the true definition of biblical friendship.
It’s also important to remember that friendship takes patience, something we aren’t accustomed to in our microwave, Amazon Prime culture. As George Washington once noted, “Friendship is a plant of slow growth that must undergo and withstand the shocks of adversity before it is worthy of the appellation” (the name). It takes time, patience, pain, and resilience to develop healthy relationships.
Looking at this overall view, we see a relational sweet spot between individuation and differentiation. And we need to keep the healthy balance between the “me" and the “we” in order to maintain a healthy relationship: a threefold cord that's not easily broken. We need to assess the temporal nature of our artificial attachments and choose lasting, meaningful relationships over connections and distractions of devices.
And above all, we must remember that friends, family, all humans, no matter how awesome, are capable of failure. But there is one who loves you with an everlasting love. He is drawing you even now with his loving kindness. Won’t you turn to him right now? He is the true friend that sticks closer than a brother.
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