The Value of Useless Friendship

There might be something more worth knowing

It may have taken only 63 minutes for my friend Wesley to reply to my message, but it might as well have been days. The vulnerability felt like the large knuckle of a grown man’s middle finger pressed into the soft spot under my ribs.

No biggie, I’d asked him on a man-date. I mean, what’s the worst thing that could happen, right? Actually, what I expected was a one-word reply…

“Gay.”

[Sigh] Hard to imagine but, there remains a certain age of men (mine) that still uses this word to imply that another man is being too sensitive. And yes, that includes my actually gay friends.

I’m not saying it’s okay. I’m saying it happens. Thankfully, he replied with love instead.

“Would love all of that!” he wrote back, adding, “Would be great to have some man time.”

I’d be lying if I wasn’t tempted to reply with just one word, but I was so friggen’ relieved I opted to reciprocate his vulnerability.

That was how Taco Tuesdays began.

By Taco Tuesdays, I don’t mean the tired marketing trope still bandied about on Chili’s Instagram page alongside other cute ideas like “Sunday Funday.” I mean Wes and my agreement to dine on tacos together once a month on a Tuesday, no spouses. Just us dude-bros.

After all, we do live in Mexico. We have access to more taco joints than one could try in a year in our little town. Also? Tacos. (Come on.)

This all came to pass because of two books I’d recently read:

1. Build the Life You Want (Arthur C Brooks; Oprah Winfrey, 2024) and

2. We Need to Hang Out (Billy Baker, 2021)

Regarding the first: You’re likely familiar with Oprah’s bona fides, but you might not know Arthur C Brooks. He’s a Harvard Business School professor and happiness expert. No disrespect to Dame Oprah, but Brooks does all the heavy lifting.

This passage from him does a good job of highlighting the background motivation for reaching out to Wes that day. (For context, Brooks frequently distinguishes “deal friends” from “real friends.” I trust you can sort out the difference.)

Perfect friendships, as beautiful as they are, can be very hard to maintain. Deal friends generally show up again and again in your life over the course of earning a living; you don’t have to make a special effort to maintain them. Real friends are another matter. It is all too easy when your life is busy with family and work to let them fall by the wayside. Someone who was a perfect friend during college might inadvertently become someone you talk to only once or twice a year after you graduate, not because it’s what you intend, but because time just passes. By the time you are in middle age, it is quite common to have very few if any of these perfect friends simply due to life pressures and the passage of time.

As with anything else of value, it is important not to leave these relationships to take care of themselves, because they generally won’t. With your list of real friends—and people you would like to be on that list—make a concrete plan for staying in touch and seeing one another.

Brooks, Arthur C.; Winfrey, Oprah. Build the Life You Want (pp. 134-135). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

In a nutshell, that’s Brooks's thesis on friendships.

Billy Baker, on the other hand, is a journalist thrust into the subject of friendship by an assignment from his editor. He shares Brooks’s concerns but takes a different angle. His book explores his personal journey into rediscovering friendship, but it also presents some jaw-dropping data.

Loneliness kills. And in the twenty-first century, by any reasonable measure, loneliness has become an epidemic.

“Loneliness” is a subjective state, where the distress you feel comes from the discrepancy between the social connections you desire and the social connections you actually have.

Baker, Billy. We Need to Hang Out: A Memoir of Making Friends (p. 5). Avid Reader Press / Simon & Schuster. Kindle Edition.

As if that wasn’t enough, he goes on to clobber the reader with these tidbits:

One study found that in terms of damage to your health, loneliness was the equivalent of smoking 15 cigarettes a day.

Now consider that a 2019 survey found that 61 percent of Americans are measurably lonely, based on how they scored on the UCLA Loneliness Scale, the gold standard for decades. That percentage had jumped seven points from just the previous year. And according to a large study conducted by the AARP, more than 42 million Americans over the age of 45 suffer from “chronic loneliness.”

It gets worse. A massive study by Brigham Young University, using data from 3.5 million people collected over 35 years, found that individuals who suffered from loneliness, isolation, or even those who simply lived alone saw their risk of premature death rise by up to 32 percent.

Baker, Billy. We Need to Hang Out: A Memoir of Making Friends (p. 6). Avid Reader Press / Simon & Schuster. Kindle Edition.

Suffice it to say, there’s something worth considering with this friendship matter. We have very selfish reasons to delve into what it means for our lives. There is something to be known.

My friendship with Wes was more than five years old by the time we invented Taco Tuesdays. What’s sad is that we both probably wanted something more from it early on, but neither of us wanted to seem like the vulnerable loser.

That’s how we think of wanting real friendship in our lives like we’re somehow a loser in that scenario. Never mind that the loser is the one with no actual friends, and the brave soul is the one who walks with fear into the wilderness of unrequited love.

As they say in every recovery program, the first step is admitting the problem.

An important element of Wes and my friendship is that we’re both living as immigrants in Mexico, he from Canada and me from the United States. (Thankfully, I speak some Canadian so we’re able to communicate.)

As for local options to make friends, we’re both pretty limited. There are generally two types of expats in the standard expat town, boomers and zoomers. Both drink heavily. I’m a decade sober, and Wes is getting too old for 30-something hijinx, but we both are familiar with that lifestyle.

Here’s the other thing. It’s mere fortune that we’ve found each other, and that we share enough in common to make hanging out worth the time. That said, I doubt our situation is much different from the isolated way most folks our age feel at the prospect of working on a friendship.

It’s scary. And it will take work. Also? Scary.

What I can report from the first Taco Tuesday is this: Afterward, as I walked through the front gate of our little apartment complex, I noticed my heart felt lighter. And I felt something like accomplishment. It felt like I’d done something important. I felt like I wanted to do it again.

So we did. And now we are doing it, every month.

As of this writing, we have another one lined up for next week. This time, we’re hitting a taco cart that parks outside a local grocery store. We’ll probably just stand there and chat, but we may get lucky and score a couple of white plastic lawn chairs with flexible legs.

I expect we’ll talk about our respective careers and our plans for the future. Wes will bring his box of genuine curiosity, and I’ll bring mine. We might talk about the wives, but we’ll definitely discuss ideas and what matters to each of us.

Some might argue that it will be a perfectly useless conversation, but by Brooks’s definition, that’s exactly what real friends are: useless. Even though one could also argue for the value of love shared, usefulness isn’t the main value of these friendships.

That’s not to say the friendship isn’t worthwhile, but it’s not riding on the back of some underlying agenda to close a deal or get ahead.

It’s just tacos and time spent together.

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If you find something about what you’ve read here valuable for any reason, I invite you to share it with someone else.

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One more thought on this…

In my conversations with others on this subject, I’ve talked to a few people who don’t think this really matters. They tend to lobby that they’ve got a good thing with their spouses and kids and that they connect with people all the time on Zoom. They’re not closed off to what they might be missing, but they’re also not convinced there is action worth taking.

To be honest, I’m not either. I don’t know if these are universal rules, that we need a friend in the meatspace (aka, the world outside Zoom), that we need to spend time with that friend with a kind of regularity. The data seems to say that, but we interpret data wrong all the time, and sometimes the data is just bad.

This is what’s true for me, though. Maybe you have a different perspective. Maybe you agree with Brooks and Baker. So please share.

So…. What’s your take on useless friends in the meatspace?