Friendship Day

In 1935, the US Congress proclaimed the first Sunday in August each year as Friendship Day. Unlike Valentine's Day, Mother's Day, or Christmas, holidays that have become highly commercialized, there are no expectations of gifts, cards, flowers, or for this holiday. Most people probably haven't heard of it, so if you choose you can act as if it is just another Sunday. On the other hand, you can decide to set aside time to celebrate the friendships that enrich your life.

 

With the hectic pace of our lives, it's too easy to take friendships, even very good ones, for granted. Use Friendship Day as an excuse to rethink and realign your friendship priorities. It's easy to get sucked into spending your time with a needy friend who constantly seeks out your companionship but consistently drains your energy, or with a toxic friend who is filled with ambivalence but conveniently lives next door. Consciously choose the friends you want to spend time with and nurture the relationships that matter most.

 

It is a privilege for me to be able to respond to your questions and dilemmas about friendship on this blog. Sometimes, relationships are confusing because ---to me too! Like any advice columnist who hears a snippet of your problem, I may not always hit the mark but I hope that my posts give you some food for thought. 

 

Happy Friendship Day,
Irene
The Friendship Doctor

 

 

The connection between two friends is often indescribable. It just feels right whenever you are together. When I met Rita, I was an eleven-year-old awkward adolescent.  She was a poised, charming and strikingly attractive kindergarten teacher who chose me as the fifth-grade “monitor” to make sure that all the kids in her class stood in a straight line when they walked down the hall and cleaned up their wooden desktops after finger-painting. She first became my mentor and role model and later became a friend.

Over time, we forged a unique, intergenerational friendship that made the years between us disappear. As a second act in her career, Dr. Rita Dunn became an inspiring, internationally renowned professor of higher education; prolific author of more than three hundred articles, book chapters, monographs, and research papers; and authority (and missionary) on using individual learning styles to improve teaching. During that second career, the working wife and mother mentored more than 160 doctoral students, many of whom now occupy positions of leadership in their own right.

By any measure, she was an extraordinary woman with whom I was fortunate to have had an exceptional relationship. Although we weren’t in constant contact over the years, we stayed connected through periodic notes to each other and emails, punctuated by occasional visits. More than that, we just “clicked.” I understood her and she “got” me. As she passionately blazed her way through the various phases of womanhood, I depended on her for advice (which she was never short of) and wisdom to ease the bumps for me. We celebrated our remarkable friendship with a champagne toast when I took her to lunch for her 80th birthday last May.

I visited her at her home this Wednesday in a torrential downpour. I wanted to be with her. Only three weeks earlier, she had had trouble breathing and was hospitalized after arriving at the ER. After tests of every organ and body system, she was diagnosed with a particularly aggressive type of metastatic cancer. “It doesn’t look good,” she told me.

Soon after being discharged, she was admitted to another hospital in Manhattan where she was treated for ascites (an uncomfortable buildup of fluid in the abdomen) and then released for further outpatient treatment closer to home.  Earlier last week an oncologist told Rita and her family that treatment might only extend her life by several weeks. She declined and bravely braced herself for the days that followed.

When I arrived, Rita was sitting upright in a lounge chair caressed with stacks of pillows on each side of her but she still winced from pain. Her body was swollen with fluid and her skin was stretched to the breaking point from her waist to her toes. We held hands and she told me that she had led a blessed life for seven decades (happily married to her husband for more than half of them), had a wonderful extended family, a legion of friends, and had achieved all her dreams.  I left to pick up some medicines for her and when I returned Rita was napping peacefully. I tiptoed out, planning to return this weekend.

Ironically, as I was thinking about what I might blog about on the occasion of Friendship Day, the phone rang with a call telling me that Rita had passed away at 5AM yesterday. In 1935, the US Congress proclaimed the first Sunday in August each year as Friendship Day. Unlike Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day, or Christmas, holidays that have become highly commercialized, there are no expectations of gifts, cards, flowers, or for this holiday. Most people probably haven’t heard of it, so if you choose you can act as if it is just another Sunday. On the other hand, you can decide to set aside time to celebrate the friendships that enrich your life.

With the hectic pace of our lives, it’s too easy to take friendships, even very good ones, for granted. Use Friendship Day as an excuse to rethink and realign your friendship priorities. It’s easy to get sucked into spending your time with a needy friend who constantly seeks out your companionship but consistently drains your energy, or with a toxic friend who is filled with ambivalence but conveniently lives next door. Consciously choose the friends you want to spend time with and nurture the relationships that matter most.

Rita Dunn was the most influential woman in my life, hands down, yet the time we spent together over the years feels far too brief. Balancing life, work, family and friendships often makes me feel like I’m on a high wire. It’s far easier to keep moving forward without making choices. I feel like I was on autopilot and almost imperceptibly lost control of my priorities, spending the bulk of my time with people and things that were less important to me. Losing Rita reminds me that I owe it to myself and those who matter most to spend my precious moments wisely.

In 1935, the United States Congress proclaimed the first Sunday in August as Friendship Day, which falls on August 3d this year. Put simply: It’s a day to recognize the vital role that friendships play in our lives. You can celebrate the day by getting together with a friend---or by phoning, emailing or texting one who lives far away.

But even the clueless among us know that close friendships aren’t made or celebrated on a single day. They’re nurtured by repeated contacts over time when we share our real selves with others.

A landmark study published in the American Sociological Review (June 2006) reported that the circle of close friends held by Americans over the past two decades has shrunk markedly. During the same 20-year period, the researchers found that the number of people who said that had no close confidants at all had doubled.

So if Friendship Day is approaching and you feel like you are experiencing a friendship deficit, you aren’t alone. Here are some of the reasons why this happens:

1) Focusing on career to the exclusion of friends: You may be a high-achiever who has come to find that it is very lonely at the top of your game.

2) Focusing on family to the exclusion of friends: You may be immersed (or drowning) in caregiving responsibilities for young children, older parents, or be sandwiched in between the two.

3) Forging acquaintances rather than friendships: You may be caught up in a social whirl but never take the time to develop more meaningful relationships.

4) Thinking you prefer the life of a hermit: Given the opportunity, you may choose more solitary pursuits and spend too much time alone.

5) Thinking that just one is sufficient: One friend may have satiated all your needs for friendship but that one friendship may have disappeared, dealing you a terrible blow.

If you feel lonely and don’t have the number of quality of female friendships you want, use the day to reclaim old friendships, nurture the ones you have, and develop new ones, one day at a time. Need some inspiration? The following ideas were emailed to me:

START A TRADITION

Two of my good friends, sorority sisters from the University of Toledo, celebrate our sorority anniversary together every year, which was on December 4, 1994 at 4:50:19 AM. Each year we plan a series of activities to celebrate our friendship over a few days. For the first 12 years, we literally were together in the same room and set our alarms to wake up and wish each other a happy anniversary. Recently, we decided to do anniversary trips. The first year, I planned the trip and we went to NYC. We did a scavenger hunt, saw a Broadway play, and more. This past year we did a trip to Martha's Vineyard and next year the plan is to take a trip together to Costa Rica.

From Dani Gibbs

GO ONLINE

My best friends are a group of working mothers I met online when I was pregnant with my first son. These are women that have been with me in the good times and bad from virtual baby showers, to the death of my dad, others losing jobs, difficult births, divorces, etc. They are women, although most I’ve not meet in person, whom I would trust my life with. Each year, we have a reunion to get together to celebrate our friendship. We are there to support each other each day on our private message board.

From Lois Whittaker

 

LEND A HAND

On last National Girlfriend’s Day, I was recuperating on the couch between chemotherapy sessions, while my girlfriends drove my kids to religion camp and cooked for me. My girlfriends made it possible for me to take care of the business of getting healthy by taking over running my house. My friend Susan organized the neighborhood to cook for us three times a week. My friend Kim sent me a schedule every Sunday night that showed which neighbors would drive my kids to camp, take them home for playdates or get them to swim practice. I barely had the energy to walk, let alone cart kids around town, so I really needed her help, too. Kim and Susan are just two of the girlfriends who helped me through the roughest time of my life.

From Jen Singer

MAKE A DATE

I am a mystery writer and the inspiration for my latest series of books -- the Friday Afternoon Club Mystery (Simon & Schuster) came from my own group of friends. We’ve been getting together on Friday afternoons for about 17 years. And yes – we call ourselves the Friday Afternoon Club (FAC). We have no agenda, no crafts or no service projects. It’s just a chance to chat with women who have come to know and love me for who I really am. I count the friendship of these women as one of the most precious blessings in my life.

From Cyndy Salzmann

BLAME IT ON THE KIDS

We are four mothers of sons who met because our boys were in the same grade in elementary school on the same baseball and basketball leagues and we wanted to socialize without the kids. We created a Dinner with Friends night – every other month; one couple selected a place and we’d all go out to eat. After the boys went their separate ways, we continued the group, albeit less often. The women decided to celebrate birthdays (ended up being 1once a season) and got together for lunch. It’s a chance to connect (no matter how busy things get) and keep in touch (even when life takes us in different directions).

From Joni Daniels

BREAK BREAD

Fourteen years ago I was friendly with two women. Between us we have six children in a seven-year age range. While we met through a business network, we quickly discovered our mommy-connection and decided to meet for lunch to share issues which we might find mutually helpful in the rearing of our children. I'll never forget the first lunch, and maybe the second or third. The food arrived, conversation was lively and, well, fluffy.....until maybe as the check was being paid, one of us would have the nerve to mention something really juicy and challenging that was going on in our lives as mothers. Hardly time left to discuss anything, we learned gradually to trust each other and to open the lunch with the high agenda points. I remember thinking "Thursdays just don't come around often enough."

From Sally Landau

BAKE COOKIES

In 1993, Laura, Julie, Charlene and I met at York University in Toronto. We were all living on the same floor and working at the same pub. As our schooling progressed, so too did our friendship. In 1995 Colleen joined our little sisterhood. Now, 15 years later, a few husbands, a few children, several moves, and lots of long distance phone calls and visits, we make an annual pilgrimage to Ontario for “cookie baking weekend.” This weekend, usually the first one in December, is 72 hours of shopping, prepping, baking, eating, and packaging. We also add in lots of laughter, some tears, a few snarky comments, plenty of hugs and kisses, some beer, wine or other mixology. These four women have been my bedrock.

From Gena Rotstein

I hope Friendship Day enriches your friendhips and helps reverse the deficit!

I couldn’t let the day go by without a post since this is Friendship Day (see Celebrating Friendship Day). When you are immersed in writing a book about female friendships, this day---that I might not have thought about or even known about before---feels like a personal holiday. Ironically, writing the book has left me less time for friends than ever before!

And even though it fell on a Sunday, it was another busy day juggling home, family and career. There was precious little ME time but I did pause to reflect on the female friendships past and present that continue to enrich my life, and I recognized that my cell phone has been a staunch ally in my efforts to keep in touch with female friends when I don’t have time for face-to-face visits...

In 1935, the US Congress proclaimed the first Sunday in August as Friendship Day. The day, which falls on August 5th this year, is intended to celebrate the friendships that enhance our lives and well-being.

Fortunately, the day hasn’t been commercialized to the same extent as more popular holidays---unfortunately, that also makes it less well-known. In the spirit of the day, I’ll send emails to several of my friends to remind them of how important they are to me...