Ancient philosophers and contemporary scientists agree that one of the keys to happiness is strong relationships with other people. We need to have intimate, enduring bonds; we need to be able to confide; we need to feel that we belong; we need to be able to get support, and just as important for happiness, to give support. We need friends.
There are all kinds of friends. Facebook “friends,” work friends, childhood friends, college friends, dear friends, neighborhood friends, even ‘we cheer for the same sports teams’ friends’.
In Geoffrey Greif’s book Buddy System: Understanding Male Friendships, he identifies four categories of friendships:
- Must friends: a best friend, a member of your inner circle.
- Trust friends: a friend who shows integrity, someone you feel comfortable with.
- Rust friends: a person you’ve known for a long, long time; a part of your life.
- Just friends: a person you see occasionally who is enjoyable company.
I am a big Harry Chapin fan as I tend to favor the Singer/Songwriter/Storyteller artists. In 1981 I saw him in concert just months before he was tragically killed in a car crash on the Long Island Expressway. On his album, Greatest Stories Live, he lets his brother, Steve Chapin, perform one of his own songs, I Let Time Go Lightly, which has the lyrics – “Old friends, they mean much more to me than the new friends, because they can see where you are, and they know where you’ve been.”
Rusted friends are there in the beginning sharing the same foundation building. As our paths vary over time these rusted friends serve as a benchmark as well as a different window to the world outside ourselves allowing us to take stock of our journey and see how we have evolved. An old friend is a guardian of the memories we might otherwise lose.
Rusted friends were there when I created a “scrub team” fight song on the bus ride home from another high school 
football game we didn’t see action in; and they were there when I was inducted into my college’s athletic hall of fame; and they were there for many of the moments in between.
I had dinner with a rusted friend in a city far away from where we grew up. As the night and conversation progressed I came to realize that I was having dinner with an extremely successful and well-placed business executive. Under different circumstances, having dinner with a ‘c-level corporate executive’ could be very intimidating. However, this was my rusted friend, the guy with whom I painstakingly shared high school physics class.
The Bible has several examples of Rusted Friends:
- Abraham and Lot – Abraham with his loyalty and going above and beyond for friends; gathered hundreds of men to rescue Lot from captivity. Genesis 14:14-16
- Ruth and Naomi – Although of different ages and related by marriage, they looked out for one another throughout their lives. Ruth 1:16-17
- Job and His Friends – When Job faced his toughest times, his friends were immediately there with him. They sat with him and felt his pain. Job 2:11-13
Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield are rusted friends, starting as childhood friends from New York. While Greenfield finished college with the intent to go into medical school, Cohen had dropped out of college. Reunited, they completed a correspondence course on ice cream making and in 1978 opened Ben and Jerry’s Homemade ice cream scoop shop in an old gas station in downtown Burlington, Vermont.
A Swedish survey of people 75 years and older found women and men who kept in contact with a variety of longtime friends and relatives had a lower risk of developing dementia. The researchers said it was possible that juggling many relationships was a mental exercise that kept brains “in tone.” There is a theory called “socioemotional selectivity theory” (abbreviated SST). Developed by Stanford psychologist Laura Carstensen that gives special insight into the meaning of old friendships. SST predicts that as people get older they prefer relationships that bolster their positive emotions. Old friends fulfill our need for connectedness and older adults prefer to “accentuate the positive.”
As it is written in Proverbs 27:10: “Do not give up your own friend and your father’s friend; do not resort to the house
of your kindred when trouble strikes. Better a neighbor near than kin far away.” The proverb urges us to cultivate old family friends and neighbors and not to rely exclusively on family in times of trouble, for family may not be there for us.
Meeting up with old friends brings an air of youth along with it. Nostalgia is a beautiful feeling. It reminds us of the way things once were, the happiness that we experienced growing up, and all the wonder. Time and distance do not change your feelings towards the people you have had unique experiences with in life. The real power of rusted friends is the feeling of closeness and openness to someone, which is a great foundation to build upon.
As adults, most of the people in our lives are mere acquaintances. We sometimes create the illusion that these acquaintances in our lives are actual friends. These acquaintances only know us as who we are today in the roles we currently play. They don’t our history or how we got to be who we are. As adults, the time to create rusted friends has passed.
Like fine wines, old friends really do get better with age. So like fine wine, make sure you enjoy those long standing friendships – it is good for the soul.
