My daughter turned six last week. We organised a birthday party — her friends, their families, the particular chaos of a room full of small children who have known each other for exactly as long as they have been alive.
At some point during the afternoon I found myself exchanging phone numbers with the other fathers. Standard practice. And I noticed something small that I have not been able to stop thinking about since.
Almost every father saved their number with the child's name first. Not their own name. Their child's name, and then "father." As in: Sofia's dad. Lucas's father. The identity came through the child — the relationship that had just been formed between two six-year-olds was already defining how the adults introduced themselves to each other.
I thought about that for a long time afterward. About how we define ourselves through our relationships. And about how the quality of those relationships depends almost entirely on what role we are playing when they are formed.
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The same week, I read in the newspaper about a funeral in the city where I live. The wealthiest and most prominent man in a minority community here had lost his wife. The funeral was significant — embassy representatives attended, business figures came from across the region, the kind of gathering that signals serious social weight.
I looked at the photographs. Prominent people surrounding him, faces arranged in the appropriate expression of solidarity. And I found myself asking the question that probably should not be asked at a funeral but that I could not help asking anyway.
Which of these people would still be here if he lost everything tomorrow?
Not the money specifically. The position. The access. The thing that made being seen with him valuable. If all of that disappeared — the way it can, quickly, in ways nobody plans for — which of those faces would still show up?
I do not know the answer for him. But I know the question. Because I have lived my own version of it.
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There is an Apple TV+ series called Your Friends and Neighbors — a dark comedy that follows a man whose life unravels after he loses his job and his marriage simultaneously. What makes it uncomfortable to watch is not the unravelling itself. It is the relationships. The social world he had built over decades — the friendships, the favours, the connections — reveals itself, piece by piece, to have been almost entirely transactional. People who seemed like friends were neighbours of his success. When the success left, so did they. Not dramatically. Just gradually, quietly, in the way that people stop calling when there is nothing to gain from the call.
It is a comedy. It is also one of the most accurate depictions of adult friendship I have seen.
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"The most painful thing is losing yourself in the process of loving someone too much, and forgetting that you are special too." — Ernest Hemingway |
Aristotle described three types of friendship. Friendships of utility — you are useful to each other. Friendships of pleasure — you enjoy each other's company. And friendships of virtue — you genuinely care about each other's wellbeing, independent of what the other person provides. He argued that only the third kind is real friendship in the full sense. The first two are relationships dressed as friendships. They dissolve when the utility or the pleasure disappears.
Most adult relationships, if you are honest about them, are the first or second type. That is not cynicism. It is just the reality of how adult life organises itself — around shared interests, shared contexts, shared proximity. The corporate colleague. The school parent. The business contact. Real warmth can exist within these relationships. But the warmth depends on the shared context remaining intact.
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When I left my C-level role, I discovered this empirically.
The first weeks — calls, messages, lunch invitations. How are you, what are you thinking, what are you planning next. I understood the subtext of most of them. They were not calls about me. They were calls about what I might be doing, what access I might still have, whether there was something in my transition that was adjacent to something useful for them. Not maliciously. Just automatically. The way people operate when relationships have been built around professional proximity for long enough that the pattern becomes invisible even to the people running it.
Then the silence. Gradual at first. Then complete. The people who had been regular presences in my professional life simply recalibrated — moved their attention to where the utility now was, which was no longer with me. This is not a complaint. It is just what happened. And it is, I think, what happens to most people who leave positions of professional significance. The phone stops ringing not because anyone decided to stop calling. Because there is no longer a reason to call that the caller can justify to themselves.
What remained in that silence was smaller and more real. The people who called with no agenda. The ones who had been there at different versions of me — before the titles, before the career trajectory had its current shape, before I was useful in the specific ways I had been useful. Those calls had a different quality. They were not about anything. They were just present.
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"It is not a lack of love, but a lack of friendship that makes unhappy marriages." — Friedrich Nietzsche |
The Roman writer Publilius Syrus observed two thousand years ago: prosperity makes friends, adversity tries them. He was not wrong. But the more precise version, in my experience, is that adversity does not try friendships — it simply reveals what was always there. The relationships that disappear were not friendships that ended. They were utility arrangements that concluded.
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My daughter's friends at that birthday party will not remember it. They are six. They were there for the cake and the games and the particular joy of being in a room full of people exactly their own age who share exactly their interests and have absolutely no agenda beyond the afternoon.
That is the purest version of a friendship of pleasure — and possibly of virtue, in the way that children who have not yet learned to calculate can sometimes be virtuous without knowing the word. No power dynamics. No utility. No positioning. Just presence.
I watched them and thought about the man at the funeral, surrounded by people who came because of what he represented. And about the calls that stopped coming. And about the handful of people whose voices remained in the silence and what distinguished them from everyone else.
The answer, as far as I can tell: they were there before I was useful. And they would be there if I stopped being useful tomorrow. That is the only test that actually means anything. And it is a test that most relationships, if you apply it honestly, do not pass.
The ones that do are worth more than everything else combined.
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This week's insight Aristotle described three types of friendship: utility, pleasure, and virtue. Only the third survives when the utility and pleasure disappear. Most adult relationships, if you are honest, are the first two. The test is simple: who was there before you were useful, and who would be there if you stopped being useful tomorrow? Apply that test carefully. The list will be shorter than you expect. The people on it are the ones worth protecting. |
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