Kardios: where our heart is home

We need a new way to talk about important people in our lives

Friendship is in the news again. The Washington Post had a high-profile opinion piece by Anna Goldfarb this week, which was clearly a way to pitch her new book, Modern Friendship: How To Nurture Our Most Valued Connections. The name of the book doesn’t grab me but the subtitle to the article certainly does:

We need a new way to talk about important people in our lives.

This is the problem, I think. The constant challenge. Our language fails us.

I’ve written about this before, but perhaps not recently as thoroughly as I did in my post from two years ago, titled “Chosen Family – and 9 Words for Love”.   As I reread that now, a few thoughts still stand out for me.

1.      We talk a lot about “chosen” families and, admittedly, I like this language. Choosing whom we love and those whom we decide are the most important people in our lives not only provides us agency, it also feels warm and comforting. Another way to think of it, however, is this: “there are two kinds of families: biological and logical.” Our chosen families are those that make sense to us.

2.     “Traditional families often expect us to conform to the family’s norms, if not also to the culture’s. These families aren’t always the places where we’re seen and celebrated for our unique individuality. But with chosen families, it’s different. Our chosen families accept us just as we are.” (quote is my own)

3.     While the Ancient Greeks had 8 words for love, these are still not enough to adequately describe the nuances of friendship or chosen family. Pragma - longstanding and enduring, deepened with time, and Philia – deep friendship, come the closest.

Now that I’ve thought about that last point more, I wonder if we can’t adopt a new name for these relationships. Perhaps something like oikos kardia, our heart home. This is clumsy yet comes from the ancient Greek words for home and heart. Or maybe, in shortened form, kardios.  Try it: “This is _____, my kardios.”  When someone asks what your plans for the holidays are, you respond, “I’m celebrating / spending it with my kardios.”

Amrita Vijavaraghavan and Andrew Stephens discuss the dilemma of what to call each other in their Don’t Think Twice podcast and Emergency Contacts Substack. As best friends who chose to create and raise a child together, they struggle with semantics. “Platonic Life Partners” is what they currently seem to have settled on but admittedly the term lacks a certain warmth. (Read about their journey to this label here.) As someone who spent many years wrestling with “significant other” and “partner” as concise ways to describe my committed love relationships and finding no word at all for “best friend, former beau, co-custodian of two dogs, and will always be in my life”, I sympathize with the frustration. Their most recent podcast, The Dinner Party, is a poignant conversation among eight friends whose relationships transcend our current language while also acknowledging the power in naming these relationships. If you have ever wrestled with defining people in your life who are more than “just friends”, I cannot encourage you enough to listen here. Their conversation is revelatory, heart-warming, and affirming in ways far better than I can articulate.

But while I think language is the problem, Goldfarb’s research points to something else. Modern life has changed friendships. Record numbers of us move multiple times in our lives. Our jobs, dwellings, even interests are far more fluid than they have ever been. William Deresiewicz notes in his 2009 article for the Chronicle for Higher Education titled “Faux-Friendship” that parents strive to be friends with their children and positions of power (bosses, teachers, even clergy and politicians) urge those whom they oversee to think of them as friends. Personally, I bristle at this interpretation of friendship – a bit too broad, too loose, not precise enough for me. I still believe boundaries and roles matter.

As Goldfarb notes, “Our phones are full of friends we love, but we rarely contact them.”

While this may be true, those whom I consider friends, truly friends, I might contact at any time for no reason at all except that I was thinking of them. It may be months or years, yet when we talk again or see each other, I have no doubt the connection, kinship, and admiration will still be there.

I would also suggest that social media has changed our understanding of “friend.” For those of us on Facebook, how many “friends” are people you would invite for dinner in your home? With how many of them would confide your most intimate thoughts? For some people, they truly consider all their contacts to be such friends. Others, perhaps, are more discerning.

Deresiewicz wrote, “The modern temper runs toward unrestricted fluidity and flexibility, the endless play of possibility, and so is perfectly suited to the informal, improvisational nature of friendship. We can be friends with whomever we want, however we want, for as long as we want.” Goldfarb describes this as “the beauty and burden of modern friendship”.

Hmmm… this is probably true. I still subscribe to the reason, season, and lifetime understanding of friendship. Though, admittedly, when I’ve deeply cared for someone and the friendship turned out to be for only a reason or season, the loss hurts.

Meanwhile, this week The New York Times featured a quiz by Catherine Pearson titled, “Butterfly or Firefly: What’s Your Friendship Style?”  I’m sure all of us are familiar enough with the term “social butterfly” to deduce the implications of this quiz. Yet, especially as we mature, are any of us fully on one end of this spectrum? In my experience, even those that might be considered butterflies can also have deep 1:1 relationships that light up others. And even those who are introverts can sometimes be the most wonderful kinkeepers who connect people together and “hold court” in their own unique ways.  

What do you think? Is your friendship style butterfly, firefly, or something else?

Goldfarb writes, “When it comes to friendship, many people imagine they’d be happier with a web of close, highly engaged friends. But studies show that it feels better to be considered someone’s best friend than to have oodles of friends. That’s because being considered someone’s best friend is a powerful measure of your integrity, good character and inner beauty.”

Do you agree? I’m not sure I do. I can’t help wondering if the “best friend” idea isn’t a myth of marriage. And wouldn’t having a web of close friends –a cadre of people with whom you are sincerely yourself and loved as you are—be the most powerful measure of your character and inner beauty? I’ve always felt that each friend brings out a different aspect of myself in a way that just one friend—as wonderful and good and close as that friend is—cannot.

Your thoughts?

Finally, there is the idea that friends are based on commonalities, which makes sense, of course. Location, education, hobbies, interests, religion, politics, even the same sense of humor can be the basis of a friendship.

My (relatively new) friend, Liz, offered the following response to my post on “Kinkeepers”:

“David Brooks was one of the first really (White) mainstream people I saw to question nuclear family model. He mentions that kinship groups were traditionally 70 or so people. Now we have to do tremendous emotional lifting to recreate even a fraction of these groups—it takes 200 hours of time spent together to make a new friend. Or--if we are wealthy enough-- we pay for the physical/societal care and support (health, education, etc) that kinship used to provide, which is transactional and lacks the same emotional dynamics.”

It takes 200 hours of time spent together to make a new friend. Again, I’m not so sure. Maybe. But also, if those friendships are based only on commonalities, what happens when you no longer have things in common?  When you move away, change your opinion, take a new job?

Andrew Stephens perhaps says it best in his post, Ms. Caldwell’s Decree:

“Who becomes part of one’s inner circle is an alchemical combination of proximity, time, willingness, commitment, and other less definable qualities. Any individual piece is not enough.”

Indeed.

Patty and I have never had much in common except, really, going to the same high school. Forty years later, she is still a good and treasured friend.