You can guess where I’m going with this. Now I can finally say my husband is my best friend. How to Win Friends and Influence People had a fairly big part to play in our present ability to listen to each other and show the kind of care that nourishes the soul. We are still ridiculously imperfect in our communication skills, but we have made huge steps forward and continue in that direction.
Intimacy, according to minds much more studied than mine, is a matter of tuning into someone else’s reality with the risk of being changed by the experience. It is not a matter of extending your self-absorption to include someone else. I am presently working on a book called The Social Cause Diet where I make the claim that involvement in a social service is a catalyst for intimacy and true friendship, because serving others requires that you leave your self-absorption behind and focus on the people or need in front of you. In the process, nourishing relationships are built with the people you serve and with those who serve alongside you.
C.S. Lewis, my favorite writer who had in equal measure great intelligence and imagination, wrote an insightful book called The Great Divorce. Lewis was not speaking of divorce between two people, but of the chasm between heaven and hell. His description of hell is one I’ll never forget. He pictured it as a grey town where people quarrel with their neighbors and then move farther and farther away from each other until their is no community at all and hardly even a sighting of another person. When I get disappointed with a neighbor or friend and I’m tempted to write him or her off, I think of hell being a place where everyone ends up alone because it’s easier than learning how to get along. Hell, in Lewis’ analogy, is a complete disconnectedness from others. It is loneliness, night and day, without relief.
As volunteerism promotes health (explained further in The Social Cause Diet), loneliness seems to diminish it. One study revealed that lonely people have blood pressure readings that are as much as thirty points higher than in non-lonely people. Some researchers claim that the magnitude of risk associated with social isolation is comparable with that of cigarette smoking.
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