We Used To Like Each Other

You are extremely good at running this together.

That is not nothing and it is worth saying before anything else. Between you, you handle a genuinely large operation. Two schedules, a house, other people's needs, money, a hundred small decisions a week, and it mostly works, and neither of you gets any credit for that because there is nobody to give it.

And somewhere inside all that competence, you stopped being friends and became colleagues.

Not enemies. Not distant. Colleagues, who are good at their jobs, who hand things off efficiently, and who have not done a single thing together in about three years that did not need doing.

Three things I am not going to do.

I am not going to suggest a date night program. Those require an evening, and usually money, and often somebody to look after somebody, and if you had all three of those spare you would probably have used them by now.

I am not going to suggest anything that costs money. Not a weekend away, not a meal out, nothing that has to be booked.

And I am not going to promise that the friendship comes back. I do not know. What I can tell you is what it needs in order to be possible, and that it is much smaller than an evening.

This is my beloved, and this is my friend

There is a line at the end of a description in the Song of Solomon, and the last three words of it are the ones I have come for.

This is my beloved, and this is my friend, O daughters of Jerusalem. (Song of Solomon 5:16, King James Version)

And this is my friend.

The whole passage before it is a description, and then it lands on two words, and they are not the same word. Beloved is one thing. Friend is a second thing, named separately, in a book that is entirely about a marriage.

Which means the friendship is not an accessory to the marriage or a nice extra when there is time. It is named in Scripture as one of the two things being described, and it is given its own place in the sentence.

So the thing you have been quietly missing, and half apologizing for missing, is not sentimental. It is in the text, standing on its own.

Song of Solomon 5:16 names the friend separately rather than folding it into everything else, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lets that reach two people who have become extremely good colleagues.

You are missing something that is named in its own right, and the friendship has never once been the optional part. Song of Solomon 5:16 says this is my beloved, and this is my friend, giving the second its own place, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes it a real thing rather than a nostalgia.

Friendship is made of useless time

Now the mechanic, and it is the reason this went quiet without anybody noticing.

Friendship is not built out of important conversations. It is built out of useless time. Sitting somewhere. Doing something pointless together. Being bored in the same room. That is what all of your actual friendships were made from and none of them were built during productive activity.

And the two of you have eliminated useless time almost entirely, because you are good at this. Every hour has a job in it. Even the recovery hours have been optimized, because when you finally sit down you are both so depleted that you each go to a separate screen, and that is not useless time together, it is two people resting near each other.

Song of Solomon 5:16 names a friend rather than a co-manager, and the Holy Spirit is not asking anybody here to be more efficient.

So nothing has gone wrong between you. The raw material has simply been squeezed out of the week by two competent people, and it can be put back in twenty minutes.

You are not short of feeling, and you have never once been short of anything except purposeless time. The written word names the friend as its own category, and the Spirit of God is the one who shows two competent people what they have optimized away.

One thing that solves nothing

So here is the assignment, and it is the last one on this site.

Do one thing together this week that has no purpose and solves nothing.

No purpose is the requirement and it is harder than it sounds, because you will immediately think of something useful you could do together, and useful is disqualified. Not a task done as a pair. Not a walk that gets the shopping done on the way back.

Twenty minutes is enough. Some genuinely useless options: watch something you both think is stupid. Go and look at something. Sit outside. Play a card game badly. Drive somewhere for no reason and come back.

There must be no outcome. If it produces anything, it is a job you did together, which is what you have been doing for three years.

And do not announce it as a thing you read about. That turns twenty pointless minutes into an initiative, and an initiative has to succeed, and this cannot succeed or fail. Song of Solomon 5:16 names the friend with no task attached to it, and the Holy Spirit is not running a project in that house tonight.

It may be awkward. Two people who have not been useless together for three years are often awkward at it for the first ten minutes. Stay for the twenty.

Song of Solomon 5:16 names the friend without attaching a function to it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is present in twenty minutes that achieve nothing at all.

You are able to spend twenty minutes on nothing, and it has never once needed to produce anything to have been worth it. Song of Solomon 5:16 names the friendship with no task attached, and the Spirit of God is the one who is in twenty deliberately useless minutes.