Not long ago I pulled out our wedding album. I had not looked at it in years. My younger son, Spurgeon, was asking questions about the day, so I sat at the kitchen table and flipped through the pages, pointing out faces, retelling stories, laughing at how young we looked.

Then I came to the photo of my groomsmen. Eight men stood there shoulder to shoulder with me, all of us young, confident, and certain we would walk through life together. These were the brothers I thought I would grow old with. These were the men I could not imagine losing touch with.

But as I stared at that photo, the realization settled on me with surprising heaviness. Out of the eight, I only maintain meaningful contact with one of them today.

One.

The rest have faded into the background of my life like landmarks. Some conflict, but not a great deal. Mostly miles added, convictions deepened, seasons changed, kids grown, jobs shifted, and proximity dissolved. The men who once stood beside me at one of the most significant moments of my life had quietly drifted into other circles, other priorities, other worlds. I have drifted too.

It is strange how a single picture can tell the truth you never stopped to consider.  Back then I mistook proximity for loyalty, constant fun for constancy, and shared youth for shared conviction. We were in the same season, so we believed we would stay in the same story forever. But middle age knows better. It reveals that many friendships from youth were built on the scaffolding of convenience. When life moved on, the scaffolding fell away, and so did the friendship.

As I stared at those faces in the photo, I felt a tug of sadness. But alongside that sadness came clarity.  Those men were not impostors. They were not disappointments.  They were simply fellow travelers for a particular stretch of road.  Our lives had overlapped, not intertwined.  We had stood in each other’s weddings, but we had not forged the kind of friendship Proverbs describes.  We had never built the long-term habits of candor, prayer, and counsel.  We loved each other, but we did not really sharpen each other.  The fact that only one remained was not a failure of affection. It was a revelation of depth.

When you grow up in modern America, friendship is simply assumed.  You inherit it.  You do not choose it.  Public schooling creates an artificial ecosystem where proximity does most of the heavy lifting.  Your friends are simply the other kids who live in your zip code and ride your bus.  You bond over superficial commonalities because you all share the same cafeteria, the same geometry homework, the same Friday night lights.  Friendship in youth is built on convenience and context.

Nothing becomes very different in early adulthood.  You enter the survival years.  You get married.  You bear children.  You work long hours. You fall asleep during movies.  You lock arms with whoever is also drowning in diapers and debt and exhaustion.  The similarities are comforting.  They feel like solidarity.  But very often it is not friendship in the biblical sense.  It is trauma bonding.  It is the camaraderie of fellow soldiers ducking their heads in the same trench.

You do not have the time, energy, or maturity to ask the deeper questions. You do not stop to consider whether these people actually share your loves, your convictions, your vision of the good life.  You are simply busy.  You gravitate toward the people who are in your season because proximity and survival make the choices for you.

Then something changes. There are some challenges no one warns you about when you are young. Middle-aged friendship is one of them. No one tells you that this will be one of the quiet crises of your late thirties and forties. You drift into it the same way you drift into adulthood itself: slowly, unconsciously, and without a plan.

Middle-aged friendship usually does not die with a bang.  It dies with a full calendar.  With one more rescheduled dinner.  One more “we should get together soon.”  One more group text that never quite lands on a date.  Your children grow.  They become more independent.  Your career stabilizes or shifts.  The fog lifts.  One day you wake up at 40 and realize most of the people who know your stories do not actually know your soul.  They were simply there when you happened to be young.  You are surrounded by people you have known for years and yet you do not truly know them.  Worse, you realize you are not deeply known.

In many cases the glaze of youthful ignorance dissolves and you see plainly what you did not have the margin or maturity to see earlier. Some of the people you once considered "close as a brother" are not aligned with you in the things that matter most. The political trivialities, the moral divergences, the theological differences, the lifestyle misalignments, the work ethic gaps, the seriousness about life, marriage, holiness, and responsibility, all become unavoidable fault lines. The people you once considered to be like family are busy or drifting in directions you never intended to go. You are left holding a quiet, unsettling realization:

I do not know how to build the kind of friendships I actually need.

And then the deeper ache comes. You begin to understand that your time is not elastic. Your soul is not bottomless. Friendship is a limited stewardship. And you do not have unlimited space to carry one-sided friendships, low-commitment acquaintances, or people who do not choose you back.

Middle-aged friendship forces you to see something you could not see before. True friendship is not defined by who has been around you the longest, but by who is willing to walk with you with constancy, candor, and counsel. The book of Proverbs becomes painfully practical in this stage of life.

“A friend loves at all times.”
Proverbs 17:17

“A friend sticks closer than a brother.”
Proverbs 18:24 (second half)

“A friend wounds faithfully.”
Proverbs 27:6
(“Faithful are the wounds of a friend…”)

“A friend gives earnest counsel.”
Proverbs 27:9
(“…the sweetness of a friend comes from his earnest counsel.”)

“A friend sharpens you.”
Proverbs 27:17
(“Iron sharpens iron, and one man sharpens another.”)

This is not proximity. This is intentionality. It is effort. It is choosing.

Mel Robbins helpfully frames the "three pillars of friendship" as proximity, timing, and energy.  These help explain why young friendships form so easily and why midlife friendships break so suddenly. Proximity fades as families move, schedules tighten, and obligations multiply. Timing diverges as some raise toddlers and others launch teens or start over in their careers. Energy shifts when beliefs sharpen, habits change, or one person grows while another stays still.

In youth, you assume friendship. In middle age, you discover its real cost.

I think it would be more accurate to call Mel's formula the "three pillars of companionship." Scripture pushes the definition of friendship deeper. You cannot have many true friends.  Companions are plentiful.  Friends are rare.  Friendship requires discovery and forging.  Discovery is the foundation.  It is the moment when two people say, “You too? I thought I was the only one.”  Forging is the lifelong work of commitment, vulnerability, rebuke, availability, and shared counsel.  The three biblical pillars are affinity, intentionality, and sacrifice.

This is where midlife friendship becomes spiritually dangerous.  It's easy to become bitter.  Easy to resent people who do not reciprocate.  Easy to hold on to relationships that should be allowed to die a natural death.  Easy to become cynical and self-protective.

But, when you see the biblical vision of friendship, you feel two things at once:  longing and crushing inadequacy. 

Longing, because true biblical friendship must be fought for and is hard to come by.


Inadequacy, because we recognize we have not been the friend we long to have.

This is why the gospel matters for friendship.

Jesus Christ is the friend Proverbs points to.  The friend who always lets you in and never lets you down.  The friend whose wounds heal rather than harm.
 The friend who cleaves to you at infinite cost.
 The friend who faced hell rather than lose you.
 The friend who does not flatter you, but sanctifies you.  The friend who knows you fully and loves you still.

His friendship frees you.
 It frees you from needing other people to carry the weight of your identity.
 It frees you from being paralyzed by rejection.
 It frees you to love without fear.
 It frees you to choose friends wisely and release friendships graciously.
 It frees you to become the kind of friend you have always needed but rarely been.

Middle-aged friendship is difficult because it is the first time in your life that you must build friendships deliberately rather than inherit them by accident.  It is the stage where you must confront yourself, your habits, your selfishness, and your relational immaturity.  It is the place where Christ’s friendship becomes not a doctrine to be recited, but a lifeline to be held.

And it is also the place where the church becomes radiant.  Christian friendship is where two people share the deepest affinity possible, the love of Christ, and yet can be gloriously unlike each other in almost every other way.  Christ opens up friendship across age, personality, income, ethnicity, background, and temperament.  This friendship is engineered by a sovereign Host who chooses the guests for His feast.  You have not chosen one another.
He has chosen you for one another.

Oddly enough, the ache of that wedding photo has become a gift to me.  It has cleared space in my soul.  It has reminded me that losing proximity is not the same thing as losing love.  It has reminded me that Christ is still writing the story, bringing into my life men who share not only my past circumstances but my present convictions and future hopes.

Middle age strips away illusions.  It shows you that convenience was never covenant.  Proximity was never loyalty.  Shared circumstances were never shared convictions.  It is painful, but it is also purifying.

Because now you can choose.
 Now you can love with intention rather than accident.
 Now you can build friendships not from survival but from wisdom and joy.  If you feel the ache of friendships that have faded, do not mistake it for failure. It is the Spirit clearing space.  It is maturity arriving. It is the Master Gardener pruning so that true fruit can grow.

To my middle-aged brothers and sisters…step into this season with courage that flows from your faith.
 Choose well.
 Love deeply.
 Speak truthfully.
 Invest in the few who invest in you.  And remember this:

Before you ever forged a single friendship on earth, Heaven forged one for you.
 The Son of God walked into Gethsemane and up the hill of Calvary so that you could sort out mere companionship from covenant friendship.

Let these four words come straight out of heaven and sink deep into your soul:

You are not alone.

And because of that, you are free to become the friend your future friends will thank God for.