What does it really take to be a good friend?

I picked-up this 10 chapter easy-read expecting a self-help book about making friends as an adult. What I got instead was something closer to a companion, and I mean that in a literal sense.

Author A. Frynd built this from real conversations with friends, more than two dozen of them, and it shows. When he asked people “What is friendship?” almost nobody gave him a definition. They gave him a memory, a confession, a regret. That choice sets the tone for the whole book.

It is not a treatise, but a gathering of testimony, woven together with Aristotle, Aelred of Rievaulx, Cicero, Whitman, and living voices like Richard Rohr, and somehow it never feels like name dropping. It reads like someone who has actually spent decades with these thinkers and finally found somewhere to put what he learned from them. I think he actually did!

Aelred's four tested qualities of friendship, loyalty, right intention, discretion, and patience, have stuck with me since I closed the book. So has the story of the author's boyhood friend Chaz, whose fried bologna sandwiches and quiet shelter from schoolyard bullies turned out to matter fifty years later.

Alma is the heart of the book for me, the spiritual director who became a friend and taught me to read slowly.

So is the chapter on friendship during illness, which draws on the AIDS buddy programs of the 1980s and does not look away from what it actually costs to stay present to someone who is dying.

The clearest statement of what the book is actually arguing shows up when Frynd retells the moment the Buddha corrects his attendant Ananda, who thought he was praising friendship by calling it half of the holy life. Not half, the Buddha tells him, the whole of it. Everything else in the book seems to build toward that line.

He does not spare himself either. The chapter on friendships that fail opens with a confession about a friend named Mo, someone who showed up for him for years until he let distance and his own exhaustion do what a real ending never did. He does not resolve it into a lesson. He just tells you it still grieves him. That same chapter, and the one on best friends before it, range from Elizabeth Barrett Browning's letters to Mary Russell Mitford, to James Baldwin and the painter Beauford Delaney, whom Baldwin called his spiritual father.

The book keeps insisting that this pattern—recognition, loyalty, showing up—is older than any of our labels for it, and by the fourth or fifth example you believe it.

I would gladly call this author my friend and feel blessed for it! It's a modern day Bible on Friendship!

I am fortunate to have a community of people whom I care about and who care about me; in other words, friends. After reading Friendship …in a lonely age, I may have taken this community for granted. Not the individual friends, just the very idea of friendship. I've never thought about how or why those particular relationships came to be and what it takes to continue to keep them vital and meaningful. In this book, the author draws on a wide range of spiritual and philosophical resources to describe how friendships work in our lives, individually and in society. Combining insights from conversations with their own friends with classical insights and their own deeply personal reflections, the book invites us to grow in appreciation of the importance of friendship in our lives. Including the source material for many of the authors quoted, along with questions for personal reflection, make this book more than an academic exploration; it is a useful tool for personal growth. Friendship …in a lonely age would be a great gift to give to friends or as a selection for a book club.

A superb summary of friendship and its importance in our lives. It's main theme is that friendship is not primarily a feeling, a social arrangement, or a pleasant accessory to life. It is a practice of presence and support. For many people, men especially, loneliness is not only a lack of social contact but a lack of meaningful companionship. We are each born into our family and early cultural influences, so there is no choice in these matters. Yet, we can choose our friends—i.e., in some ways, friendship can be seen as the highest form of relationship between two people. I was inspired by learning of Aristotle's view of friendship as two people who love the good they see in one another; that they want each other to flourish; that they support one another during times of suffering and distress; and that they genuinely will the good of the other.

A Beautiful Reflection on Friendship

Here philosophy meets the essay form. This book offers a beautiful and surprisingly profound clarification of something we too often take for granted: friendship.

What makes it especially meaningful is the way it explores the different levels and layers of friendship in our lives. Not every friend occupies the same place in our hearts, nor do all friendships serve the same purpose. Some relationships are brief and circumstantial, some are companions for a particular season of life, and others become enduring sources of strength, understanding, and love. The book gives language and structure to these distinctions without diminishing the value of any of them.

More than simply defining friendship, it invites us to see it with greater clarity — and, ultimately, with greater gratitude. It left me reflecting not only on what friendship means, but on the many friends who have helped shape who I am and helped me keep moving forward.

On their own, the first five chapters could stand the test of time as representative of our modern age. This is a beautiful book about a deceptively nuanced subject — and a timely reminder to appreciate the friends we have, remember the friends who have helped us along the way, and remain willing to become that friend for someone else.

I woke at 2:30 a.m. and reached for this book, wanting something meaningful yet comforting. The deeper I went, the more compelling it became. I found myself thinking about how much I miss the vulnerability and intimacy of a close friendship — something that has eluded me my whole life, often leaving me judging myself harshly.

I’ve poured my energy into my wife and family, caring for them with everything I have, and in doing so I’ve missed the experience of a truly close friendship. The friendships I have had often left me wanting more, especially with other men — father‑wound territory for sure.

This book felt personal, and I felt moved to say, “Thank you for entrusting your sacred work with me.”

I have read and reread Frynd’s “Friendship ...in a lonely age” and seven key descriptors fit: brilliant, transparent, insightful, practical, expansive, authentic, and organic. While the book is autobiographical in nature, it is not ego-centric. (It’s not all about Frynd.) Clearly, the author has been (and continues to be) on a life-transforming journey which, at its center, is this phenomenon called friendship.

In these pages, Frynd very capably deals with the etymology and psycho-social dynamics around friendship. However, what I most appreciate are the stories and anecdotal illustrations which engage the heart and invite robust participation.

The book very skillfully moves one from head to heart.

I hear Frynd saying: Friendship is that sacred space where I can know and be known, love and be loved, serve and be served, celebrate and be celebrated. Friendship is that reciprocal relationship which consistently messages: I see you. I hear you. I honor you. I feel with you without the need to fix you. And I give you the space you need to be you.

This is a book which invites personal reflection, self-examination, contemplation and action. I commend this “labor of love” to anyone who wants to be on the life-giving journey of cultivating authentic friendships.

A Nurse's Reflection on Friendship ... in a Lonely Age

As a nurse working on the front lines, I am surrounded by illness, vulnerability, and mortality. I've learned that friendship isn't a luxury, but sustenance.

When I read Friendship ... in a lonely age, I found not only recognition of this truth, but a book that treats friendship as the serious, sacred thing it actually is.

What struck me most was the scholarly apparatus. Each chapter is grounded in footnotes that reference theologians, philosophers, neuroscientists, and spiritual directors—Aristotle to Keating to modern research on loneliness. This isn't the casual framework of a self-help book. The author is in conversation with centuries of thought about what friendship means. The footnotes are rigorous; they establish that we're not inventing friendship anew, but participating in an ancient and ongoing dialogue about human connection. This level of care, the refusal to oversimplify, made me trust the book deeply.

And yet the prose remains intimate. The author moves fluidly between intellectual rigor and lived experience, between what thinkers have said and what the human heart actually knows. The footnotes, conveniently located at the end of each chapter, never distract; they deepen. For readers who want to follow a thread further, they're there. For those who don't, the text stands complete on its own. That generosity—trusting the reader to choose their own depth—reflects friendship itself.

Chapter 9, "When a Friend is Ill," touched me in a particular way. In my nursing work, I see people stripped of everything except their need to be witnessed, to be known. The author writes about what it means to show up for a friend in illness not with solutions or advice, but with presence. With seeing. With the willingness to sit in uncertainty together. This chapter articulated what I live but struggle to name. It gave language to the deeper and spiritual dimension of care.

What moved me most was that friendship is not treated as a feel-good topic. It honors friendship as the work it is—the vulnerability it requires, the ways it fails us, the grace when it holds. The footnotes signal this: we are not alone in struggling with these questions. They've mattered to the wisest minds across time.

For anyone navigating loneliness, grief, the complexity of showing up for others, or simply the hunger to understand connection more deeply, this book is a companion. It invites you into a conversation that began long before any of us, and will continue long after. That's not just meaningful. That's necessary.

What an excellent read. I reflected on the importance of friendship in my life like never before. The author does a great job of connecting philosophical perspectives on friendship to the world we live in today, where we are often so busy with work, family, and everyday responsibilities that we can lose sight of the relationships that truly matter.

What stood out was the deep discussion of loneliness and how, despite being more technologically connected than ever, so many people are experiencing a deeper sense of isolation.

The author looks at friendship from many different perspectives and reminds us that meaningful friendships require time, connection, and genuine presence. This book was a great reminder that friendship is much more than simply having people in our lives—it plays an important role in who we are, how we experience life, and our overall sense of connection and belonging. The prompts helped me really think about friendship in ways I had never done before.

A deeply considered meditation on friendship—and on life—delving into the hidden possibilities of human relationships. The author conceals his identity but reveals a mind steeped in classical literature and philosophy, Catholic theology, Hinduism and Buddhism. These traditions and others are deployed in an exploration of the nuances of being a friend and having one. You’ve heard of page-turners and books you can’t put down. This is one you can’t turn a page of without picking up an insight. Beautifully written and as heartfully evocative of the high note of human experience as Paul Robeson singing “Old Man River”.