How Neglect Affects Christian Friendship

Cultivating and nurturing good Christian friendship is an important part of Catholic spiritual growth. But there are some influences in our lives that make it difficult for us to keep our friendships healthy. Neglect is one of the deadliest friendship-killing influences – and unfortunately one of the most common.

Life Happens . . .

Hey – it happens, right? We get busy. Months go by and we don’t talk or write to our friends. Eventually, we even stop emailing. But we comfort ourselves with the thought that when we get back together we’ll pick right up where you left off. And with some friendships, that can be true . . . for a while.

But the faithfulness that especially Christian friendship is grounded in is built up by a myriad of small occasions for displaying affection and expressing commitment through tiny acts of service. These tiny acts happen through the gift of time.

The Snowball Effect

The problem is that once the guilt hits about the distance that has come between friends, we continue to keep our distance rather than face it. We wait for the great occasion for making up for lost time. Sometimes that moment comes. Other times we just keep waiting. The guilt and waiting cause a snowball effect that keeps us from reconnecting to our neglected friends.

What a distanced Christian Friendship really needs is immediate and frequent doses of little moments. Start with a card or an email. Get together for lunch or coffee. Don’t wait for it to be an “event.” Just do something small – and do it now!

My wife and I are horrible offenders here. We recently moved, leaving a number of close friends behind. Immediately my wife started telling people, “We’re really bad at distance relationships, but we’ll try to keep in touch.” The debilitating guilt was already present before we were even guilty of neglecting our friends. So when life takes over and we actually do neglect our friends, the guilt is already active. So we start looking for opportunities for the big reunion. But planning a meaningful reunion and making the trip seems like such a large task. So it gets put on the back burner, making us feel even more guilty.

All it would really take is an email.

Look, occasional neglect happens. Get rid of the guilt. Just fix it.

The Habit of Neglect Ruins Christian Friendship

Why is neglect so ruinous to friendships? True friendships are built on the foundation of trust, intimacy, and love. Trust and intimacy require spending time with each other to have real communication, tests of trust, and deep sharing. Spending time to build trust, intimacy, and love is especially important within new friendships. However, in established relationships, these important elements of friendship can slowly erode if we don’t continue spending time together.

That’s why it’s so important to attend to neglected relationships in order to keep them nurtured. But neglecting friends can also become a habit. When you identify a pattern of neglecting your friends, you may need to look for weaknesses in your personality that you need to strengthen. For example, if you have a sanguine temperament (a very social person who likes to be with people), you may be prone to neglecting your friends in favor of being a social butterfly. If you have a melancholic temperament (a thoughtful, reserved person who prefers to be alone), you may neglect your friends because reaching out is beyond your comfort zone. In these cases, neglect doesn’t happen because of your temperament, but because of personality weaknesses associated with it. Neglect can also happen when you are stressed or depressed, when you experience some pain in the relationship, or when you just get too busy. Whatever the deeper cause of the neglect of our friends may be, it’s important to address it and to heal our friendships.

Fortunately for us, the love of friendship is a skill that we can learn. Learning these skills can help us to avoid neglecting our friends, or can help us to heal damaged neglected relationships. Because human relationships are how we learn to love as Jesus lives, these social virtues are part of the key spiritual virtues that make up a lay “rule of life.” From the Abbey teaches you how to develop the key spiritual virtues that help you rebuild the “inner abbey” of your heart so you can meet Jesus in prayer and participate in His divine life.

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Brought to you by Jeffrey S. Arrowood at From the Abbey, dedicated to helping you rediscover the JOY of learning and living your faith so you can grow in intimacy with God.

Brought to you by Jeff Arrowood. My mission is to help Catholic adults like you rediscover the JOY of learning and living their faith.