Rory Gibson: Why I tell my mates I love them

As the world faces an epidemic of loneliness, Rory Gibson talks about the importance of keeping and spending time with lifelong friends.

ONE OF the good things about growing older is that, if you’re lucky, you’ve got friends who’ve walked beside you every step of the way as you’ve muddled through life.

Those who are still there decades after you’ve first met are valuable beyond compare, filling voids created by fissures in marriages or other family relationships that should provide food for your emotional wellbeing but too often don’t.

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But even if everything is hunky dory in those facets of your life, the pleasure to be derived from an old friendship – or a solid new one – is immense.

Sadly though, too many people appear to be missing out on the benefits of friendship. Survey after survey around the world point to rising levels of loneliness, and study after study point to this becoming a major health issue.

Columnist and surfer Rory Gibson. Picture: Nigel Hallett

Two things got me thinking about friendship this week. First, I read a story in The Times in Britain recounting what happened when a BBC radio program devoted its entire slot to loneliness. During the program mention was made of the Chatty Cafe Scheme, whose website subsequently crashed from lonely people logging on to find out more about it (it’s a scheme in which cafes set up “chatter and natter” tables where strangers can sit and have a yak with each other).

Then a couple of days later I drove for five hours south just to have a game of golf with a friend I’d known for the best part of 40 years. It was his 60th birthday, and he didn’t want to have a party. All he wanted to do was play 18 holes.

We don’t see each other that often, and when we do we spend most of the time putting shit on each other to the point where an observer might assume there was no love lost between us.

As we bickered our way round the links, that Times article kept popping into my head, and I realised what an asset this man was in my life. So after the round, sipping a beer in the clubhouse, I told him I loved him.

The look on his face alone was worth the long drive, beyond stunned mullet.

For once he was speechless. We’re still mates but.