With whom do you discuss the important matters in your life? (Facebook friends don’t count)

My sister-in-law Mary visiting with her niece Bonnie at a family reunion.

My sister-in-law Mary was visiting from Ohio that week. It was the first quality time we’d spent together since my brother Don died several years before from injuries he sustained in an accident.

            I asked Mary how she’d gotten through the early years of grief. Without hesitation, she said: “My friends got me through it.”

            Mary knows well the truism that “friends double our joy and halve our grief.” In addition to family members, she talks regularly to five or six other people back home about important matters in her life.

            According to national study published a few years ago titled Social Isolation in America, those are the first people we turn to for major help in times of crisis. Unfortunately, Mary would have been the exception among participants in the study completed by sociologists at Duke and the University of Arizona.

            The authors found the number of Americans saying there is no one with whom they discuss important matters nearly tripled since 1985 and for most adults, the number of confidants decreased from three to two.

            Almost half the population said they discussed important matters with either no one or with only one other person. Participants also reported a decrease in ties formed in neighborhood and community with an inward shift toward close kin.

‘           The study suggests several possible causes for these remarkable changes over the last two decades in our relationships with one another. For one thing, phone calls, email, and Facebook exchanges can’t substitute for face-to-face communication.

            The longer commutes and more hours worked by many Americans might explain the decrease in neighborhood and community involvement, which bodes ill for both our personal well being and the health of our democratic institutions.

            In reviewing the study, I thought of a couple of other possible causes for our increasing social isolation. Maturity once meant moving from the dependency of childhood through the usually strident independence of young adulthood and finally to interdependence, which assumes cooperation with others.

            But the ideal of the rough and ready, totally self-sufficient American has always lurked within the shadow side of our national character. Even the former President Bush’s most loyal supporters will admit that during his years in office, he most consistently modeled a tough-talking cowboy style, conveying an attitude of “my way or the highway” both at home and abroad.

            Since our leaders inevitably influence the overall tone of society, America grew increasingly polarized under the Bush Administration. And it’s no wonder we became more guarded in talking with one another about both personal and general matters, including politics and religion.

            At the same time, the FBI reported the biggest increase in violent crime in fifteen years, and the mayhem in the streets may have caused some to withdraw from neighborhoods and community.

            Perhaps exacerbated by the Tea Party’s shenanigans, the red state, blue state divide has continued under the Obama Administration. And according to recent polls, Obama registers as one of the most polarizing presidents in modern history.

            Politics aside, Social Isolation in America prompted many of us to examine our own closest ties. I mentioned the study’s findings to several friends and acquaintances and just as I did, they hastened to count the number of people outside their families with whom they discuss important matters.

             Updating the tally of my own confidants for purposes of this post, I included only family members, a couple of old friends, my mindfulness meditation group, my memoir writers group, and a few neighbors; I left out my 600 plus Facebook friends…