Like the Bette Midler song, “You Gotta Have Friends,” many married couples, particularly young couples, make the mistake of counting on their spouse to be their lover, domestic servant, financial partner, and best friend. This is okay if it works. There are stories of marriage partners who were best friends for life. If only it could be that way for everyone.

Often it’s not. Even if you truly are good friends with your spouse, do you want to count on only one other person in this life for all of your social needs? The high divorce rate in Western societies may be due in part to spouses counting on each other far too much. The level of expectations gets so high that no one can fulfill it for another.

So, your wife doesn’t want to go to the football game on Sunday. What are you going to do, try to get her interested in I-formations, play option passes, and field goal kicking? There’s a lot of buddies you can find who are already interested in those things.

So, your husband doesn’t want to go to the theater. Maybe he thinks seeing people in costumes jumping around the stage for an hour and a half, randomly breaking out in song, is more than he can take. There will be plenty of other friends that would love to go to the theater with you.

Why do so many people get wrapped up so often in having their spouse be the be all and end all? It could be insecurity, could be because their lives are so hectic that they might as well befriend the person they live with. It certainly can be convenient in terms of scheduling events.

Just Start Talking

It takes two to converse, and if you don’t start, maybe there won’t be a conversation at all. When Michael Jordan rejoined the Chicago Bulls in March, 1995, after a year and a half away from the game, one of his new teammates, someone who hadn’t been there during the championship seasons of ’91, ’92, or ’93, found it hard to strike up a conversation.

Jud Buechler tells of how he was alone in the locker room with Michael for ten minutes, yet couldn’t bring himself to say anything. The gap between teammates, one a superstar and the other a role player, seemed too great. Later, the Bulls didn’t play well as a team in the playoffs, perhaps because Michael was not in sync with the rest of the team – he needed to have made friends sooner with his “new team” following the reunion.

Enroll Someone in What You’re Doing

If you want to get to know someone quickly, get them to join you. I met a man who ran a hardware store. He told me how he met his wife many, many years before. She was very attractive, he said, and he was afraid of trying to win her over. All the other guys were interested in her.

He had a bowling team (bowling was quite popular back then), and asked her if she would join. She liked bowling, joined his team, and they’ve been rolling strikes and spares together ever since.

If you want to get to know someone quickly, go to the same events. Meet and converse early on the first day or first hour of the event. Give yourself time to build up a relationship if it’s a multi-day event.

Communicate in Earnest from the Outset

There’s something disarming about speaking from the heart even when you’re speaking with someone who is less than intimate with you. You have some kind of receptive zone that allows another person to penetrate your defenses more naturally when they’ve conveyed to you, through their words and expressions, that they’re speaking to you on a deeper level than usual. Maybe it’s because they engender in you some level of trust that you want to engage in but so frequently do not.

If you can appeal to something that has meaning for them, perhaps a cause, or even a fond memory, your words and gestures will have impact. Touch them emotionally.

Show Immediate Interest

Convey more interest in the other party than in yourself. You’ve heard of the old acronym WIIFM, an overused but useful way of remembering that whenever you have any type of message for another person, the primary thing that they’re concerned about is What’s In It For Me (WIIFM)?

Solidifying Friendships

Once you’ve gotten to know someone, if your goal is to befriend him or her, these ideas may help:

• Seeing the other person in the change of setting will tell you a lot more about him or her. It also may be the beginning of reciprocation.
• Visit them at their home. If there’s a report you have to drop off, something to pick up, a holiday party you’ve been invited to, or if there’s any other friendly, professional reason for visiting a coworker at his or her home, go ahead.
• Exchange e-mail addresses, cell phone numbers, and so on. Once someone has saved your e-mail address, you have a higher probability of corresponding with that person than if they didn’t. Frequently dispense short, nice notes to office coworkers, brief, positive, and informative e-mail messages to co-workers perhaps via your office intranet.
• Show happiness to hear from them. Relationships last when at least one of the parties continues to say, “Hey, I’m glad to hear from you.” If both convey this message, the relationship is solid.
• Work through a crisis together. When you’re on the same team against the same obstacles and you overcome them, you’ve potentially laid the ground for an amicable relationship.

Looking For Mr. Good or Ms. Good

In general, follow the Will Rogers philosophy of looking for the good in others. Find something about a co-worker that you admire, and let it be known.

Do you have a common interest away from the office or do you share a common need? Do you remember the names of the important people in a co-worker’s life, such as their spouse, children, and so forth? Do you remember birthdays? If so, surprise your coworker with a card or a gift.

With the widespread use of database software, remembering the details about another person’s life this isn’t hard to do anymore. Once you learn something about someone such as their birthday or spouse’s name, you can simply log it in to the note section of the record on them in your database. Superstar salespeople do this all the time in tracking the needs and interests of customers. It works just as well with the people you see on the job every day.

Extend Yourself for a Friend

Some of the strategies above may require that you extend yourself a bit, but to gain a new friend, why not?

With a gesture such as visiting where they live, for whatever reason, to simply pick up a recipe, magazine article or what have you, you make friendship possible. Once you step into somebody else’s home, you enter a whole other world. You see the art or paintings they have on the wall. Perhaps they have a bookcase displaying some of their books.

The type of furniture they have, how they lay out their living room, or in general the atmospherics of their home, tell you more about a person than you might otherwise learn in weeks of hiking around with them on a trail. It’s not like you’re going there to spy. It’s simply that one’s domicile reveals so much about one’s self.

Likewise, inviting potential friends to your home for whatever reason to pick up something, to play cards, to discuss a forthcoming event of some club or association to which you both belong all increase the probability that a new friend may be in the offing. If you’re well off, you may go so far as to prepare a guest room in your home, or if you’re buying a new house, have such a room in mind.

Open Your Home

If your children are off to college or have left the nest, perhaps this is easier for you than for those who are just getting started with a family. The ability to easily accommodate guests prompts you to engage in such behavior.

Aren’t there professionals in your industry who don’t necessarily work where you work, but with whom you interact on an interim basis who might well be house guests at some point? When Ronald Reagan was visiting the Palm Springs area in California, during his presidency, he stayed in the home of Walter Annenberg, multimillionaire and philanthropist. More precisely, Reagan stayed at Annenberg’s estate, for indeed, the guest facilities are more spacious and more lavish than most people’s homes, and the grounds are just as secure as the White House.

My friend Peter in Boston has a twenty-room house that includes not one, but two guest bedrooms. Peter doesn’t go out of his way to invite people to stay over. Still, knowing that you can stay over, with simply a phone call that says “I’m coming,” makes the trip that much easier and enjoyable.

If you can clear out some space in your home that indicates to guests that they are welcome, you may be on the road to a more vibrant social life.

Long-term Friends

Women seem to instinctively understand the need to have good friends in life and display the skills necessary for initiating and maintaining such relationships. Based solely on my own observations, I’ve concluded that often, a woman will seek out one good lifelong friend while having many others. Men may or may not have a lifelong best friend but often have several pals with whom they are friendly for stretches of time.

Friendships between men and women vary based on the status of each person in the friendship. If both parties are happily married to others, the friendship can be long-lasting, and usually seems harmless and non-threatening to both marriages. This type of friendship may well be entirely rewarding.

If one party is not married, the spouse of the other party could see the friendship as a threat, however much we wish this weren’t true. If both parties are not married, depending on the age and circumstances of each partner to the friendship, the nature of the relationship might vary widely.

A Man and a Woman

A man and woman both in their twenties who previously dated but have decided to be friends, have never dated, or simply initiated a relationship as friends and intend to keep it that way can be a great source of strength and comfort to one another as they proceed through the travails of life and career. Such a friendship can be rewarding, particularly during one’s twenties, which is often a time of tumult.

Find a Friend

Because of the growing number of divorced adults and single parents in society, groups such as Parents Without Partners and other men’s and women’s support organizations have popped up in many communities. People find friends through such groups as a prelude to getting remarried, for the advice and empathy they can offer as a each other, or simply for fellowship or companionship.

If you find yourself at this point in life, perhaps you’d like to make a goal of exploring one new group per month over the next four months, and after identifying the most appealing one, joining that group. In any event, it’s hard to conceive of ways you can create a vibrant, mutually rewarding, long-lasting friendship sitting in your armchair. The world is out there, as in outside of your door.

Even with all of the high-tech gadgets you can surround yourself with, you’d be hard-pressed to say what takes the place of going on an adventure, taking a hike, or seeing a movie with a friend.