Deal friends and real friends

In four decades on Wall Street, I have been surrounded by people. Clients, colleagues, teams, partners across the industry. Some of those relationships became lifelong friendships. Many more were real and valuable, but they existed because of the work. When I began researching how senior executives experience retirement, I kept coming back to a distinction Arthur Brooks makes in his book From Strength to Strength.

Two kinds of friendship

Brooks describes what he calls deal friends: relationships based on utility, where each person helps the other achieve something else they want, like professional success. There is nothing wrong with them. They are how careers are built. But they have the weakest emotional ties, and they tend to fade when the deal does.

Real friends are different. They come from a genuine care for each other's well-being and a shared passion for something outside the transaction. They are the people you could call at three in the morning.

Why it matters more later

Decades of research, including the Harvard Study of Adult Development, point to the same conclusion: close relationships are one of the strongest predictors of health and happiness later in life, more than wealth or status. At the same time, loneliness is far more common than we admit. In a widely cited 2018 national survey, more than half of American adults said they sometimes or always feel that no one knows them well.

For high achievers, the gap can stay hidden for years. Work provides a full calendar, constant contact and a sense of being needed. Researchers who study the transition to retirement have found that people who felt lonely before retiring, but were distracted by work, often confront that loneliness for the first time when the work stops.

What to do about it now

The encouraging part is that real friendships can be built and rebuilt at any stage. It simply takes the one thing a demanding career makes scarce: deliberate time. A few places to start:

Reach out to one old friend you have lost touch with, and make the plan yourself rather than waiting for them to. One former CEO I interviewed realized his friends had always been the ones to initiate contact, and that he would have to learn to do it himself.

Look at your calendar for the last month and notice which relationships would still be there if your title disappeared tomorrow. Protect time for those.

Invest in a shared interest outside work, whether a board, a sport or a cause. It is the most natural place for real friendships to grow.

None of this is urgent in the way a client call is urgent. That is exactly why it gets pushed aside, and exactly why it is worth starting before you need it.