Two are better than one. So where did everyone go?

You are surrounded by people and you know it.

Your phone has hundreds of contacts. Your social media has followers. You have colleagues who know your name and neighbours who wave and people who would describe you, if asked, as a friend. You are, by every measurable metric, connected.

And yet.

There is a particular loneliness that lives not in isolation but in crowds. Not in the absence of people but in the presence of many people who do not actually know you. Who know your name, your job, your opinions on certain topics, maybe even your struggles in broad outline. But not you. Not the version of you that exists at 2am when the performance is too exhausting to maintain.

That loneliness has a name. It is not loneliness of place. It is loneliness of depth.

And it is the loneliness of our age.

I want to take you somewhere.

First Samuel 18. Saul's court. Two young men meet after a battle that has just made one of them famous. David has killed the giant. The songs are already being written. And Jonathan, the king's son, the one who by every calculation of power and inheritance should have been threatened by this rising star, looks at David and something happens that the text describes with startling plainness.

The soul of Jonathan was knit to the soul of David, and Jonathan loved him as his own soul (1 Samuel 18:1).

Knit. That is a slow word. A patient word. The word you use for something that takes time and intention and the careful interworking of threads until two things become one thing that holds together under pressure.

This was not networking. This was not mutual benefit dressed in warm language. This was two souls that recognised something in each other and moved toward it without calculation.

Jonathan gave David his robe. His armour. His sword. His bow. His belt. Everything that marked him as the prince, the heir, the next in line. He handed it all to the man who, by the logic of courts and kingdoms, was his rival.

That is not strategy. That is love. And it is so foreign to us that we read it across three thousand years and feel the ache of never having known it.

Here is what I think happened to friendship.

We optimised it.

We turned it into something useful. Networking. Community. Support systems. Accountability partnerships. We gave it functions and metrics and kept the parts that served us and quietly discarded the parts that cost us. And in doing so we kept the shell and lost the substance, the way you can keep the shape of a fire long after the heat is gone.

Real friendship in the biblical sense is covenantal. Jonathan and David did not drift into closeness. They made a covenant (1 Samuel 18:3). They chose each other with the same intentionality that marriage demands, the same willingness to be known and to know, the same decision that this person's good matters to me as much as my own.

Proverbs 17:17 says a friend loves at all times, and a brother is born for a time of adversity. Not a fair-weather companion. Not someone who is present when presence is convenient. A friend who loves at all times, which necessarily includes the times when love is inconvenient, uncomfortable, and unrewarded.

That is rare because it is costly. And we live in an age that has made the cost of commitment optional.

C.S. Lewis, in The Four Loves, wrote that friendship arises the moment one person says to another, what, you too? I thought I was the only one. He described it as the least biological of loves, the most unnecessary in the sense that it is not required for survival, and therefore the most purely human. It is the love that says I see something in you that I want to walk beside, not because I need you to survive, but because the journey is truer with you in it.

Lewis also noted, with characteristic precision, that this kind of friendship has become so rare that many modern people do not believe it exists. We have reduced all deep feeling between people to either romance or transaction, and anything that does not fit those categories makes us uncomfortable.

Which is exactly why Jonathan and David make us uncomfortable. Their friendship does not fit our categories. So we misread it, domesticate it, explain it away. Rather than doing the harder thing, which is sitting with the fact that what they had is what we were made for and what most of us have never found.

So why is it rare?

Because it requires the one thing our age has made most expensive.

Vulnerability. The willingness to be actually known. Not your highlight reel. Not the version of yourself that has processed the struggle and arrived at the lesson. The in-progress version. The version that is still in the valley and does not know the way out and needs someone to sit in it without trying to fix it.

Ecclesiastes 4:10 says if either of them falls, one can help the other up. But pity the one who falls and has no one to help them up. The Preacher is not being poetic. He is being medical. A person who falls alone in a cold place can die there. We were not designed for that kind of solitude.

We have settled for it anyway. Because the alternative, opening yourself to the possibility of being truly known and not truly loved, feels like a risk too large for the potential return.

But David and Jonathan took that risk. And what they built held through betrayal and exile and madness and war. When Jonathan died, David tore his clothes and wept and wrote a lament and said your love to me was extraordinary, surpassing the love of women (2 Samuel 1:26). Not because romantic love is lesser but because what they had was the rarest thing. Two souls knit together and held.

I do not think friendship is impossible in 2026.

I think it is inconvenient. I think it requires choosing depth over breadth, choosing one person to actually know over fifty people to vaguely follow, choosing the slow uncomfortable work of being present over the frictionless comfort of being connected.

I think it requires being the Jonathan in someone's life before you find the David in yours. It requires giving first. The robe, the armour, the sword. Everything that marks you as sufficient and self-contained. Handed over. Freely.

And I think it requires the conviction that Proverbs has always carried quietly at its centre: that the person who finds a faithful friend has found something more valuable than most people spend their lives accumulating.

Not a contact. Not a follower. Not a connection.

A soul knit to yours.