My wife and I are friends with a couple that lives in Helena, Montana, and every so often we try and meet for weekend getaway somewhere between Rapid City and Helena to hang out, chit-chat, drink a bit, and laugh a lot. There’s quite a bit of “somewhere” between Rapid City and Helena, but we often end up somewhere near Yellowstone National Park.

“My wife and I are friends with a couple”, is not something I often say, as more often than not, “My wife has a friend” is a more accurate assessment of the social connection. Whether that friend has a husband or significant other is of little concern to me, unless my wife makes it my concern.

A few years back, my wife called me and said, “My friend Shelley is in town, and I’m going to meet her and her husband Aaron downtown for dinner. Would you like to join us? I think you’ll like him.” Now it is my concern.

“I think you’ll like him” is just a pile of words, but it is a pile of words that has most likely been descending upon men and making them cringe for as long as there have been wives with friends who have husbands.

It is a phrase that will send my brain rummaging frantically about, whirling and searching wildly for an excuse, a prior engagement, a medical procedure, a highly contagious or socially awkward illness, absolutely anything that could possibly sternly occupy the sliver of time that specific gathering is to occur.

As my brain searches in vain, my mind reminds me of something Kurt Vonnegut wrote in Cat’s Cradle, “She was ransacking her mind for something to say, finding nothing in it but used Kleenex and costume jewelry.” So it goes.

Once my brain dejectedly drops the rickety bushel basket of used Kleenex and costume jewelry it has feverishly collected, my mind thinks, “I won’t like him, and I know he won’t like me.” The beauty of it all, is that you can rest assured that when you arrive at dinner, smile and shake the other guys hand, that if you look closely you’ll see remnants of Kleenex and costume jewelry clouding his eyes as well.

Social connections are an important component of our healthspan, they impact the quality of our lives just as much as eating right and regular exercise. Perhaps more so? The reserves of my social connections have been enhanced greatly because of my wife.

What constitutes “enough” social connections in ones life is highly individual, and largely dependent upon where one sits on the introverted/extroverted spectrum. That spectrum is generally a sliding scale that shifts with the situation, the company, the mood, or the quantity of libation.

Sometimes scales can be wrong. Sometimes we need more of something we didn’t think we needed. Sometimes we’re a little light in the social connections department, but don’t realize it until we quit rummaging through the used Kleenex and costume jewelry and just indulge.

Finding nothing but used Kleenex and costume jewelry that day, I begrudgingly indulged, and since that indulgence, Shelley and Aaron have become “our” friends. Friends that have made my social reserves deeper and richer.

I still reflexively cringe when my wife drops that particular pile of words on me, and I imagine I always will, but I’ve found a few people I now call “friend” under that pile. People that add to the quality of my life.