Give your friends a chance to abandon you
in praise of occasional helplessness
Last week I helped my best friend pack his truck to move to a new city. I’m excited for him, and yet I shudder to think about the time and energy it’ll take to build that same level of closeness with newer friends. It’s not that I have trouble meeting new people; it’s that very few people have the open space to go through the effort of building a new long-lasting friendship from scratch. I’ve been struck by Esther Perel’s observation that “modern loneliness masks itself as hyper connectivity. And so people have easily 1000 virtual friends, but no one they can ask to feed their cat.”1 What do you do when the one friend you would ask to feed your cat has left?
I made this meme recently about connection:
There seems to be a tendency among some circles, myself included, to think deeply about connection in order to find shortcuts to it. You have events popping up where people plunge immediately into deep personal stories, or do strange-looking meditative exercises like staring into each other’s eyes and narrating their inner monologue out loud. And to an extent it works: you suddenly feel closer to a group of strangers you just met than to most of the people you see every day. But it is somehow unsatisfying. You don’t just want more “connection highs”, you want kinship, you want a friendship that lasts. You want something that can’t be engineered over the course of one night.
I’ve known my friend for a decade. But it’s not only the passage of time that makes it special—it’s the ways we’ve shown up for each other, repeatedly, during that time. It’s the fact that he’s seen me at my worst—depressed, petty, impatient, self-absorbed—and for whatever reason, he chose to remain my friend. There was a night eight years ago, when I had been having a hard time and had been giving the people close to me a hard time, when I abruptly walked out of a group dinner because I was mad at everyone in the friend group, including him. Unlike everyone else in the group, he chased after me, and when he couldn’t find me, he sent this message:
Despite that fact that it’s been eight years I still remember that text exchange vividly, because I remember how shocked I was. Storming out of dinner is not something I usually do, and it’s the kind of action that I imagine would cause me to lose people’s good graces, that would make me seem like a petty child that no one wants to associate with. I was fully convinced that night, as I was wandering around feeling hopeless and angry, that those friendships were sealed, that the entire group was done with me. With just a few texts my friend showed me how wrong I was.
The fact that our friendship has survived moments like this is what gives me so much ease around him, it’s what assures me that I can be fully myself. A lot of people think of vulnerability as “sharing personal facts about yourself”, but this is the easiest kind of vulnerability. Serious vulnerability is not just talking about how you were struggling at some point, or that you were overwhelmed with emotion previously but are fine now—it’s sharing these things as they are happening, expressing your anger and anxiety and sadness while you still haven’t resolved them. There are very few people I can do this with, but it’s something I want to do with more of my friends.
If you’re like me, the thing you fear most is abandonment, and the thing you avoid most is putting yourself in a position where that might happen. And so you do everything you can to become self-reliant, you organize your life around independence, you develop an exhaustive list of practices to manage your own psychology. All of which are good things on their own. But I’m starting to wonder if, rather than avoiding helplessness at all costs, rather than fearing the day that I finally fall apart and truly need someone else, I can welcome such a day. I can think of it as “the beginning”, rather than thinking of it as “the end”. Because yes, sometimes friends witness you in such a moment and they walk away. But the right people will see you in your weakness and they’ll come and sit next to you. They will hold your hand and they’ll tell you, not with their words but with their actions: This is the moment at which I could abandon you. And I won’t.
Thanks to Suzanne and James for feedback on earlier drafts.
Glad I discovered this. "Adronitis" is a word (albeit a made-up one by John Koenig in his book) I learned about a while back that he defines as "the frustration with how long it takes to get to know someone." I think part of the frustration we feel is due to what's described here - the knowledge that much of the richness of a relationship can only come with time, no matter how much we try to force closeness. Well said, and beautiful piece.
"it’s sharing these things as they are happening, expressing your anger and anxiety and sadness while you still haven’t resolved them". - this is so beautiful and now that I reflect on this, it makes so much sense. And it's so heartwarming to see that text screenshot. So a friend like this is possible! Hmmm.