Relationships

When I moved to the USA many years ago, I learned the expression:

It didn’t make much sense to me back then because in my internal blueprint “friends” were always friends for a lifetime.  “Back home” other friendly people are called acquaintances, colleagues, buddies, connections, neighbors… but not friends.  In Denmark, an acquaintance might be a person you regularly run into at some other friend or relative’s parties.  If you have not (yet) developed the relationship so much that they are also invited to your parties, they are not (yet) called friends.  And if they only are involved when you call everybody together, they are probably not lifetime friends, either.

As you can imagine, foreigners moving to Denmark can’t easily walk up to one of the locals and suggest they could be friends.  As most friendships go way back and have taken years to cultivate, the reaction is typically: “Whoa, what does this person want?”  But one doesn’t have to be friends to go to a movie, a ballgame, have a beer together after work, or meet at a café – just don’t use the “F-bomb.”

Now, living in the U.S. and having been introduced as “my friend Charlotte” more times than I can count by people I wouldn’t have considered Friends (but perhaps friends), I wondered what is under the expression above and when and with whom I have which kind of relationship.

So, let’s dig a little deeper into relationships.

Somewhere between isolation and co-dependency is healthy inter-dependence.

I use the term isolation rather than independence as a reference to Eric Ericsson.  In Ericsson’s developmental stage theory, one of the stages is “Intimacy vs Isolation” – a time in our lives when we, usually subconsciously, determine whether it is a good thing to enter into intimate relationships – and with that, I am not talking about sex but about showing ourselves wholeheartedly to somebody.

We choose intimacy, or not, depending on whether we have successfully been through the previous phases and have learned to trust others, trust in our own capabilities, and don’t carry too much of our personality under lock and cover (a.k.a. in the Shadow) because we caught/were taught those parts of us were not welcome in our family, in school, or in society in general.

With this introduction, how often are we friends with people, yet we don’t let them know us intimately?

With most relationships, we start out isolated like this:

We don’t know each other yet, and if there is any overlap in interests, we have yet to figure that out.

At the other end of the spectrum, an unhealthy and enmeshed relationship may look somewhat like this:

   Or

In the first situation, we do everything together.  If we do everything together, logically you can’t have experienced a lot recently that I was not part of and vice versa.  Our friends are friends of both of us – if the other doesn’t like our friends, we drop those friendships.

Have you been in such relationships – perhaps in the first months of being in love?  The song goes “…and all the world fell away.”  Or perhaps we fell away from the world, collapsing You and Me into US?

The second situation is the more lopsided and unhealthy co-dependency, where you are having/allowed a life I am not part of, but I don’t have a similar outlet.  You have friends I don’t share, but I don’t have friends you don’t socialize with as well.

The dark version of this is when one party controls the other, but lopsided relationships are seen among many retired couples where the wife typically has other women friends, but the husband used to spend all his waking hours working and got all his social needs met through work to end up with no other interests and no, or only very few, friends of his own.  It may be the other way around, but historically, that has been more uncommon.  The exception was when the husband was a part of a sports group or a veterans’ group. That is one reason the effect of the  “Bowling Alone” phenomenon has hit harder among adult men than among adult women.

A healthier relationship may look more like some version of this:

We have some things in common and can celebrate those, but we also have personal interests that don’t necessarily involve the other.  That doesn’t mean they are a secret or that we don’t talk about them.  Healthy friendships look like this.

The parts of life that are not inside the “overlap” can provide a steady stream of new inputs, and what we “learn” from our friends, we can bring across to other walks of our lives.

How about the “what” in the overlap?

If we were colleagues, our professional interests would be in the overlap.  As close and collaborative as we may have been as colleagues, if we didn’t share much else and didn’t socialize outside of work, the chance is that if one or both changed jobs, we would be reduced to LinkedIn connections.

If we attended the same sports center and helped each other out, shared a ritual drink in the cafeteria afterwards, and one of us became incapacitated and couldn’t do this kind of work out any longer, we might lose contact – except for the occasional ping on social media.

Friends for a reason.

If our children were in school together and we hung out together, primarily facilitated and facilitated by our children’s relationship, the chance is that once the kids flew the nest, the friendship wouldn’t survive.

If we had met living abroad, our common feelings of being outsiders, perhaps a common cultural background different from where we now lived, might have made us seek out each other’s company.  We could commiserate over the oddness of the host country,  perhaps speak our mother tongue together, and who knows if we, over time also found that we had other common interests.  But once we had moved back to the old country, we might lose contact – except for the occasional ping on social media.

Friends for a season.

What characterizes the relationships that survive, the friends for a lifetime?

Apart from us not “strangling each other” by spending too much time together, we need to have something important enough to be together around.  That something would hopefully include a genuine two-way interest in each other’s growth and success, a.k.a.. love.  As Paul Haury says, “we both choose each other to belong together.“ 

If we look at all our relationships, what is so special about those we invest time in?  One of the special things is that we actually do invest time.  We make this person and their well-being a priority.  And, at the same time, we respect each other’s boundaries.  Time doesn’t have to be a lot of time – and yet, we can’t have too many same-sided unaccounted for cancellations to disrupt the delicate balance, because that signals that the other is no longer a priority.

It has been a source of joy and astonishment how little it takes to keep such a relationship alive.  With this kind of friends, one may be away from each other for literally years, but because the relationship was built on trust and honesty, it is easily revived by random visits and individual emails/messages.  Just don’t think it can be kept real if it only happens in public on social media.

It seems to me that a lot of people fear interdependence.  Perhaps they have experienced codependency and felt “taken over” by an overinvolved parent or lover?  Perhaps they fear setting boundaries – it always upsets the equilibrium if boundary-setting is new, and the other person is used to having it their way unchallenged?  Or perhaps they (falsely, in my opinion) believe that they are supposed to be totally independent?

We developed as a social species.  Watch Tom Hanks in Castaway if you want to see total independence.  Not pretty – or what do you think, Wilson?

The chicken and egg questions are, as members of a social species, can we have a healthy relationship with others if we don’t have it with ourselves first?  And can we get it with ourselves without the help of others?  And can we have either if we are not even curious about who we are under the façade or who we could become without a mask?

Not maskless all the time and everywhere.  But at least with our Friends.