On Friendship

Some really short raw notes for now - a lot more to collect / process / document.

This is mostly written as a reminder to myself. If you find something beneficial, cool, if not, that's ok too.

The Obvious

• be nice
• be respectful

The Harder

• be upfront
• resolve conflicts promptly. preferably in an upfront and respectful manner (try to limit/minimize/eliminate passive-aggressive crap).
• trust friends to say what they mean. if you feel something is wrong with a friend, and approach them and ask to check, and if they say no, nothing is wrong, then trust their word. either they're telling the truth, there is no problem, or they are not comfortable dealing with it at the moment, in which case you've made it clear you care about dealing with it and have firmly placed the ball in their court. in either case you've done the right thing. let it go.

The Even Harder

• know your limitations. know just how much you can be a friend to someone, and what ways of helping people out are beyond your means, whether fiscally, physically, or emotionally. one way to know you have gone beyond these limitations is when you end up regretting the help you gave, start to feel taken advantage of, are annoyed at obligations, feel like someone is treating your kindness as an entitlement etc. those feelings will only end up hurting the friendship, so confront those feelings first in yourself, and accept and understand your limitations. it's ok to have limitations. we are only human and thus all have limitations of varying degrees in different areas.
• explicitly set limits. when you discover new limitations on how you can be a friend to someone, especially those limitations which you are or may be crossing with a particular friend, after being upfront with yourself about your limitations, be upfront with them. set limits/boundaries accordingly. doing so in an upfront manner shows respect and trusts your friend to understand. explicitly setting such limitations helps preserve the friendship you have, rather than having it deteriorate due to the negative feelings previously mentioned.
• respect explicitly set limits. of course this only works if such limitations are respected. so when a friend expresses their limitations to you, respect those limitations. don't whine/bitch or otherwise complain or guilt trip them (friends should not be exhibiting those behaviors anyway, assuming a certain baseline level of emotional maturity).

The Superficial

Substances

Substance (alcohol etc) based relationships don't last. Drinking buddies aren't really buddies. Tend to your real needs: http://icanhaz.com/needs

• 2008年08月24日 tweeted.
• Richard Greenberg related from past "friendships"
• Joyce Kim is tired of explaining why she doesn't want to drink each time she is out and asks when did we turn into a frat party?
• ... and others in direct messages.

In Need

There is an English proverb "a friend in need is a friend indeed" which may be true in the general (80%?) case, perhaps as proverbs tend to be, but is far from an absolute (in many ways).

when down

"when down" is perhaps shorthand for expressing a state of particular emotional need. We can use this specific case of being "in need" for some analysis that is likely applicable to various cases of being "in need".

A friend recently said, "nobody likes you when you're down, that's when you find out who your true friends are."

Certainly you learn who your friends are that value you enough to put their emotional state at risk in order to help you.

However, the challenge is that everyone goes through times of emotional strength and weakness. Even a "true" friend won't always be able to be emotionally available in order to help.

You can't give what you don't have.

This doesn't make you a bad person, nor not a true friend. It just means you don't have the necessary emotional strength (yet) to help them with what they are going thru.

Thus if a friend does not help you when you are down, they aren't necessarily not a true friend, they may just be too emotionally weak at the time, perhaps even emotionally too fragile, to support you in your down state.

Conversely if you yourself are experiencing an unusual level of emotionally weakness or emotional sensitivity then just because you are unable to help another friend who is down, that does not make you not a true friend either.

Related: see above about know your limitations and explicitly set limits.

If someone is persistently in a state of emotional weakness and thus never available to be helpful to their friends, then perhaps it is not possible for them to ever be a true friend. If someone is persistently emotionally weak, or that's normal for them, they should seek a path to grow emotional strength, and perhaps consider outside help, counseling, coaching to do so.

If you are continuously emotionally sensitive, or find yourself becoming more and more emotionally sensitive over time, you should seek understanding of your sensitivity, and how to control it rather than having it simply be an autonomic response. Emotional sensitivity is not necessarily a bad thing, especially if you are able to consciously control it. On the contrary it may enable you to develop a heightened, focused, at will sense of empathy, which can help you better understand and support friends going through emotional difficulty or confusion.

see also

• strimble OnFriendship page

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