A few days ago I found myself apologizing to a friend for the fact that we’ve never gotten in an argument.
We’d been discussing how avoiding conflict maintains distance between people. When I quietly suck it up and deal, I’m avoiding the issue rather than working through it and coming out the other side. We can’t avoid conflict without creating distance, no-mans-lands of topics we don’t discuss that tend to grow with time.
Our closest relationships are with people we can disagree with and know it doesn’t threaten our ties. We can be our real self and share our real opinions, even if they don’t approve, understand, or agree. Friends become family when we can lose our cool or say something difficult and then work through it.
This is something I never learned to do in my marriage, where we kept ending up at the edge of conflicting desires without ever figuring out how to go through it. The no-mans-lands of conflicts we were avoiding grew until there was no space left to be together.
When I quietly deal with an issue to avoid conflict, I’m deciding I don’t believe our relationship is strong enough to withstand the honesty of being our full selves around each other. Or I’m deciding it’s not worth the effort. It’s less taxing to deal with something I’m unhappy about than invest in the relationship. Maybe I don’t have faith in my ability to be close with someone else.
I reassured my friend, saying our situation is different. We’ve never lived in the same city. We have few mutual friends. Neither of us needs anything from the other beyond emotional support. Our relationship takes a particular shape because of those things. Indeed, it does keep us from being as close as we could be, but it’s not because either of us is holding back. We can reveal our full selves without there being opportunities for that to result in conflict.
I’m sure, I told her, we’d argue like siblings if we were able to spend more time together.
I posted about one of the essays in Ann Patchett's This is the Story of a Happy Marriage, about her relationship with her grandmother.
There's a beautiful interview in Conversations on Love, Natasha Clunn's newsletter (she has a book of the same name) in which Patchett discusses what it’s like to love a friend who's sick.
You wrote that life was about the ability to love. I found it interesting you used the word ‘ability’. Do you feel you learned that ability to love or you had it from a young age?
I had it, definitely, but before Lucy I had not been tested. I'm amazed when I meet people at this point in my life who haven't had a love that's been tested. They haven't had to take care of somebody who is sick, or go through a hard financial time, or see somebody through a divorce. This happened recently: I watched a story unfold in somebody's life, and I thought, Oh god, you don't know. You haven't been through this before.
I'd known Lucy since I was 17, we'd been best friends since we were 21, and from 21 to 39 we were in it. By ‘in it’ I mean suicide attempts, hospital stays, surgery, debt collectors, deepest depression, greatest joys and victories in the field that we longed to be in. So what I learned from Lucy is how to stand by somebody. Marriage vows – for better, for worse; for richer, for poorer; in sickness and in health, for as long as you both shall live – are good for friendship, too. Are you going to stand by somebody, no matter what?
Many people who read Truth and Beauty [Ann’s book about her friendship with Lucy] said to me, ‘Your relationship wasn't equal.’ And I’d think, How has your life been going for you so far that you think love is equal? That you think you put everything on a scale and if some day you’re giving more than you're getting, you get off your scale and go home? Do you really think that's what love is? That is not what Lucy set out to teach me, but that was what our relationship taught me in those years: if you love someone and that person is down, you help. And if you are the one who has to help 99 times out of 100, you feel damn lucky that you're not the one who having the surgery.
When people think of caregiving, they think of parents and children, grandparents, spouses. They rarely think of friends. It’s funny, given the number of people today who are single, who live far away from their legal kin.
While I do have friends who grew up in Toronto, I found it far easier to become close to people who had also moved from far away. They still had empty seats to fill at the table on important occasions. They were also in the market for a new emergency contact.
Even when I could still pick up the same radio stations as my parents, I was in it with several friends. I think of all things we did for each other without really stopping to debate the depth of our commitment to each other or whether it was worth the cost. Perhaps we were just inexperienced to know better.
That changed once people started pairing off and creating homes and families of their own. Those friends who had once been family shifted to…something more akin to distant relatives.
I won’t pretend I’ve always been there for friends when they needed me. I’ve failed the test and I’ve been failed.
Sometimes I’ve been the one to organize meal trains, take in their cat, and ferry things to the hospital on demand. At other times my good intentions never manifested in actual support. Sometimes I decided that I’d had enough and did whatever seemed to be the politest way to avoid entanglement.
I’ve been incredulous and resentful of other people’s requests for help. At other times I’ve been hurt, even to the point of ending friendships, upon discovering someone didn’t ask me for support when they needed it.
It’s easy to maintain boundaries by not picking up the phone. It’s harder to go through it together.
During lockdown it seemed like we were all reaching out to people we’d lost touch with. No matter how busy we were, we had time to take a call because we were trapped at home. As much as we were not in the same situation, we were going through something and there was no need to pretend to be okay.
There’s an article in Shondaland that keeps showing up in my social media feeds and my inbox, reminding us that we can rekindle friendships after years of neglect or worse.
The story is not over yet. Your friendship may seem to have failed the test. It might still be there, waiting to be rekindled. There is not just one test to pass or fail.
When people complain about how their friends just don’t get what they’re going through as caregivers, it makes me feel grateful to have any friends at all.
I don’t know what it’s like to be a parent. I don’t know what it’s like to have been given a terminal diagnosis. I don’t know what it’s like to have a parent die. I don’t know what it’s like to be Black. I don’t know what it’s like to have a sibling who requires care. I don’t know what it’s like to have lived through a war. I don’t understand what it’s like to be any of my friends.
We change and our relationships change. Sometimes we just need to find a new sort of relationship that works for us, in this moment.
Trying to remove ableist language from my vocabulary has made me aware of just how negative my language is. The Guardian is helping us reclaim an expanded selection of positive terms.
Private equity firms have a knack for ruining everything with their efficiency and eye on profits. Now they’ve set their sights on hospice care.
A reminder that nearly 1 in 5 Americans has a medical bill in collections.
A movement that gives me hope is the participatory budgeting movement. Directing money to demonstrate community values is important and local initiatives have a meaningful impact on our daily lives.
Carissa Potter writes about being overwhelmed and sliding into a panic attack.
The Guardian reminds us that that vision of the new you for 2022 was created by the old you you’re trying to discard.
Heather Havrilesky writes about embracing being human, including the less polished aspects of ourselves. In case you don’t click, here’s something I’d like you to hear:
“We aren’t the sum of what we offer to others. Our worth is far more interesting than that.”