The fragility of our friendships

The absence of conflict isn't always an indicator that a friendship is healthy, sometimes it's the very lack of it and the inability to solve issues together that makes the friendship fragile.

My aunt said something to me almost a year ago that has lingered on my consciousness ever since and made me think a lot about relationships, especially friendships. She said:

“If everything appears great, there is always someone not telling their full truth”. 

This made me think of the many times I have been too scared to tell my friends how I truly feel, fearing that I am demanding too much of our friendship. As someone who prefers solitude, I have come to realise that true and deep connections is what I need as I don’t want the fast and fun activity driven types of friendships. This is the first time I have openly admitted this. This type of friendship I crave is demanding. It craves a certain amount of honesty many of us are terrified by. I also know that relational stress is one of the worse stresses out there and our inability to handle conflicts and nurture our relationships hinders us from building healthy and resilient friendships.  

Individualism and competitive culture 

Recently I read a post here on Substack where someone young wrote something in the lines of:
“We don’t care about candid moments with our friends anymore, we trade all of that for gym sessions so we can build our self image and make ourselves more marketable and attractive.”
In the age of social media I can see how someone would draw such a conclusion. Though this might be true to some, I like to think that most of us genuinely hunger for real connections. We just don’t know what to do to have and maintain them, or we do but it’s a lot of work. In the dating culture this is apparently considered to be “desperation and thirst”, but maybe we are thirsty and desperate for true connections and until we admit that vulnerability we can pretend we don’t care all we want, but this still affects our lives.

Learning to deal with conflict starts with accepting the inevitable fact that we might face rejection.

We are so consumed with comfortability in society today, that we may be compromising some very important needs due to our fear of rejection. The reason why we avoid our friends instead of confronting them is because we are afraid they will leave us. In fact in some of the messages people have sent me in the research period for this post, people reveal just that: that friendships often don’t survive fights. That is a risk in all relationships, but particularly in friendships.

The challenge is we live in a throw-away society and that reflects on how we handle relational conflicts. Having an argument or disagreement shouldn’t mark the end of a friendship, most of the time it’s the other side of that that has the true connectedness and real friendship based on honesty and understanding. I think we shop for friendship the way we buy fast fashion, with the illusion of endless opportunities. In reality though, there are many people out there, not everyone can be a good friend to us or us to them.

The idea that people are disposable is perhaps our biggest challenge when it comes to building lasting friendships, because relationships of any kind are a lot of work and we are just not doing the work. That said, people have a limit, but we can't give up without ever having tried. One way friendships do not work: A friendship has to be a “give and take” situation, and unfortunately sometimes we find ourselves either not able to give what is expected of us for various reasons or unable to receive it. There are intricate factors that play a big role in this. Everything from childhood trauma, cultural differences, bonding patterns¹ and different views of friendships.

Another issues is we are not clear about our needs and or capacity in the early stages of a friendship. This can change in different seasons of life, of course, but I will argue that most people connect on vibes and not intentional and methodic courting as when we are looking for an intimate partner. This means that there is a chance most of our friendships are random and when something is random we don’t feel the responsibility to nurture it.

The Green Room (2019) by Salman Toor

Bonding patterns and clashing expectations

While building healthy relationships we have to consider our needs and if they align with the people we befriend. We cannot ask someone for what they don’t have to give in the first place. 

The mistake I have made many times in the past is one of expecting people to be friends with me the way I am friends with them. I have come to realise that people have different capacities in different stages of life and some people don’t like conflicts of any kind. My bonding pattern certainly plays a big role in the type of people I tend to attract, but I have also left a world of religiosity and sometimes I struggle to maintain friendships in that world, because we have conflicting core values. 

The other thing I think plays a huge deal, is the fact that we are seldom as careful as we should be when deciding who gets to be our friend or not. We know we can choose our friends but we are less aware that we can also let people go when things don’t work out. Instead people are ghosting each other or avoiding the elephant in their room. I have never been clear with what I expect of friendships and thus taken for granted that the people I select to be in my friends somehow magically know how to be a good friend to me and I to them. We would have more meaningful friendships if the obligations and expectations we have of each other were clear.

Something familiar 

My therapist has from time to time explained how we interact with whatever feels familiar to us. So if we are used to rejection we will often find ourselves being rejected multiple times and at times get accustomed to it. Just like in non-platonic relationships we make excuses for our partners when they are rejecting us:

“He is probably busy, maybe something happened.”etc. We do the same about our friends, though they keep excluding us without even telling us what we did wrong.

I don’t know about you, but I find it more difficult to argue with my friends than say, my partner. Platonic relationships are so hard to navigate and part of the reason why is the lack of contract in the very beginning of the friendship. We can go to great lengths for our friends but we only hope they do the same for us. In other words we often give the love we think we deserve. Friendship is a type of contractual relationship, the only problem is that we rarely discuss the obligations and expectations of such a contract. We assume everyone is thinking of the wellbeing of the other and in that case we will all be ok as long as we are friends. Or sometimes we imagine our friends think the worst of us when in reality they are just as lost as we are. 

Ambiguity in core values & Expectations

One of the things I realise should be part of my friendship contracts is the fact that there should be no ambiguity in core values and the only way to find out is to have honest dialogue about difficult subjects. There is a difference between having different opinions and just being friends with a homophobe or a racist.

“We can disagree and still love each other, unless your disagreement is rooted in my oppression and the denial of my humanity and the right to exist.”

-Robert Jones, Jr.

Just like it isn’t possible to build an intimate relationship with someone who has conflicting core values to us, it is just as difficult to build a healthy friendship and I realise that most of my past friendships have been situational, perhaps based on superficial common values, such as having similar interests etc.

The complexity of female friendships 

Female friendships are supposed to be this safe space where everyone can talk about their experience, thoughts and feelings without being judged, however women are incredibly judgemental. Because female friendships tend to be more intimate, they are also very fragile. According to psychology, us women often have higher expectations for support and intimacy in close relationships. Hence why it can feel like betrayal when our friends don’t act the way we hope and wish they did. But we need to stop assuming and start talking to each other. Our female friends are not our mothers or phycologist, either. Women often load a lot of heavy stuff onto each other, I think I am guilty of this too. If we define our friendships more we can have the right expectations of each other.

Vulnerability is key to any intimate relationship 

We cant receive love the way we give it, and though that is a painful thing to admit it is also incredibly liberating.

The tricky thing is that there is no such a thing as intimacy without fragility and vulnerability and this is what makes friendships messy and beautiful. Our ability to humble ourselves when we are in the wrong helps others to do the same. But first we have to show that we care by fighting the fights in our relationships that are worth fighting. That is easier said than done. As illustrated early we don’t like or tend to gravitate towards pain and rejection: In order to be vulnerable we have to feel some level of discomfort. When we don’t, it is often an indicator that we are not entirely psychologically safe in that friendship and how can we be when we don’t know what the expectations are?

Sometimes we need to back up to gain some perspective and sometimes we have to leave people behind, but we don’t get anywhere from being passive spectators in our friendships.

Every time we feel our heart ache because our friend did or said something to us, we need to talk to them. Trust that they have our best interest at heart, because most of the time they do and when friends come to tell us that we have hurt them, we have to listen and hear them out. We have to work through things the way one would in a non-platonic relationship and most importantly remember to speak our truth! Even though we might not always be right. It’s not about being right or wrong. It is about being heard, a very important part about belonging and finding peace together. Most importantly playing a active role in our friendships and making sure they are healthy and safe spaces rather than a random collections of people we vibe with. There is nothing wrong with the latter, if that is by design.

If you could handcraft the type of friendships you need, how would that look like? Write it down for yourself or share it here.

This post is really long yet somehow I feel there is so much more to be said. I know we all have something to contribute to this subject. Feel free to share whatever reflections that come to your mind. This is a safe space. Until next time,

Take care!
Love always, 
M. 

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1. Attachment theory, developed by British psychologist John Bowlby, explores how early emotional bonds between infants and caregivers shape individuals' attachment styles throughout life. These attachment styles play a significant role in adult relationships, influencing how individuals form and maintain intimate connections. Read more