Can Friendships be Unconditional?
I was talking to a colleague the other day. She was lamenting, what she called, her mid-life crisis. When I enquired further, it turned out to be nothing to do with dropping a clothes size, or quitting her corporate job to raise alpacas.
She was having a dark moment of the soul about friendship. As we talked more, I realised this meant she was having a complete rethink about what friendship meant to her.
So, what was the problem?
She felt that somewhere along the way, her treasured friendships had become very one sided. Her good friends talked at her, not with her. When she did get to speak, they interrupted her, and rarely listened to anything she said. Some of them felt that they should tell her all the things she wasn’t. She wasn’t organised enough. She was too soft. Too flaky. Too late. Too forgiving.
She said it was if, with every conversation, they sandpapered a little more of her soul away.
It got me thinking about the nature of friendship. How unconditional can we expect it to be. And how do we get the give and take of it right?
Brene Brown recently said that the concept of unconditional love doesn’t exist except between parent and child (and perhaps not always there either — ask somone with a narcissistic parent). If you take Brene’s word for it, that prompts some interesting questions about what makes a friendship stick.
For me, I would say that building a history of shared experiences is a large part of it. Not that you can’t enjoy new friendships, or distance-buddies, but the sense of ride-or-die, rock-solid, I-genuinely-love-you-my-friend connections — I think — take time.
And that grows from being there at key moments in each other’s lives. I will never “unlove” certain people. I have a friend who once flew fifteen thousand miles in two days to drive me and my son on an important two-thousand-mile recruiting road trip. Then there were my friends who, when I was getting a divorce and shifting house with no other support, came and helped me box up 1000 books. And my friend who answered my phonecall on the darkest day of my life and came and sat with me and held my hand until the crisis had passed.
Our friendships might not be completely unconditional, but through my eyes, they are deeply intentional. I choose to nurture and constantly return to friendships with people who have shown me their love in a way that inspires me and helps me to endure.
Intention allows for healthy boundaries, moments of disconnection, and miscommunications. Intention is reflective and affirms choice. I choose you again, my friend. And again.
We all go through periods of being totally self-involved. It’s a default human behaviour that some would argue is worsening with the way we now live our lives. But without acts of kindness, life becomes intolerable.
So we work at it. We work at being better partners, better friends, better lovers. Just better.
And that’s… a damn good thing.
