Friendship

Because it's been on my mind

Photo by Hannah Rodrigo on Unsplash

There is a question that comes to most people in middle life, and it comes quietly, usually late at night, usually after a stretch of work that has required the person to be more than they were before. The question is: how many true friends have I actually had?

The question is the wrong shape, but it has to be asked in its wrong shape first, because the wrong shape is the shape the culture has given us. The culture trains us to count. It trains us from childhood to count playmates, to count birthday-party guests, to count followers, to count contacts, to count likes, to count the people who showed up to the wedding, to count the people who showed up to the funeral. The count is supposed to mean something. The count is supposed to be the score by which the question of whether one was loved gets answered.

The count does not mean what we have been told it means. The count, when it is honest, is almost always small. The count, when it is honest, is almost always smaller than the person doing the counting expected. And the smallness, when first noticed, is one of the more disorienting griefs available to a person, because it arrives with the implication that the person counting is the one who has failed to be lovable, rather than the much more accurate implication, which is that the count was the wrong measure all along.

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I want to begin with what almost everyone gets wrong about friendship, which is the conflation of the functional ring with the inner ring.

Most of the people who circulate through a life are functional. They are colleagues, acquaintances, neighbors, fellow-travelers, business contacts, members of the same scene, attendees of the same parties. They occupy a real category. The category has its own pleasures and its own etiquette and its own kinds of care. People in the functional ring will, on occasion, do something genuinely kind. They will remember a birthday. They will send a condolence card. They will buy a round of drinks. The kindness is real and the kindness is also bounded. The kindness is the kindness the role permits. When the role ends — when one of the parties changes jobs or moves cities or stops attending the same events — the kindness ends with it, in almost every case, almost without exception. This is not a betrayal. This is what the functional ring is.

The error most people make, particularly in their twenties and thirties, is to mistake the functional ring for the inner ring. The error happens because the functional ring is much larger and much louder and much more present in daily life than the inner ring. The error happens because the functional ring performs many of the surface behaviors of friendship — sharing meals, laughing together, being present at significant occasions — without the underlying structure that distinguishes the functional from the friendly. The error happens, also, because the culture rewards the appearance of having a large functional ring with status markers that look like the markers of being loved. The popular person is treated as the loved person. The well-connected person is treated as the surrounded person. The mistake is invisible until the day the functional ring is needed for something only the inner ring can do, and the functional ring isn’t there, and the person discovers, all at once, that they have been miscounting their whole life.

This is the disorientation that comes in middle life. It is not, in the structural sense, a discovery that one is less loved than one believed. It is a discovery that one has been counting the wrong category. The actual count of the inner ring has always been small. The actual count of the inner ring is small for almost everyone. The functional ring was always functional. The conflation was the error.

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There is a worse thing, though, and it is the thing that hurts more than the miscounting, and I want to be honest about it because it is what most people are actually grieving when they say they have had few true friends.

The worse thing is the experience of generosity exploited.

A person of certain temperament — and I am thinking here of the people I have most loved, the people whose company has most rewarded me, the people whose absence has cost me the most — will give more than they have been asked for. They will give time. They will give money. They will give attention. They will give their own work, freely, to anyone who shows up needing it. They will give the benefit of the doubt past the point where the benefit has been earned. They will give explanations of things they understand to people who have asked badly. They will give care to people whose self-presentation has not earned it. They will give, in short, generously, the way generous people give, which is to say without first auditing whether the recipient is the kind of person who can receive generosity without converting it into something else.

The conversion is the problem. There exists a kind of person who cannot receive generosity. They cannot receive it because the receipt of it would constitute an admission, intolerable to them, that they were in some way in need of what was given. The receipt would constitute a kind of debt. The debt, in their psychic economy, is a position of inferiority. They cannot tolerate the inferiority. So they perform an operation on the gift. The operation converts the gift into something else. The gift becomes evidence of the giver’s neediness, the giver’s loneliness, the giver’s compulsion, the giver’s failure of self-regulation. The gift becomes a story about the giver in which the giver, having given so much, must be the person with less worth. The story relieves the recipient of the debt by inverting the structural asymmetry. The recipient is no longer the indebted party. The recipient is the discerning observer who has noticed that the giver is the diminished one.

This move is more common than people realize, particularly among the people whose temperaments draw them to ambitious, generous, creatively prolific people. The ambitious generous person attracts a certain ring of people who circulate around them in part because the ambitious generous person is the source of things — opportunities, ideas, attention, gifts. The ring takes the things and then, behind the back of the ambitious generous person, builds the story about the giver. They give too much. They need too much. They are too much. The ring tells itself this story for years, and the story circulates inside the ring, and the story is the thing that makes the ring tolerable to itself, because the story converts the asymmetry of giving and receiving into a story in which the receiving party is the morally superior party, the one with self-possession, the one with appropriate boundaries, the one with the discernment to see that the giver is the deficient one.

The giver, in the meantime, does not know any of this is happening. The giver feels, periodically, a low hum of being slightly diminished by the ring, a sense of being treated as if their generosity were the symptom of a problem they had rather than the offering they meant it to be, but the giver cannot quite locate the source of the hum, because the ring is performing friendship at the surface level, and the surface looks fine. The giver keeps giving. The ring keeps converting. The asymmetry deepens. The giver feels more and more diminished without being able to name what is diminishing them. The hum grows. Eventually, something breaks — sometimes the breakage is the giver’s, sometimes the ring’s, sometimes a single member of the ring goes too far in the diminishment and the giver finally sees it clearly — and the giver looks back over the years and realizes that what they thought was friendship was an asymmetric exchange in which they were the resource and the ring was the consumer, and that the ring had been telling itself stories about them, behind their backs, for as long as the ring had existed.

This is the moment of grief I have been describing. The moment is brutal. The brutality is not only the discovery of what was happening. The brutality is the retroactive rewriting of years of one’s life. The dinners. The gifts. The kindnesses. The trips one took. The careers one helped to launch. The opportunities one passed to people. The introductions. The midnight calls. All of it now bearing, in retrospect, a different meaning than the one one believed at the time. The cumulative weight of the rewriting is what produces, in middle life, the sense that one has had fewer friends than one believed. The sense is accurate. The friends one believed one had were, in many cases, members of the ring that was converting the giving into a story about the giver. The actual friends were always fewer, and the actual friends were the ones who, during the same period, were giving back — not in equal measure, because equal measure is not the metric, but in the only metric that finally counts, which is presence.

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I want to say what the metric is, because it is the thing that gets lost in the count.

The metric is not symmetry of exchange. Friendships are not commercial relationships and they cannot be evaluated by audit. The metric is also not similarity of temperament or shared interests or compatible schedules or any of the surface features that the culture suggests friendships should have. The metric is one specific thing.

The metric is: would this person, when the chips were down, take an action that exposed them to my anger, because they loved me enough that the risk was acceptable?

This is the inner-ring test. Almost no one passes it. Most people, when the chips are down, will protect their own comfort. They will withdraw. They will fail to call. They will fail to show up. They will fail to do the harder thing, which is the thing that the situation requires but that the friendship may not survive. They will not, when one is in trouble, reach out to one’s spouse. They will not, when one is in crisis, fly across the country. They will not, when one has gone silent, sit with the silence until it breaks. They will excuse themselves. They will tell themselves they are giving space. They will tell themselves they don’t want to intrude. They will tell themselves a story in which their own withdrawal is the appropriate response. The story is wrong, but it is the story almost everyone tells themselves, because almost no one is willing to risk the friendship for the friend.

The few people who pass the test are the inner ring. They are the friends. They are the count that counts. They are usually two or three. They are sometimes one. They are sometimes, in certain configurations of life, a spouse and one other person, or a sibling and one other person, or a parent and one other person, and almost never more than three or four. The number is small because the test is hard. Most people cannot pass it.

The count being small is not the indictment most people read it as. The count being small is the count being honest. A person with three friends, by this measure, has more than almost anyone alive. A person with one friend, by this measure, is in the company of most of the writers and thinkers and artists and quiet workers of the world, who have known one friend, deeply, and who have done the work of their lives in the support of that one friendship. A person with no one passing the test is in genuine isolation, and that is a real condition with a real name, but it is not the condition most people are in when they report having few friends. Most people, when they look honestly, have one or two. The one or two have been doing the work of the inner ring the whole time. The grief is for the ring of people one believed were the inner ring and who turned out to be something else.

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What does one do, in middle life, when one has discovered the miscount?

There is the obvious thing, which is to grieve the loss. The grief is real and the grief should not be skipped. The years one gave to the ring are years one cannot get back. The opportunities one extended to people who used them poorly are opportunities one cannot recover. The kindness one gave that was converted into stories about one’s deficiency is kindness that cannot be reclaimed. Some part of one’s working life is gone because it was spent on people who were never the right people. The grief is for that part of one’s life.

There is the harder thing, which is to revise one’s giving without becoming closed. The closed posture — I will never give again, I will audit every relationship, I will protect myself — is the posture that the people who exploited one’s generosity have, by their behavior, encouraged in one. The closed posture would represent their final victory. Their stories about one’s deficiency would, in the closed posture, finally come true: one would become the small, audited, defensive person they always claimed one was. The closed posture is the trap.

The right thing is harder. The right thing is to keep giving, but to give differently. To give to the people who can receive. To stop giving to the ring. To recognize, when the ring shows up, that the ring is the ring, and to be courteous to the ring without surrendering one’s actual resources to it. To recognize that the inner ring is the inner ring, and to invest in it with the seriousness it has always deserved. To give one’s deepest self only to the people who can hold it without converting it. To accept that this means a smaller circle, a smaller life in one sense, and a much larger life in the only sense that finally matters, which is the depth of presence with the few people who can actually be present.

There is also the recognition, painful but freeing, that one’s own generosity was never the problem. The problem was the recipients. The generosity is the right disposition. The generosity is, in fact, the thing one was put on the earth to have. The generosity will be one’s gift to the inner ring for the rest of one’s life, and the inner ring will receive it as gift, because the inner ring is composed of the people who can. The functional ring will continue to circulate. One will continue to give to the functional ring what the functional ring is owed, which is courtesy, professional respect, fair dealing, and one’s competent work. One will not give the functional ring one’s deepest self anymore. The deepest self goes to the inner ring. That is the rule.

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The last thing I want to say is about what friendship actually is, because the count question and the exploitation question and the inner-ring question all get clearer when one names what the thing is one has been talking about.

Friendship is the relationship in which one person’s continued existence is, for another person, a load-bearing fact about the universe.

This is a heavy formulation and I mean it heavily. The friend is the person whose presence in the world changes the structure of the world for you. If they were not there, the world would be a different world. If they died, something irrecoverable would be lost, and the loss would not be a loss of utility or function or pleasure but a loss of the architecture of reality as you have been inhabiting it. The friend is woven into your sense of what is real. The friend is the person you would call if the unspeakable happened. The friend is the person you would want to be holding you if the lights were turning off. The friend is the person whose voice, recognized in a crowd, would make you turn your head before you knew why.

By this definition, friendship is much rarer than the culture admits and much more weighty than the culture rewards. The culture rewards the appearance of social abundance. The culture does not have language for the small dense fact of one or two people who are the actual structure of one’s life. The culture is wrong about this. The structure is the structure. The appearance is the appearance. The count, when it is honest, is the count of the structure, and the structure is almost always small.

A life with two such people in it is a fortunate life. A life with one such person in it is a complete life. A life with none of them is a life in which one is still building toward the structure, or in which one has lost it and is grieving it, or in which one was raised in conditions that made the building impossible and is now doing the slow work of becoming the kind of person who can build it. None of these conditions is shameful. All of them are common. The cultural mythology of the wide friend group is a lie that makes all of these conditions feel like personal failures, when they are, in their actual structural shape, conditions of being human.

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If you are sitting with the count tonight, and the count is smaller than you expected, I would say this. The count is almost certainly correct. The grief about the count is correct, too — it is appropriate to grieve the years given to the ring that was not the ring, and it is appropriate to grieve the people who appeared to be in the inner ring and who turned out not to be. The grief is the work.

But underneath the grief, when the grief has done what it does, is the structural fact that the inner ring is the inner ring. It has always been small. It will probably always be small. The smallness is not the indictment. The smallness is the honesty. The inner ring’s loyalty to you is the count that counts. The inner ring is, in almost every life, the people who, when the chips were down, took the risk that exposed them. They are the people one should be giving one’s deepest self to for the remainder of one’s working life.

The functional ring will continue to circulate. The functional ring will continue to perform the surface of friendship. The functional ring may even, on occasion, still wound. Let them. They are not the people who count. The people who count are the people whose continued existence is, for you, a load-bearing fact about the universe. Those are the friends. Those are the ones the word was meant for.

The count is the count. The count, when it is honest, is enough.

That is all I came to say.

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