the methodology of building relationships: friendships
i've had a lot of cause to reflect on the way in which people establish friendships recently.
speaking outside the context of romantic relationships, i am reminded recently of a large gulf between different methodologies in developing relationships, and what happens when the attendant expectations that go with each methodology come into conflict.
some people go "all in" when they meet someone for the first time, at least people with whom there is an harmonic resonance as opposed to a discordant one. Others "approach with caution" and constantly adjust internal boundaries forwards and backwards as comfort levels with another or others morph over time. Still others will "stage-gate" relationships hierarchically, allowing people to move into closer circles and making increasing allowances for occasional aberrant behaviours unless or until such time as the allowances pile up into a one way ticket back out to a further ring.
i'm personally in that last category, but i know people in all of them, or variations on all of them. some of them are even *my* friends.
as with romantic relationships, people develop their social relational tactics on the basis of a maddening variety of factors, some of which might be predictable to the outside observers, others that will not. the interactions offered by people tell a lot about the expectations *they* bring to the relational table for their own friends: the "all in" types will want to share everything about themselves in detail whether your interested or not, transgressing your own boundaries without permission and possibly without care unless you're consistent in defending them, and are likely quick to take offence if you don't immediately accept them as they are. the "approach with caution" types will make minute adjustments within their own spheres of reference without ever telling you what or why, making opaque changes to the transactional nature of the relationship to protect themselves from perceived conflict or threat as their "found values" within any particular relationship change. those of us who "stage-gate" often have an easier time letting people in than out, which makes us prone to having hidden buried land mines and super-nova triggers that are attached to the accumulating trangressional allowances, and when the ejection seat goes, the seat's occupant almost never sees it coming, only the massive explosion.
as with *any* relationship, there are implicit expectations we bring into friendships on the basis of our particular methodologies. because they are implicit, however, we assume the other parties will just play along to our values without complaint, and woe be to them if they don't... only we never give them a chance to hear or negotiate explicitly those expectations, so they never really know up front what it is they've signed up for by "being friends" with us. we establish implicit "social contracts" on the basis of our own values, and assume that because another person seems friendly to us and resonates harmoniously with us, that they must share our values for the friendship relationship and will therefore be respectful at all time of our values... even if we haven't clearly articulated those values, or even articulated them at all.
in the process of building a romantic relationship, there often comes a time (or, in my case, many times) in which the participants pull out the expectations and examine them; for some it's the "so, where is this relationship going?" conversation, for others it stems from the "WTF just happened there??" conversations. but romantic partners don't move forward without doing some explicit examination of individual and joint expectations: do we expect to get married? be monogamous? buy a house? have children? put family or work first?
but as has been recently noted elsewhere, inasmuch as our culture has no safe rituals or processes for ending friendships, we also have no such rituals for beginning them, for making explicit the nature of those social contracts. we meet some people we like, we engage each other, we fall into particular habits of spending time together... we build our internal and implicit expectations for their behaviours regarding us now that we've slapped on them the un-negotiated label of "friend"... and we go on about or way assuming everything is fine according to our uncommunicated understanding of the nature of the friendship, right up to the point where something goes akimbo in our perspective and the wheels come off. and of course, once the wheels are off, there's little chance of rationality to engage a discussion about "what expectations A had for the friendship" versus "what expectations B had for the friendship" - there's only damage and victimhood and self-righteous indignation on all sides until the dust settles, which in some cases can take years, or never happen at all. in the meantime there's a huge amount of strain on the social network and shared resources as others react to the conflict in their own ways, according to their own friendship methodologies. some people will feel compelled to take sides (with or without bad-mouthing the other camp), some will retreat, some will attempt to mediate to at least restore some balance to the network if not to the damaged parties themselves.
the lack of explicit rituals in non-romantic relationships is a societal problem; it's not you, it's not me, it's not a Tribe problem.... it's a cultural thing. we meet people we think are cool, who might actually like us for ourselves, and we can be over the moon. NRE happens in non-romantic relationships, too. and we "fall into" the easy pattern of association without ever thinking that there might be boundaries we're squashing in our presumptions, that maybe there are other definitions of lexicon we employ when we talk, that maybe we're so happy to find people who are willing to like us and listen to us that we forget that sometimes they may not want to hear everything we have to say, and may be unwilling or unable to reciprocate in kind, that being overwhelmed causes some people to withdraw, or even take offence. we make assumptions that our boundaries when presented will be respected, even if staunchly defending those boundaries for what seem to us as really good internal reasons that other people cannot see from the outside, means we're actively pushing people away. we assume that of course our friends will stop and take our needs into consideration, and even assume that in doing so we can guarantee getting what *we* want over whatever meets their own needs.
and while some of this may be true some of the time, it's not true enough of the time that we find ourselves incredibly hurt by what looks like a sudden betrayal when another's actions deviate from our preciously constructed and harboured expectations, from the social contract we thought we had. and our tendency to resort to self-protectionism, a "once bitten, twice shy" mentality, means that it's never *our* fault, it's always someone else's fault for breaking expectations they never even knew existed, and in our victimhood the only recourse is to protect ourselves from people who are going to be like that with us; reworking our methodology for communicating the internal assumptions and expectations of a friendship rarely, if ever, seems to be a viable option. we'd have to own some responsibility for communicating those, for making sure they are actually valid for each particular friendship we have. that's a lot of work, and we are inherently lazy monkeys; it's easier to just stick to the patterns we have and jettison relationships that don't do what *we* want over and above what *they* may need.
yup, yup, yup... we all make this mistake. i've made it, even recently, with the attendant explosive results because internalized assumptions and expectations were not made explicit (and what were, were inaccurate). yup, yup, yup. i'm seeing this play out in the purview of social networks in which i am embedded, and to which i am peripheral (it's almost like a mars-in-retrograde scope of effect, especially when i see it occurring in disparate networks).
so it raises the questions:
how clearly can you articulate your generally-internalized expectations and assumptions for "friendships"? if you maintain hierarchical relationships, can you articulate those expectations and assumptions for each gradient?
how often have you taken the time to explicitly articulate those expectations and assumptions to each of your friends? does it tend to happen up front? does it only happen when an internalized expectations or assumptions has been transgressed by someone who didn't know it was there? does explicit articulation happen at all?
if you DON'T explicitly articulate those expectations and assumptions to each of your friends, can you articulate what the risks are for not making them explicit?
if you DON'T explicitly articulate those expectations and assumptions to each of your friends, and you're aware that there are risks, how do you manage the situation when transgressions occur?
how much time do you invest trying to understand the internalized expectations and assumptions that motivate each of your friends? how do you know if your friendship behaviours are, in fact, welcome or not? how savvy are you to other people's different communication abilities, and when they may be struggling with something they cannot communicate? do you tend to assume that it's all their responsibility to communicate internal state and state changes, even if you yourself have not effectively done so for your own internal state?
for myself, these questions are currently relevant; they affect relationships i currently have. as the answers roll out into more expressible articulations, they may affect other relationships i currently have. this is the way of things: change begets change. the social contract needs to be a *living document*, eligible for revision from one or both directions. i can only speak for myself and my own impressions of watching this particular drama play out recently on multiple fronts: we live in a culture that daily plays Russian Roulette with our own emotional health. we take risks in relationships because, i suspect, we (a) don't do the work to understand our own needs and expectations and assumptions up front so they are explicitly communicable to potential friends, and (b) we fear the vulnerability of being honest up front and the attendant risk of rejection for that honesty. so we settle into patterns that get comfortable until they are not, then we REact to change as if it were a deliberate knife to our hearts when in fact it's just someone readjusting for internal boundaries and needs that weren't effectively explored - by either side - up front or actively maintained along the way.
shit happens. and we take it personally. sometimes it's meant personally, but sometimes it's not about the person receiving the Dear John from a former friend; it's about the friend's struggle to address Stuff that isn't about us at all. but we're not going to see it that way; it will only ever be another echo of abandonment and betrayal because, really, it's all about us. and you can't cut through the emotional miasma to look at it any other way.
the lack of cultural ritual makes it difficult to see this kind of drama play out in anything other than this inelegant old standby of a plot. we simply don't know how to let go: not of our expectations, our assumptions, our victimhood, our historically-conditioned responses, our griefs, our angers, our fears. it's all right there, every time.
so i would ask you to consider, those of you who live in a world that includes people who are not you and don't think or act like you do: what *can* we do to keep in mind that sometimes other people's needs take priority for them over our needs? if it results in a parting of the ways, how can we find a balance between our grief and anger in the moment with a sense that other people gotta do what they gotta do for their own health (more importantly perhaps, how do we unhook the all-about-us response that sends us thinking that we, therefore, must be "unhealthy")? how can we let go without adding to the baggage, or barricading the doors between us? how can we say goodbye to grown-apart people without applying a sense of betrayal? how can we make healthy separations that don't end up putting Us and Them in armed camps? why is anger and bitterness the only response some can find?
it's a lot to think about on a monday morning, i know. but the absence of rituals for starting and ending non-romantic relationships is something that i think is hugely important on both a small-social-scale and the broader cultural scale. it bears consideration, on all levels.
footnote: none of this is to say that rituals don't develop *within* the particular friendship and particular *to* that particular friendship. but the cultural rituals that mark *transitional* states of beginnings and endings - those are what i note as MIA. we have no equivalent to weddings and handfastings and baptisms and funerals or wakes or anniversary celebrations for our *friendships*. i am coming to believe that actually leaves us adrift and at some risk for learning how to more effectively process specifically-friendship transitions on emotional or psychological levels.
speaking outside the context of romantic relationships, i am reminded recently of a large gulf between different methodologies in developing relationships, and what happens when the attendant expectations that go with each methodology come into conflict.
some people go "all in" when they meet someone for the first time, at least people with whom there is an harmonic resonance as opposed to a discordant one. Others "approach with caution" and constantly adjust internal boundaries forwards and backwards as comfort levels with another or others morph over time. Still others will "stage-gate" relationships hierarchically, allowing people to move into closer circles and making increasing allowances for occasional aberrant behaviours unless or until such time as the allowances pile up into a one way ticket back out to a further ring.
i'm personally in that last category, but i know people in all of them, or variations on all of them. some of them are even *my* friends.
as with romantic relationships, people develop their social relational tactics on the basis of a maddening variety of factors, some of which might be predictable to the outside observers, others that will not. the interactions offered by people tell a lot about the expectations *they* bring to the relational table for their own friends: the "all in" types will want to share everything about themselves in detail whether your interested or not, transgressing your own boundaries without permission and possibly without care unless you're consistent in defending them, and are likely quick to take offence if you don't immediately accept them as they are. the "approach with caution" types will make minute adjustments within their own spheres of reference without ever telling you what or why, making opaque changes to the transactional nature of the relationship to protect themselves from perceived conflict or threat as their "found values" within any particular relationship change. those of us who "stage-gate" often have an easier time letting people in than out, which makes us prone to having hidden buried land mines and super-nova triggers that are attached to the accumulating trangressional allowances, and when the ejection seat goes, the seat's occupant almost never sees it coming, only the massive explosion.
as with *any* relationship, there are implicit expectations we bring into friendships on the basis of our particular methodologies. because they are implicit, however, we assume the other parties will just play along to our values without complaint, and woe be to them if they don't... only we never give them a chance to hear or negotiate explicitly those expectations, so they never really know up front what it is they've signed up for by "being friends" with us. we establish implicit "social contracts" on the basis of our own values, and assume that because another person seems friendly to us and resonates harmoniously with us, that they must share our values for the friendship relationship and will therefore be respectful at all time of our values... even if we haven't clearly articulated those values, or even articulated them at all.
in the process of building a romantic relationship, there often comes a time (or, in my case, many times) in which the participants pull out the expectations and examine them; for some it's the "so, where is this relationship going?" conversation, for others it stems from the "WTF just happened there??" conversations. but romantic partners don't move forward without doing some explicit examination of individual and joint expectations: do we expect to get married? be monogamous? buy a house? have children? put family or work first?
but as has been recently noted elsewhere, inasmuch as our culture has no safe rituals or processes for ending friendships, we also have no such rituals for beginning them, for making explicit the nature of those social contracts. we meet some people we like, we engage each other, we fall into particular habits of spending time together... we build our internal and implicit expectations for their behaviours regarding us now that we've slapped on them the un-negotiated label of "friend"... and we go on about or way assuming everything is fine according to our uncommunicated understanding of the nature of the friendship, right up to the point where something goes akimbo in our perspective and the wheels come off. and of course, once the wheels are off, there's little chance of rationality to engage a discussion about "what expectations A had for the friendship" versus "what expectations B had for the friendship" - there's only damage and victimhood and self-righteous indignation on all sides until the dust settles, which in some cases can take years, or never happen at all. in the meantime there's a huge amount of strain on the social network and shared resources as others react to the conflict in their own ways, according to their own friendship methodologies. some people will feel compelled to take sides (with or without bad-mouthing the other camp), some will retreat, some will attempt to mediate to at least restore some balance to the network if not to the damaged parties themselves.
the lack of explicit rituals in non-romantic relationships is a societal problem; it's not you, it's not me, it's not a Tribe problem.... it's a cultural thing. we meet people we think are cool, who might actually like us for ourselves, and we can be over the moon. NRE happens in non-romantic relationships, too. and we "fall into" the easy pattern of association without ever thinking that there might be boundaries we're squashing in our presumptions, that maybe there are other definitions of lexicon we employ when we talk, that maybe we're so happy to find people who are willing to like us and listen to us that we forget that sometimes they may not want to hear everything we have to say, and may be unwilling or unable to reciprocate in kind, that being overwhelmed causes some people to withdraw, or even take offence. we make assumptions that our boundaries when presented will be respected, even if staunchly defending those boundaries for what seem to us as really good internal reasons that other people cannot see from the outside, means we're actively pushing people away. we assume that of course our friends will stop and take our needs into consideration, and even assume that in doing so we can guarantee getting what *we* want over whatever meets their own needs.
and while some of this may be true some of the time, it's not true enough of the time that we find ourselves incredibly hurt by what looks like a sudden betrayal when another's actions deviate from our preciously constructed and harboured expectations, from the social contract we thought we had. and our tendency to resort to self-protectionism, a "once bitten, twice shy" mentality, means that it's never *our* fault, it's always someone else's fault for breaking expectations they never even knew existed, and in our victimhood the only recourse is to protect ourselves from people who are going to be like that with us; reworking our methodology for communicating the internal assumptions and expectations of a friendship rarely, if ever, seems to be a viable option. we'd have to own some responsibility for communicating those, for making sure they are actually valid for each particular friendship we have. that's a lot of work, and we are inherently lazy monkeys; it's easier to just stick to the patterns we have and jettison relationships that don't do what *we* want over and above what *they* may need.
yup, yup, yup... we all make this mistake. i've made it, even recently, with the attendant explosive results because internalized assumptions and expectations were not made explicit (and what were, were inaccurate). yup, yup, yup. i'm seeing this play out in the purview of social networks in which i am embedded, and to which i am peripheral (it's almost like a mars-in-retrograde scope of effect, especially when i see it occurring in disparate networks).
so it raises the questions:
how clearly can you articulate your generally-internalized expectations and assumptions for "friendships"? if you maintain hierarchical relationships, can you articulate those expectations and assumptions for each gradient?
how often have you taken the time to explicitly articulate those expectations and assumptions to each of your friends? does it tend to happen up front? does it only happen when an internalized expectations or assumptions has been transgressed by someone who didn't know it was there? does explicit articulation happen at all?
if you DON'T explicitly articulate those expectations and assumptions to each of your friends, can you articulate what the risks are for not making them explicit?
if you DON'T explicitly articulate those expectations and assumptions to each of your friends, and you're aware that there are risks, how do you manage the situation when transgressions occur?
how much time do you invest trying to understand the internalized expectations and assumptions that motivate each of your friends? how do you know if your friendship behaviours are, in fact, welcome or not? how savvy are you to other people's different communication abilities, and when they may be struggling with something they cannot communicate? do you tend to assume that it's all their responsibility to communicate internal state and state changes, even if you yourself have not effectively done so for your own internal state?
for myself, these questions are currently relevant; they affect relationships i currently have. as the answers roll out into more expressible articulations, they may affect other relationships i currently have. this is the way of things: change begets change. the social contract needs to be a *living document*, eligible for revision from one or both directions. i can only speak for myself and my own impressions of watching this particular drama play out recently on multiple fronts: we live in a culture that daily plays Russian Roulette with our own emotional health. we take risks in relationships because, i suspect, we (a) don't do the work to understand our own needs and expectations and assumptions up front so they are explicitly communicable to potential friends, and (b) we fear the vulnerability of being honest up front and the attendant risk of rejection for that honesty. so we settle into patterns that get comfortable until they are not, then we REact to change as if it were a deliberate knife to our hearts when in fact it's just someone readjusting for internal boundaries and needs that weren't effectively explored - by either side - up front or actively maintained along the way.
shit happens. and we take it personally. sometimes it's meant personally, but sometimes it's not about the person receiving the Dear John from a former friend; it's about the friend's struggle to address Stuff that isn't about us at all. but we're not going to see it that way; it will only ever be another echo of abandonment and betrayal because, really, it's all about us. and you can't cut through the emotional miasma to look at it any other way.
the lack of cultural ritual makes it difficult to see this kind of drama play out in anything other than this inelegant old standby of a plot. we simply don't know how to let go: not of our expectations, our assumptions, our victimhood, our historically-conditioned responses, our griefs, our angers, our fears. it's all right there, every time.
so i would ask you to consider, those of you who live in a world that includes people who are not you and don't think or act like you do: what *can* we do to keep in mind that sometimes other people's needs take priority for them over our needs? if it results in a parting of the ways, how can we find a balance between our grief and anger in the moment with a sense that other people gotta do what they gotta do for their own health (more importantly perhaps, how do we unhook the all-about-us response that sends us thinking that we, therefore, must be "unhealthy")? how can we let go without adding to the baggage, or barricading the doors between us? how can we say goodbye to grown-apart people without applying a sense of betrayal? how can we make healthy separations that don't end up putting Us and Them in armed camps? why is anger and bitterness the only response some can find?
it's a lot to think about on a monday morning, i know. but the absence of rituals for starting and ending non-romantic relationships is something that i think is hugely important on both a small-social-scale and the broader cultural scale. it bears consideration, on all levels.
footnote: none of this is to say that rituals don't develop *within* the particular friendship and particular *to* that particular friendship. but the cultural rituals that mark *transitional* states of beginnings and endings - those are what i note as MIA. we have no equivalent to weddings and handfastings and baptisms and funerals or wakes or anniversary celebrations for our *friendships*. i am coming to believe that actually leaves us adrift and at some risk for learning how to more effectively process specifically-friendship transitions on emotional or psychological levels.