The Human Fire 2.9 - The Good in Our Relationships
Who we are, and who we might be, to each other.
Today's issue is the eighth in a series on the Art of Life exploring the elements of "possibility."
We are the company we keep, at least according to the fortune-cookie proverbs that count as wisdom on the internet. Take the five people you spend the most time with, and there you have a good indication of your own character.
The truth is, the people we spend the most time with can ebb and flow depending upon our season and circumstance of life. College-aged me spent a significant amount of time drinking stale coffee at Waffle House, dissecting philosophical and theological arguments with friends I now haven't seen or talked with in a decade or more. As social skills expert Carolyn McGuire has put it, people get on and off your bus as you go through life. And that's ok.
At the same time, the relationships we forge with others outside our family systems are crucial both to our personal development and our long-term well-being: friends, pals, teachers, mentors, teammates, colleagues, neighbors. Yet we are in the midst of a "loneliness epidemic," still grappling with the generational effects of a global pandemic that upended all the ways we spend time together and relate.
We need each other, but we need each other in the right ways - to pull us into the better parts of ourselves, to support us in this endeavor of life that is ever so precarious. Who will you be, to those you meet and love?
Oxygen
"As iron sharpens iron, so one friend sharpens another."
~ Hebrew proverb
I made a friend last year. A new friend, as adults, which is something I haven't done much of outside educational institutions. We were in a writing group together, and connected over shared interests in spirituality, modern masculinity, and parenting neurodiverse children. I've never met him except over Zoom, but at this point we talk and text weekly. His friendship has reminded me that, at their best, our friends see us more clearly than we often see ourselves. We would be less ourselves without them, as I am without him in my life.
Fuel
Making friends as adults can be complex. But it's not a total mystery, as science writer David Robson explains in his new book, The Laws of Connection: 13 Social Strategies that will Transform Your Life.
Robson believes we can all strengthen our relationships, and that doing so brings both deep fulfillment and improved health outcomes. To improve our friendships, however, requires us letting go of a few myths. He calls one of these "the liking gap" - the mistaken assumption that others don't like us that much or aren't interested in learning about what we think or what our lives are like.
We self-select out of new or improved friendships when we assume the worst. Leading with vulnerability - something noted author Brene Brown has also advocated - is a way to overcome this gap. It results in what Robson calls "the beautiful mess effect," where showing imperfection leads to closeness.
Parents and other busy people especially may appreciate Robson's packaging of the "fast-friendship procedure," which helps identify the sign-posts to a developing relationship: reciprocity, frequency, positive feedback, and gradual self-disclosure. That may help you make the most of those quick playground or school connections with parents or work colleagues you might want to get to know better.
No family, however good, can provide everything a child needs to develop into an emotionally healthy and responsible human being. Outsiders play a crucial role in our growth and well-being, providing us with companionship, teaching, and pleasure as we learn our art of life. Three types of relationships are especially critical to human development: teachers, friends, and lovers.
Some of the first adults outside the family that we encounter are our teachers. When they are expert in their craft, we not only enjoy the process of learning directly from them; we continue learning from such teachers even after we cease to be in their immediate presence. Yet we also have a choice about those from whom we learn. Rather than merely accepting the teachers we’ve been given, we can seek out others who may be able to enlighten us further in the arts we wish to master, or which are crucial for our personal development or vocational goals. Not all teachers are currently living: the medieval Italian poet Petrarch, who lived alone in a mountain hermitage, once remarked that he was never truly alone and without tutors, since he was surrounded by books! Those who have gone before us have much to teach us about being human if we seek them out. And all good teachers will continually show us, by examples past and present, how to ask the right questions to find the answers we seek.
Friends play a different role in our development, and we should be aware that there are different levels of friendship. Some friends are those of proximity, and others are made through shared tasks or pursuits. Then, there are those friends who help us become better versions of ourselves, who pull us toward a good they seen within us, and which they too are seeking for themselves. The friends we choose to surround ourselves with, and to whom we reveal the deepest parts of ourselves, matter tremendously, for they can accelerate, retard, or stall our progress in the art of life. Like any relationship of value, friendships require intentional cultivation to thrive. When we bond with someone through proximity or over an activity, it often happens that the friendship ends once the activity ceases or one party moves away. While this is a natural occurrence, it is often an easy, unintentional one. Communication technology has made it easier to connect, and yet it usually facilitates what social commentators call “weak ties.” It takes disciplined intention to forge and maintain “strong ties” across distance and continue a friendship of any sort, but especially of the kind that pull us upward toward our better selves.
Those from whom we learn the most are often those who share a life with us – our lovers, partners, and spouses. They can embody the best aspects of friendship, but they involve a knowing that can only come through the experience of a life lived together. The choice of having a life partner, and which particular person to choose, saddled as it is with major life transitions such as births, vocation, and death, is likely the most important choice a person will ever make. And it is often made reflexively, in response to our family systems and the emotional needs we often don’t know we have thanks to that system. Unless some experience has made us aware of the ways our families shape our behavior, we bring those tendencies into the relationship – what psychologists term “family of origin issues” and what often generates the conflicts that can plague almost every deep partnership of human knowing. These partnerships are often the first, sometimes only space where we feel safe enough to begin to understand, accept, and change the generational patterns we’ve inherited. They can be a space for the emergence of those abundant elements of love, beauty, truth, and wonder to pull us deeper into the mystery of human existence.
Heat
Aristotle argued that the highest level of friendship occurred between those who sought to draw each other further into the Good. Yet that was also that rarest type of friend. Have you had friends like that, who made you better, who wanted what was truly best for you as a human being? How have you maintained that "friendship in the Good" over your life consistently? What have you learned from such friends?
Good friends will ask you good questions. Why did you do that? What do you want? How the hell are you gonna pull that off?
Who are the friends or teachers in your life who have asked you the best questions? How have those questions changed your life?
I hope you are having a summer full of friendship and all good things. And if you're my friend, I'd love to hear your thoughts about friendship.
Until next week, I'll see you down the path.
Chad
HumanWealth Partners
P.O. Box 1486, Newburyport MA 01950
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