People in any kind of friendship with me need to know: I'll take you back way too many times after bad endings. I'll take you back and take you back until it's just absolutely proven to me that we can't possibly be a good thing for each other, in each other's life. This isn't a very good trait. It can end up causing more harm than good. After the first 3 or 4 times, am I going to start regretting not giving up the first time? Is the other person going to regret not giving up earlier? It's happened. But on the whole, I'd rather keep a strong but misplaced faith in two peoples' ability to work through a thing, rather than make a choice to lose faith sooner, and end up throwing away what could have been saved.
I believe the most important thing is for each side to be square and true with the other. I believe that friendship with honesty is incredibly resilient. If you believe in a friendship, you owe it to the other person to keep it honest. Friendships without honesty are fragile and precarious for the lack. If a person is going to patch things up with lies, or smooth things over with pretense of things being okay, this is not acting for the friendship: it is acting against it. It's expediency for the sake of today's comfort; laziness trying to pass itself off as self-sacrifice. "I'll suck it up, for the sake of the friendship!" Will you? Forever? Forever ever? Forever ever?
If that's your choice, so be it, it's yours. No one can help you with it. Don't blame the other person. For all you know, they would have been willing to walk with you down the hard route that you eschewed, and actually work through whatever the problem was.
Friendship is important enough to tell the truth - friendship ought to be too important not to tell the truth. Friendship ought to be strong enough to take the truth - including the other person's truth. Be open and honest enough to trust in the other person's strength, instead of trying to play to their weakness. Is a thing very minor? Then it's all the more important that the friendship be strong enough to bear disagreement - especially on such a minor point! And also especially: because minor points have a way of growing major, when covered over. The more major a point is, the more crucial it becomes that each person be very clear where they stand, and where the other person stands. To fake through just means to pay later, with a heavier dose of acrimony. And we know that. So don't act like you're doing the friendship a favor by betraying what's true.
Something is not right between us. We believe this thing is less important than the friendship as a whole. Let us both join together, and get along better, by embracing the power of saying so. Say: this, I do not agree with; and this, you do not agree with. And say that the friendship is more important than the disagreement.
This is what respect for friendship entails.
But if the point is discussed, and it becomes clear to that the point is in fact so big that the friendship can't bear it - then you both needed to know that. Being honest about that was the only respectful thing you could have done. You refused to be false friends.
If a thing is not right, then have it out. Have it out in view. Most friendships are both strong enough and important enough to take it. The person who says the friendship can't take honesty is the one who is insulting that friendship's worth.
6 comments:
Excellently written, lots of truth in it, many people need to hear it.
A few caveats:
1. Honesty does not mean voicing every stupid thought that passes through your mind. Friendship also calls for common sense and consideration.
2. Some people REALLY do not need to hear this because they are selfish and self-absorbed, and expect their friends to be mindreaders and ever at their beck and call. They are already being way too honest about the many ways their friends disappoint them.
Not that such friendships are better off when the selfish or oversensitive person holds in some of it. They then just become bitter and all the more touchy.
But the danger is that such a person, reading this post or exhortations like it, will find justification for all their controlling. It is now "their duty to the friendship" to insist on every little act of worship they happen to want.
Others of us, just as selfish but a little less blind, will be honest when we are hurt, then when we hear our own complaint out loud, will be struck by how basically selfish and unrealistic it is.
#1 most definitely. Any time there's a problem and I'm going to say something - not that I'm perfect, but I *do* try to cultivate the stop and think reaction, where the question I ask myself is: "What positive thing am I going to achieve by saying this?" If I can't come up with something...that ought to let me know something.
Hm. I can see where you're going with that #2 caveat. I can see where that would tend to bolster a bad tendency. I don't know too many of those people. Or maybe I am one!!! Hahaha no, I'm kidding. I don't know too many of those people. But I do hear about 'em! I hear the tales. The commiseries. I know they are definitely out there!
What, it can be miseries, but it can't be commiseries? Ffah.
What, it can be "Fah!" but it can't be "Ffah"?
Say: thank you, Jen. :-)
Let us both join together, and get along better, by embracing the power of saying so. Say: this, I do not agree with; and this, you do not agree with. And say that the friendship is more important than the disagreement.
Honesty
The idea of you and me getting along better is kind of funny, kin of scary.
Kind of.
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