The Friendship Recession

 

It's an astounding paradox of our time. We're all more connected than ever online, we have more chances to speak to our friends than ever before in human history. Even when alone, there is literally no reason to be alone, and yet most people are finding friendships more difficult than ever. In the most social years in human history, more friends than ever are growing apart, and often even breaking apart. And as the temperature heats politically and planetarily, connections of iron are melting everywhere.

The human mind is literally unreadable to anyone but itself, and therefore every man is an island. The right to privacy is inviolate because it's a necessity. We are not supposed to know what everyone in our life thinks about everything, and in many ways, the fact of knowing their opinion too often is an intrusion. There are some things which the people close to you do not approve of which we'd be far better off not to know, and once we do, the trust we once had in them is always in question.

Statistics show that men are suffering from this 'friendship recession' with extreme disproportionality, but I honestly think women are suffering from it too. So many married people I know, women and men both, are struggling with the years of early child care, and go through their days in terrified anxiety. So many single people I know, men and women both, are struggling with the crippling loneliness of an unattached life. Women may feel more connected to other women in unprecedented numbers, but such connection does not stop a march of history that seemed to be marching in their direction multiple times only to march farther and farther away.

Our generation of women have had a long series of moments when they finally thought their struggles might be alleviated, only to find them far from over. Any hard won gains of their struggles will likely be to the benefit of generations after theirs. In times of historic struggle, and who can doubt we're in one, everyone feels alone. No one can stop thinking about how close they were to something better, only for good tidings to be ripped out of their hands the very moment before they secure their grip. We have no idea what the future will bring, and in such times, you can only feel truly connected to those whom you trust absolutely to act in your interests, and everyone else is an object of terrible fear.

Something like 10% of the population belong in some sort of cluster of personality disorders that affect their ability to act in the interests of those they would love. Of that 10%, the number who are men is obviously larger than the number of women, and the reason is generally not, as so many critical theorists contend, that men are socialized to act toxically. The reason is on the cellular level. One cannot dismiss the bad behavior of men as 'toxic masculinity' when it's arguable that testosterone itself is a toxin. All those born with high levels of testosterone, including many women, are more prone to erratic, destructive behavior. For the vast majority of men, socializing them to treat the women in their lives better can be an overwhelming success, but there is that 10 or 15% of men who will react against the socialization and accountability with all the more will to power against it.

What do we do to protect ourselves against them? What can we do but band together? What can we do but make friends with people whose friendship is not necessarily something we're not always going to find worthwhile? We have to accept, even love, the humanity of those who see the world completely differently from us, because if we don't embrace people who believe things we loathe, even occasionally do things we loathe, there is a large population of Trumps and Putins out there who can easily exploit our fissures.

I know that I'm experiencing a small friendship recession myself. I was stunned by how much I enjoyed the quiet of the pandemic, the first time I didn't have to worry about socializing in Baltimore. My closest friends are almost all in other cities, and I kept in touch with them over zoom, and 'virtually' dropped nearly all my Baltimore friends. Suddenly, I stopped drinking, I stopped binge eating, and my weight suddenly melted by thirty pounds. But now that we're all starting to re-socialize, I find old anxieties and old habits returning, and a loneliness which I felt not at all when I didn't have to see people has returned with a vengeance in this era when I once again do.

I've had much more painful experiences, but I lost a good friendship this summer that was both extremely meaningful, and somewhat exploitative on the friend's part, and the moment I pushed back, I was of course abandoned like Haley Joel Osment in AI. I miss this person terribly, I do not miss what this person put me through. Was the friendship worth the trouble? Probably, because such is friendship. Friendship, real friendship, is not defined by calm waters, but by the fact that both protect the other through turbulent waters, turbulence that is in many ways self-inflicted by both friends. Friends are not only there to be supportive but also to challenge one another when being challenged is necessary, and this friend, well... oh my god...

But for me, this is ultimately just a small friendship recession. My 'friendship depression' was at the end of 2015. I came to Baltimore in 2012, and my first three-and-a-half years in Baltimore were, in retrospect, such an extraordinary honeymoon. Everyone in Baltimore who knew me thought me a shitstirrer, almost a 'social assassin'; to an extent well past how I was known in my Washington DC twenties, when I probably deserved such a label far more. But in spite of the fact that people found my refusal to curb my tongue infuriating, they wanted my friendship anyway. Why? Because I'm funny...

It was almost as though having a person around with a lack of inhibition about saying obnoxious funny things was like badly needed oxygen to people so constrained by ethical codes that they repressed a crucial part of themselves they refuse to acknowledge is even there. For most people, humor is as much the oxygen of life as love, and in many circles that used to welcome me, all the hookups in the world could not stop them from seeming completely repressed; and therefore there was hardly anyone around confident enough to crack a joke. Nobody seemed to approve of me, but for a number of years, everybody kept coming around for more. I had a few friends in DC like that, but in Baltimore, it was almost everybody.

And then, in 2015, I found myself in a relationship of my own. After a few weeks it was... misery itself. I ultimately blame no one but myself for going into a relationship like that with my eyes completely open, but for all my friendships in those years, I was nevertheless lonely, and terribly jealous of all the people who seemed to find some semblance of happiness in each other's arms. By barely more than a month in, I was utterly wretched and the wretched state increased as time went on. I believe the misery and stress deposited upon me caused a chain reaction that caused me to deposit my misery elsewhere, which caused at least ten people I thought good friends to run screaming for the exit. During that period I exited a part-time job of six years on bad terms, I resigned in anger from the band I'd belonged to for four years that gave me more pleasure than any musical experience ever has, which thereby caused the breakup of my own band; which caused me to welch on commitments for my band to play at a friend's wedding - which seemed to cause an unspoken breakup of a good friendship with them. While at their wedding I realized that I'd only felt truly accepted and affirmed in the company of one friend, which caused me to fall in love, thereby ending even that friendship. All of which caused me to have a very nearly literal nervous breakdown, which of course caused me to be risible company, behave regretfully in a number of different ways, and caused the end of still another three or four good friendships.

Am I to blame for all that? Quite a bit of it, yes, of course. I do think just about every friend I lost in those events could have been 30-70% more forgiving, but when someone is well-liked spite of being kind of a schmuck, it's only a matter of time before people decide to dislike you for being a bigger schmuck than you actually are. Whether you're nice or mean to others, people turn on you all the time, it's one of life's many seasons, and later in life, people who loathe each other sometimes become one another's staunchest allies because of the bad experiences they've shared.

But just a month or two after all that came the Trump presidential candidacy, and nearly all of us had every expectation of life uprooted. Whether it would have been easier or harder with all those friends who turned out to be less friendly than I thought, we all faced the same dread that every expectation and value we have may end, and in conjunction with that, what is any loss of a few friends in comparison to all we could lose?

I was, and I suppose I remain, a bit of an interpersonal Trump. Not nearly so bad of course, but certainly that sort of person who butts in his opinion and presence much too often. It truly is a learned trait a naturally quiet person learned over decades of living with an extremely unquiet mind. However hard and unlikely, it's a trait that I hope to unlearn so that I may live something like a quiet, harmonious life that seems to be the last thing available to a person who puts up such a gregarious front; but as I hopefully get knee deep into 'bookwriting land,' the essays here will be less frequent as the writing and concentration is deposited elsewhere (he says yet again...), and socializing can be something much quieter as befits anybody in their forties.

But how does one live quietly? Well, sadly the answer is probably to do as quiet people do. Keep your opinions to yourself, keep most of your clever lines to yourself, distance yourself from situations before you lose your temper, and make yourself much less visible. Well... I'm down to half-a-dozen facebook posts a day from the forty I'd post around the time my social life went to shit, but realistically speaking, people are who they are. I'm probably stuck with this blustering bombast for good, and believe me, I like it less than you do. One does ones best to find the open avenues for improvement, but a closed lane is a closed lane when there's a bulldozer or steamroller sitting in it.

Some of us are just born to be barometers for how the rest of the world feels. In moments of relaxation, we're welcomed, in moments of stress, no one is less welcome. I'm hardly the first for whom this is true. It's the state of the Jewish people throughout history, and there are many moments when such a circumstance feels like the mark of Cain, but what is clear is that even people around Baltimore or elsewhere who can't stand me would much rather welcome me with open arms than 90% of those who vote for Trump or think Vladimir Putin's a great man.

So never mind me, I'm just a tiny pebble in a sea of multitudes you all find much more disgusting. Whether in 20 years (assuming I'm around) I'm ever back in the life of people who seemed suddenly to think of me like a dead raccoon in their wall, they all will have to welcome people into their lives they find so much more distasteful than me. At some point, some child, or parent, or sibling, will become convinced that Trump is a great man, or that abortion is murder, or that gay people are sick and trans people are faking it, that global warming is a hoax and the poor have themselves to blame, that men are the persecuted gender and Christians the persecuted Americans. But the more power such movements obtain, the more important it will be to embrace these people close to you who collaborate with the worst of them, precisely because their beliefs are so poisonous that they will poison the whole world. In a dictatorship, people viewed with favor by dictators are the only people who can guarantee the safety of people you love.

When Auden wrote 'We must love one another or die,' he didn't just mean to love those who are easy to love, he also meant that we must love those who hate all too easily, because hate met with hate only breeds greater hate, and the option thereafter is death.

Friendship, like love, is far more complicated than it looks. It's far more complicated because it's far more simple. You think you can choose your friends, but the truth is that for the vast majority of the time, circumstance chooses our friends for us and unless the person does something objectionable in the first week we all just sort of shrug and say 'ok, this is the person I'm in it with now.' In this era of the internet, we may think we have more agency over who our friends are than ever before, but the truth is that we have less agency than we have in a long long time. By choosing our friends carefully according to our values rather than our needs, we become hammers in search of nails, because there are always disagreements about fundamental values that can escalate into enmity. By cutting off friends who tell us unpleasant truths about ourselves, the person who abandons sets themselves up for far worse abandonments down the road. By avoiding friends we often find insulting rather than telling them their behavior's unacceptable and helping them reform, we are turning against us the very people who know how to damage our social lives the most.

Hans Keilson, a Dutch writer and Holocaust survivor, made the point better than anyone I've ever read: "Enemies never die out in this world. They are recruited from former friends." In an era when families are breaking apart, when people have less friends than ever - particularly men, when disagreements seem so rife that we protect ourselves in a cocoon of like minds to validate ourselves, we are courting civilizational death, from which even those who survive will bury so many friends they love.

Our friends are often not our favorite people, but they are our allies, our advocates, our cheerleaders, the people who know us and the people who understand our choices even when they don't agree with us. Friendship can sometimes feel like a marriage that isn't worth saving, but after family, friends are the second bulwark of survival in a world that eventually kills us all.

And besides... they can be a lot of fun.