A friend of mine told me an interesting thing about a friend of hers. They have been friends since their first day in reception so it’s a friendship that has lasted over fifty years. On my friend’s fiftieth birthday, a group of her friends arranged to take her away for a surprise weekend trip to Paris.
On the plane she was sitting with them all, chatting and laughing, and her lifelong friend said to her, “I’ve never heard you laugh.” The other friends who were with them were surprised when they heard this because as far as they were concerned, my friend was always laughing.
Clearly this is something my friend has thought about a lot since then as she told it to me at least fifteen years after the event, and looking back she realised that indeed there had been little laughter during that long friendship. She also realised there was a whole side to her of which her friend was unaware. Conversely, she felt that she knew everything about her friend’s life because her friend was always bringing problems to her, which is ironic because my friend over the past few years has developed a chronic medical condition which has left her in a wheelchair.
This is sometimes, rather simplistically, defined as “radiators” and “drains”: drains being people who drain all the positive energy out of your life and leave you feeling exhausted by the negative weight they place on your shoulders. Alternatively, radiators brighten a room when they enter, spreading positivity and leave you feeling that little bit brighter.
Although there may be some truth to it, it’s not as simple as all that. Why do we allow people – good friends – to drain us? Because we influence the way people behave towards us just as much as their behaviour is in their own control. This, after all, is one of the basic tenets of Neurolinguistic Programming – there are books about it, courses and YouTube channels on how to influence people for success and profit using techniques like pacing and adapting and rapport.
Now this takes place at a conscious level, but it also happens subconsciously. When I was at school I was a bit of a class clown. Although I’ve outgrown all that now (I think), when I meet very old friends, no matter how hard I try to be serious and sensible, they regard everything I say and do as funny and they don’t expect me to be serious or thoughtful. Over the years they have developed habitual responses to my stimuli and if I provide new stimuli I don’t always get the response I want. Relationships tend to run on tracks, whether it’s family, friendship, acquaintance or romantic. If they kept changing it would be impossible to maintain them.
So how do we change, and change things within our relationships? Well, we can’t do it by continually dropping friends and family who don’t support our change. Obviously, some relationships are genuinely toxic and we need to be out of them, but just because a friend has never seen you laugh, or won’t take me seriously, doesn’t make them toxic.
Perhaps they want a serious friend who listens to their problems, or a funny friend who makes them laugh. And being prepared to do that is what friendship is all about. What do we get in return? The sense that we are helping them.
Research suggests that helping others to regulate their emotions also helps us to regulate our own, decreasing symptoms of depression and improving our own emotional well-being, in the same way that donating money to charity makes us happier because it activates the same (mesolimbic) regions of the brain that respond to monetary rewards and sex! So there is a payoff for doing the right thing even though that isn’t the reason we should be doing it.
But how do we prevent ourselves being used or poisoned in these kinds of relationships? I think it’s more about us than them, but at the same time it’s more about them. A study by Professor Iverson at the University of Miami found that Christians encouraged to pray for others experienced health benefits; and same professor also discovered that people living with HIV who prayed for others survived twice as long as those who prayed regularly for themselves during the course of a study.
So thinking about other people in a caring way is good for you. The Buddhist practice of “loving-kindness meditation” or metta bhavana when practised regularly increases people’s feelings of social connection and empathy with consequent benefits to their mental health. Clearly then there are benefits from thinking about and caring for other people, but that can’t be why we enter relationships, or it negates the reason for doing it in the first place. It’s one step away from Ayn Rand’s philosophy of Rational Selfishness where any benefit to the other person is merely a by-product. If you go into a relationship or help someone because it makes you feel better, aren’t you the toxic one in the partnership?
The Chinese martial arts have a concept called Wu De or Martial Virtue. It is concerned with morality in thought as well as in action. One of the five virtues representing morality in thought is patience. Ren is the term for patience and the character representing it has an upper part representing a sharp sword while the lower part is a heart. Thus we have a wounded heart and by extension, patience is being prepared to be hurt and bear it because it’s what you bring to a relationship that counts not how the other person responds.
After my father died, I came across this poem amongst his things. After much searching I have been unable to attribute to anyone, so he either wrote it himself or it is too obscure for Google! I think it says more beautifully in a few words what I’ve been trying to explain with reference to religion, psychology and the martial arts.
Never be shocked
Never be surprised
only concerned
It is not always easy
to like someone
But always necessary
to love them.