Love and Friendship: Just an Opinion

To a Dear Friend.

I tried to respond to your comment in the reply box, but I quickly realized that I had so much to say that my comment was going to be about as long as a blog post.  So I may as well go ahead and give you a full answer, because insightful comments deserve full answers.  As do friends who take the time to read my little blog as many times as you have.  I want to start off by saying, that I’m no expert on the subject of love and relationships, obviously.  But anxiety has prompted me to become a bit of an obsessive, so over the past six months I've been reading everything I can get my hands on, talking extensively with a rather well-known therapist who specializes in the subject, and maniacally interviewing happily married couples, such as my parents and grandparents.  So what I can give you now is only an opinion.  The opinion of an anxious 23-year-old who has never been married.  And of course this opinion is filtered through the lens of my religion (because of course I had to talk to priests), my life in theater (grilling married classmates until they avoided me in the halls) and all my personal isms.  But I’ll go ahead and share it, for what it’s worth.

“There was something kind of unsettling to me about what you wrote here when I first read it.”

First of all, I'm glad this post unsettled you a bit.  What I mean is, it’s often unsettling when our unconscious beliefs and expectations are challenged, as you've so rightly observed.   And what is anxiety if it’s not a deep sense of being unsettled, a sort of perpetual state of “I’m not sure if this is right”?

 I want to respond to your comment about love verses in-love, because this idea has given me so much anxiety over the past months.   And when I say anxiety I mean literally calling my partner up in the middle of the night because “my heart is beating so fast I can’t sleep, I’m so scared, how do I know we’re meant to be.” To which my good man would sleepily respond that he loved me and I loved him so would I please go back to bed and stop calling for the love of God.  Easy for him to say.  And yet for a while the question lingered, and with this question came a lot of shame, which triggered more panic.  And while I've been doing a lot better, even your comment was enough to trigger me.  But then I took a deep breath and thought… actually I can respond to this.  I've been there before.  I know the answer I've come to for myself, which possibly will help you.  (But I’m not sure.)  And underneath it, I think I hear a more universal question that so many people ask, which is “what has been keeping me from finding something that works?” 

“I think there's a difference between just love and being in-love... the difference between how I feel towards my friends and how I would feel toward the person I want to spend the rest of my life with. Not necessarily something perfect, but definitely something deeper.”

I want to share with you a beautiful quote from Jungian analyst Robert Johnson’s book We: Understanding the Psychology of Romantic Love.    Johnson writes “When two people are ‘in-love’ people commonly say that they are ‘more than just friends.’ But in the long run, they seem to treat each other as less than friends.  Most people think that being ‘in-love’ is a much more intimate, much more meaningful relationship than ‘mere’ friendship.  Why then do couples refuse each other the selfless love, the kindness, the good will, that they readily give to their friends?  People can’t ask their friends to carry all their projections, be scapegoats for their moods, keep them feeling happy, and make life complete for them.  Why do couples impose these demands on each other?”

So in a sense, you’re certainly right, but on the other hand there are certain aspects of friendship that we would do so well to integrate into our romantic relationships.  I’ll list a few here.

1)      Friendships grow over time.  We don’t expect to be best friends with someone the moment we meet them.  We don’t expect to just see them and “know” they are our friend.  Sure, sometimes this does happen, which is awesome, but more often than not it’s a gradual thing, and that doesn't make the friendship any less strong.  But with our partner, we expect the connection to be instant.  We want to know right away, and if it’s not there that second, why even bother trying? 

2)      We go out and make friends.  We actively seek out friendships, because they are necessary to our lives.  There is no shame involved in trying to make friends, in fact if a person doesn't try to make friends its pretty darn strange.  In contrast, actively seeking out a partner is seen as desperate or just pathetic.  If it’s meant to be it will “just happen,” right?  Logically, though, if we’re searching for something deeper than friendship, and it’s universally accepted that friendship takes some work to form, we may want to reconsider the idea that love relationships are ready-made.  If anything, deeper connection should require an even deeper effort.

3)     We forgive AND forget.  If your roommate pisses you off, you’re over it by the next morning, because ultimately you know he’s a good guy and… whatever you can’t stay mad at him for long.  But if it’s your girlfriend, well, you have to reconsider the whole relationship, right?  Because whatever it is she did could be a sign that deep down she’s not even the person you thought she was, and maybe you shouldn't be together, because you can’t be with someone who does that, right?  Right?  Well, actually… the loving thing to do would be to treat her like your friend in this case.

4)      We don’t expect them to solve our problems, just listen.  This is so essential to the myth of romance in our culture, I almost didn't list it, for fear of turning you off to my opinion. But I'd rather you deeply disagree with me than not give you my full thoughts, because this is so important.  We expect our relationships to complete us, to make us happy.  To fulfill us.  But the truth is, if you admit that no matter how great your partner is, she is still a human being, we basically have to admit that she can’t save our soul.  So to speak.  We are still responsible for our own happiness.  A partner can half your sorrow and double your joy, but she can’t eliminate your sorrow and create your joy.  She just can’t.  So if you’re in a relationship and you’re dissatisfied with life, it doesn't automatically mean the relationship is wrong.  There are a million things that could be wrong, and ending the relationship will help your work struggles about as much as ending a friendship would.  That is, not at all.

5)      We go through periods where we don’t hang out as much.  Sometimes we get busy, we don’t have the same classes, or we just get sick of each other and need a break.  But this is okay, because we know the person is our friend and when the time comes, we’ll be two peas in a pod again.  When it comes to relationships, we expect a great deal more consistency.  And this makes sense, because we’re talking partnership here.  But relationships, like friendships, do ebb and flow.  You’re not always going to feel as passionate towards your partner.  But unlike friendships, we too often take the natural ebb and flow of relationships as a sign that they are over.  We don’t realize that, with trust and time, our feelings will reappear.  Like the moon which goes through cycles of fullness and eclipse, or the tide of the ocean, feelings move in and out, but we trust in their return.  Feelings come with love, but they are not identical to love.  Love, like the moon, is always there.

I don’t want to over-share in regards to my own relationship.  As you know, we are unmarried and have no immediate plans to be married, so we’re not the best example of real lovingness.  (And if we never end up married, everything I’m saying still holds true for me.) But I will say that the fact that he is my best friend is one of the essential things that makes our relationship romantic.  Once, in one of my highest anxiety states, I called my mother in tears saying “But we’re best friends.  Do I need to break up with someone because we’re best friends? What about love?”  My mother basically laughed in my face and said, “Being best friends is the best case scenario.  You can always get back to loving someone if at the core he is your best friend.”  This is coming from someone who has been happily married for almost thirty years.  And I will say that my parents have a highly romantic relationship, nothing like those platonic-friends-pretending-to-be-in-love sort of couples that give me so much fear and you’re probably imagining on some level.

The last thing I will say relates to that something deeper that we all yearn for.  I’m going to make a bold statement and say that that something deeper has nothing to do with the initial spark that our culture holds as tantamount in relationships.  That initial spark fades and is no indication of whether or not that something deeper will arrive.  There is a beautiful quote about soul-mates that I heard somewhere along the mess of my frantic research.  I’m going to paraphrase and probably butcher it, but let me go ahead.

“Anyone who says they will know their soul-mate right when they see them has no idea what they are talking about.  You only become soul-mates by becoming.  By struggling, and learning, and living together over time, that is how you become soul-mates.”

Of course, being an anxious person, as soon as I learned that friendship was an essential aspect of love, I began to obsess that my mate and I weren't good enough friends.  I said to my mother “But we don’t like the same things!  We can’t even agree on a movie to see.  He doesn't even like sushi.  Oh my god, he doesn't like sushi!” 

To which my mother replied, “Well Emily, that’s what your friends are for…”