Friendship orientations
Why can't we be as open about having different needs for friends as we are for romantic relationships?
A stream of consciousness story of self-discovery told through social media posts. Original content at the bottom of the post is readable without the social media posts, but if you like the general insights there are more in the screenshotted posts.
In the years since my divorce, I have thought a lot about the kinds of relationships different people are geared towards. For example, I learned that, romantically, I was definitely geared toward monogamy:
I discovered that I have a monogamous romantic orientation. But I have a certain pattern of relationship orientations that goes deeper than monogamy. I’m geared toward one romantic partner, yes, but I am also geared toward that relationship and family relationships as the primary relationships in my life. I’m not that geared toward friends. And I’ve never heard this spoken of explicitly as an orientation by anyone else before, but it fits into a suite a preferred relationship styles for me.
Almost a year ago, I posted this publicly on Facebook:
The next day, I posted this privately, summarizing my confusion at the reaction:
The whole thing seemed related to something I had previously written about being a “friendship anarchist”:
We don’t talk much about friendship styles, much less dignify them as orientations. Like I learned from the comments (publicly and through admonymous) on my friendship bottom post, even a community of friends that is highly aware of mono/poly relationship orientations tended to assume there were just more and less virtuous ways of being a friend (I was being unvirtuous), rather than different desires for closeness and commitment, or greater or lesser needs for friends at all. The friend relationship is highly valorized at this moment in our culture imo, especially in comparison to romantic relationships (“marriage is temporary, friends are forever”— fwiw in my experience, most friendships are also not forever). Talk about the downsides of friendship like peer pressure and cliques has gone precipitously down since my childhood. We talk about the danger of romantic relationships changing your self-image and personality, but I always found the pull to those changes to be more onerous with friends. I want romantic relationships to challenge me and change me— I don’t generally want my identity to change from friendships, and I prefer to just disengage from a friend whose force of personality pulls me into their orbit. But I know plenty of people, like my sister, who crave friendships that will define and change them in this way.
I’m someone who is mainly oriented toward my monogamous romantic relationship, next my family, and totally cool with either all kinds of friend connections ebbing and flowing throughout my life or with almost no friends. I suspect this “monogamy+clan” orientation is a natural cluster. For example, my parents are both like this as well. I think a more diffuse kitchen table polycule style where most of the important relationships in your life are friendships and some of them are sexual friendships is another natural cluster. This post was partly inspired by the remarks I’ve often heard poly people make that romance doesn’t seem fundamentally different from a close friendship to them. To me romance does seem fundamentally different than friendship, and it seems related to wanting exclusivity, which in my experience many poly people think of as merely an attempt to be sure the person doesn’t leave, not the extra thing that I desire and which distinguishes my special monogamous romantic relationship from all the other relationships in my life.
I don’t need to have an officially recognized relationship orientation cluster to dignify my tendencies and preferences, but I would be interested to see overall relationship orientations characterized, in part to make it easier for me to have friends with similar needs and expectations. I would probably try harder to have friends if I hadn’t had many experiences of commitment-shyness with people who were more zealous about the relationship than I was. I would like to be able to talk about friendship more deliberately, the way we can talk about wanting different levels of engagement and commitment in a romantic relationship. To borrow poly parlance, I’m looking for secondary to totally casual friendships, and I wish this was acceptable to say. I want to be able to be honest about how I am rather than just “failing” at being the “right” kind of friend, and I think we have all the ingredients we need in our discourse to make that happen.
Interesting. This raises the question of what should be considered an "orientation" vs just "a trait you currently have."
An orientation implies that something is innate, unchangeable, fine, and must be accepted by society.
"A trait you currently have" on the other hand, might be good -- but also it might be holding you back, making you and others less happy, etc.
How sure are you that your current approach to friendship is the former, not the latter? As someone in the middle (I think) of the friends-initiating distribution, it feels like I could increase or decrease this a good deal if it would make my/others lives better to do so. So, it does not feel like an orientation.
(As an aside, a similar criticism has been made of Myers-Briggs -- namely that, if interpreted as prescriptive rather than merely descriptive, it can lead people to create self-reinforcing stereotypes for themselves. Making everything an orientation could do the same.)
This is very insightful and enlightening – for me anyways.
I'm Sad now that I realize that I've often thought about, e.g. flakiness, as something blameworthy. That's particularly Sad because I think I'm generally pretty good at charity, even towards much worse behavior!
I've long thought about the differences in 'friendship styles', tho without the convenient handles this post provides. Most of my friends are individual relationships, tho there are some weak ties to specific groups too; tho almost all pretty small groups. I also enjoy many weak, but still intimate, relationships with people I regularly encounter, like neighbors, or shop owners.
One difference might be that I was _somewhat_ able to be a (weak) 'top' in otherwise tenuous friendships. My 'hack' was to, when I learned a friend's birthday, add it to my calendar. Contacting people on their birthdays seems like a reasonable Schelling point and a good way to maintain minimal, but still regular, contact.
Sadly, I just started removing friend's birthdays from my calendar – because they weren't even contacting me on my birthday. I think I'm just missing friends (and a romantic relationship) and – so you've convinced me – unfairly punishing my distant bottom-friends out of resentment. (I want some (more) friends that wish _me_ a happy birthday!) I think now, thanks to you, that I should maintain the distinction between what kind of 'friend activity' I want, and what any particular friend is capable/willing to give me.
I think one aspect tho that's still hard, for some people (e.g. me), to handle is 'flaky talk'. It's hard (for me) to reliably translate what flaky people say into reasonable expectations. I haven't been able to entirely dismiss any expectations without also falling into 'friend nihilism'. Maybe it's unavoidable that each friendship has to be independently calibrated.