That which does not change is dead: friendship too!
On the quest for new cultural scripts
One of the ways I seem to be taking after my mom in adulthood is my dedicated participation in book clubs. In addition to an in-person one here in Portland, I’ve been part of this fabulous book club hosted on Zoom by Youtuber Katherout.
This group of mostly women in their mid-twenties spread geographically throughout North America has become a beautiful community for me of deep thinking. Each calendar year begins with a three month weekly commitment to working with Julia Cameron’s Artist’s Way courses. Throughout the rest of the year we meet monthly to discuss heady books that inspire us to dream up and manifest better futures for the world. From optimistic solar punk fiction, to poetry that connects us to the beauty of life, to books that help us understand the role of friendship and love in our lives. After so long with the same cast of characters, this dispersed community is very real, as we turn to each other to process what we read in the context of our individual lives.
Not to mention, our lives have literally intersected. I’ve gone out for coffee with another Portlander who briefly was part of the group. One participant who was living near my home church was able to attend my ordination ceremony. And, my path has crossed with Kath’s in Seattle. I ran into her waiting for the bus when we were both headed to the same flea market, and at this moment, the desk I sit typing at used to be hers. After a move, she found it didn’t fit her new space, and offered it up for trade (gift economy, anyone?).
All this context is honestly beside the point, but I wanted to offer it as a moment of celebration that this sweet little cohort is part of my world, and part of the rhythm of my months. I love the way my world is changed by these people.
Really, this post is about an idea that came up in book club the other day that I’ve been working on connecting and fleshing out.
We were discussing Rhaina Cohen’s The Other Significant Others, a book that is making a big splash in this cultural moment (seriously, go see how many podcasts she’s been interviewed on), and seems perfect for this group at this time. The book profiles these pairs of friends that exemplify big experiments in putting friendship at the center of one’s life. With each of these vignettes, Cohen offers reflections on the fluctuating understanding of friendship and marriage in our collective imagination, as well as the challenges and pitfalls that people charting a non-standard path in their friendships face. It is a celebration of platonic partnerships, and a rebuttal to all those op-ed writers mourning the downfall of traditional marriage.
What got me on this train of thought was when we learned that the vast majority of people on that call had stories of deeply meaningful friendships falling victim to “the slow fade.” Why, we asked, is it so common to just gradually and subtly drift out of friendship, and not even talk to one another about it? Especially when it is such a contrast to what we expect from other relationships in our lives, the normalcy of it is jarring to consider. And worse, if you do have open conflict in your friendships, there is this distinct shame that comes with it. Like, friendship is meant to be easy and comfortable, or else it’s labeled Toxic. I’ve been told that if there is “drama” in a friendship, it must mean that the people involved are Dramatic people who just can’t get it together. And, adults are supposed to have it together.
We don’t talk to these ones we love about what isn’t going well between us, largely because we don’t have cultural scripts for this. Instead it’s normal to just put more and more distance between them and ourselves until they are just a dot winking out on the horizon in our view.
That being said, it isn’t always intentional. But even when we find ourselves drifting from each other by circumstance, we may be afraid to ask for something different, because maybe it’s intentional for them and maybe there’s something actually wrong with us, and why would we subject ourselves to open rejection like that?!
We need a new vision, new cultural scripts to help us have healthy conflict in our friendships. I want to be able to declare that someone is important enough to me that I’d rather them give me difficult feedback and ask me to treat them as they’d like to be treated, than lose them. I expect this in my romantic relationships, my work relationships, and even with roommates. I know I’m strong enough to have hard conversations, and I want to have them with the friends I love, so we can make an effort to bring each other more care, more joy.
I think I’m saying that I want to have covenantal friendships. For that kind of friendship to be the norm, for all of us to have more skills for navigating intentional relationships and generative conflict.
In Unitarian Universalism, we believe that the holy stuff of life is found in our inherent interdependence. We become ourselves in relationship with one another, and that is the point of what we are doing here in these bodies with these souls on this earth. Covenant is what we call the mechanisms by which we choose to enter into relationship and show up for each other.
According to the UUA Commission on Appraisal, covenants are different from contracts in that mutual obligation continues even after covenants are broken. When someone falls short of a promise they’ve made, the covenant is the thing that reminds us to return to that relationship, to renew those promises. To paraphrase James Luther Adams paraphrasing Martin Buber: humans are promise-making, promise-breaking, and promise-renewing people.
I have so much to say on these ideas. But to start, what I’m feeling this week is that I want my friendships to be just as covenantal as my marriage, and just as covenantal as my relationships with my congregants. I want to have terms of mutuality that include renewing promises as long as that relationship feels like it can be life-giving and beneficial to all parties. I want to be told when I’m showing up poorly, and be given a chance to show up better next time, and to take it seriously.
Twice recently, I’ve not been available for a particular friend of mine after setting out aspirations of spending quality time. I really don’t like to be a flakey person, but life has been coming at me from all directions lately, and I’ve organized my time quite poorly in some instances. It’s not from a lack of caring about this friend, but that’s a hard thing to communicate when you’re cancelling plans. Feeling concerned about this distance, she asked me directly, “are you sure you want to see me?” and I’m so grateful she did. Because I got to say yes. And now I have an important opportunity to show up for her with intention and an offering of deep presence. I’m so lucky to be loved enough to have this asked of me.
And then there is the other friend I’ve been estranged from for years (yes, I have a history of friendship Drama! Sue me!). Against many odds, life circumstances have given us an opportunity to reconnect, to try again, to learn from what went wrong last time, to re-evaluate what role we want to play in each others’ lives. Honestly, I’m super nervous, not quite sure of what I want from this friendship, hoping, with no guarantee of success, that we can avoid falling into the same unhealthy patterns as last time. But wow it sure makes me feel alive!
We humans are not only promise-makers. We must contend with the fact that we are also promise-breakers. As we move through the world and find ourselves in new territory, and being tugged in many directions, it is nearly impossible to uphold all our commitments to all people. (Unless we are not the type to make commitments to others, in which case, that sounds like a narrow and lonely existence, and I don’t have any advice to offer.) We let others down, we let ourselves down. Sometimes those mistakes are too big, we cause harm with real consequences. And sometimes, we get to try again. We get to renew our promises, setting intentions with the gift of greater wisdom than we had the first time.
In the words of the Commission on Appraisal:
“As seekers, we willingly choose to love each other and stay in relationship over and over, again and again. In this way, although we may break promises, by leaning into the transformational power of our faith, we can begin again to covenant in love.”
This is how relationships are kept alive. This is how we are kept alive.
This week I finished reading Madeline Miller’s Circe, a modern retelling of the story of the goddess/witch Circe, an important character in the Odyssey. It ends with Circe negotiating her way out of her thousand-year island exile, and choosing to transform herself into a mortal, so she might travel the world and grow old with her lover.
This ending struck me as so beautifully human, and shows exactly how holy change and messiness are. In the moment where she prepares her spell, she imagines her future, with fear and excitement. In Circe’s voice, Miller writes:
“Overhead the constellations dip and wheel. My divinity shines in me like the last rays of the sun before they drown in the sea. I thought once that gods are the opposite of death, but I see now they are more dead than anything, for they are unchanging, and can hold nothing in their hands.”
The thing is, renewing our promises is not just a necessary component to the longevity and health of relationships. It is a sacrament wherein we choose life. We choose to grow, to be changed by knowing one another. And that, is no small thing.