Top Quotes: “Big Friendship: How We Keep Each Other Close” — Aminatou Sow & Ann Friedman
Research on Friendship
«We can learn so much about someone by the way they talk about their friends.»
“”All the research on attraction can usually be applied to friendship as well,” says Emily Langan, a communications professor at Wheaton College who studies all kinds of close relationships. “It’s attractiveness in style. It’s attractiveness in aesthetics, sort of the vibe they give off. It’s attractiveness in personality as well.” Much of this, she notes, happens at a subconscious level. It’s often hard to articulate exactly why you’r attracted to someone. You just are. And sometimes it’s even hard to say how you want that attraction to manifest. Do you want to be this person’s lover? Their best friend? Their spouse? Their creative collaborator?”
“The Gmail trail doesn’t lie: we were keeping up digitally, but always quickly proposing opportunities to spend time together in person. We both instinctively knew that we were still in that fragile, early phase of friendship when “out of sight” quickly becomes “out of mind.” We had not gotten close yet, so if we stopped hanging out regularly, we would fade away from each other’s lives. It’s possible to go months without seeing a long-time friend and still feel close to them, but new friends require steady investment.”
“In friendship, our cognitively demanding field, there are magic numbers too: 30 hours, 50 hours, 140 hours, and 300 hours. Jeffrey A. Hall, a researcher at the University of Kansas who has avoided being summarized by Gladwell, actually timed the early stages of friendships. Hall found that after 30 hours spent together, people said they considered each other “casual friends.” After 50 hours, they would start referring to the other person as a “friend” with no qualifiers.
But it wasn’t until 140 hours that people considered it a “good friendship.” And “best friend” was a label people started using only after 300 hours together. That might seem like a lot of time, but it’s actually only 12.5 days.”
Aminatou & Ann
“She was an Amnesty International letter writer, volunteered at the fistula clinic in town, and taught the women at the local prison how to read and write, even though the authorities sanctioned only Bible study and crochet lessons. Aminatou helped the women smuggle letters out to their families and lawyers. When her boarding school revived its draconian dress code, Aminatou didn’t understand why everyone thought this was acceptable. She demanded to know why it applied only to girls’ clothing, and she was outraged when male teachers would ask girls to bend over or kneel to prove that their clothes met their sexist standards. Aminatou still can’t crochet, but Amnesty letters, the fistula clinic, and going up against school administrators formed the foundation of her feminist beliefs.”
“Her Catholic family tried to instill in her many religious values that never really took (sorry, it’s just a wafer!)”
“We have come to realize that if someone is tearing us down or targeting us as competition, it’s often because they are lacking in confidence or support themselves. We try to be the one to take the first step and declare that we are willing to work hard to collaborate. We try to consider how far we could get together.”
“A Northwestern University study showed that people prefer to make friends with other people who can help them achieve their goals. At the same time, they’re not even aware that that’s something they’re selecting for. Seeing something in your friend that you want to achieve yourself can help you get closer to who you want to be.”
“Often, the accountability question Ann asks herself is: Would I be able to look my Black friends in the eye and describe how I handled this situation? If the answer is not “absolutely yes”. and, in all honesty, the answer is not always “absolutely yes”- that’s how Ann knows she has to do better.”
“One thing we tell each other a lot is “I love your brain.” It’s our way of saying, “You’re smart, you’re clever, I want to hear what you think about everything.” From the earliest days of our friendship, we were each fascinated by the way the other organized her thoughts and ideas, and we wanted to know each other’s opinion about every single thing. This feeling has never faded away. Even today as we talk to each other, we swear we can feel ourselves sharpening in real time, getting a clearer sense of the world around us and our place within it.”
Challenges
“As Ann listened to Aminatou talk about her growing frustration with the situation, Ann was outraged at how this guy was treating her. Who does he think he is to treat the best woman in the world this way? This sounds supportive, but it’s actually part of a negative friendship pattern for Ann. When one of her friends is dating someone she thinks is unworthy of their affection, she does this angry-mama bear thing. She makes very clear that she does not like this romantic partner. But even though Ann’s reaction is rooted in a protective impulse, her friend does not end up feeling supported. This is what happened when Aminatou tried to tell Ann about her nebulous romance. She felt like Ann was judging her for not extricating herself, and slowly she stopped giving Ann all the details. And so, while Ann knew the contours of what was going on, she didn’t know how ugly it had gotten for Aminatou. When Aminatou finally decided to walk away from this person, she felt so lonely. She was breaking up with someone she hadn’t even been dating.”
“ “The problem,” Karen North, a communications professor at USC Annenberg, told the New York Post, “is that people will ‘reach out’ by clicking on a friend’s page and reading through their posts, and that way they feel engaged even though the engagement was one-sided. So the relationship doesn’t actually get furthered, it’s just peering into each other’s lives.””
“No relationship is too big to fail, and. friendship is no exception. We learned the hard way.
In one of the few studies of long-term friendships, researchers surveyed hundreds of adults and found that only 30 percent of their closest friends still remained close after seven years. The study was covered with headlines like “The Seven-Year Expiration Date on Friendships.” It’s a convenient paralel to romantic relationships, which supposedly experience the “seven-year itch.” The term comes from a 1952 play by that name (which later became a movie starring Marilyn Monroe), and the seven-year number referred to the point at which marrages of that generation were most likely to fail. It makes sense. Seven years is long enough to feel like you’ve already made it through the hard stuff together. Seven years is long enough to develop some really bad communication habits. Seven years is also long enough to feel that the other person should know you well enough they wouldn’t do things to hurt you.”
“We were no longer speaking the same language. Often, when Ann thought wed had a perfectly pleasant interaction, Aminatou felt awful about it, and vice versa. Neither of us ever sald to each other, in the wake of a specifie painful incident, “This hurt me,” or, “I’m in my feelings about this.” Instead we were hiding in indirect statements that were easily misinterpreted and each spinning narratives to ourselves about what the other was going through. What did she really mean by that? Why would she do something like that? She must really not give a shit about me anymore. We were both cagey and self-protective, too scared and proud to be direct with each other about what we were feeling or what we needed.
This is yet another pattern that crops up in a lot of friendships. In her book You’re the Only One I Can Tell, Tannen explains that a difference in conversation style — or each person’s unique way of saying what they mean and interpreting what another person is saying — is often the invisible culprit when trouble arises between friends who are women. That’s because, in many cultures, women are socialized to be less direct, saying things like, “Do you think it’s cold in here?” rather than “I’m cold. Would you mind turning up the heat?” Women are also socialized to prize communication as a way of feeling intimately connected. It was certainly true for us that when we stopped being able to communicate, our intimacy broke down. Our shared base and safe harbor disappeared slowly without us noticing until they were gone.
No wonder we couldn’t see it. In the easy-breezy early days. of our friendship, our conversation styles seemed so in sync, we didn’t appear to have separate styles at all. We simply knew which personal questions were ok to ask and which would be received as prying. We knew how to indicate we were paying attention to each other. We knew how to express concern and how to receive the other person’s concern too. We knew how to convey deep emotions like solidarity, empathy, or fear through the briefest of text messages. We knew how to interrupt vague statements and even silences. We just got each other. But because we’d never been forced to articulate what was working about. our communication, now that it had broken down we couldn’t figure out how to get it back. We avoided talking about the problems that we could both feel but couldn’t name yet.”
“Tannen notes that entrenched silence can lead to a phenomenon she calls “complementary schizogenesis.” It’s what happens when two people end up communicating “in ways they normally wouldn’t, as each reacts to the other by increasing the very aspects of their styles that differed in the first place.” You think you’re trying to bridge the gap by modeling how you’d like to communicate, when in fact you’re retreating further from the person you’re trying to connect with. Tanner gives the example of two women. Noelle wishes Tara would speak more softly in public places, and so Noelle models the behavior she wants to see, and drops her voice lower but all Tara hears is her friend speaking too quietly. So she raises her voice louder, implying she’d like Noelle to speak up.
“Noelle ends up practically whispering, and Tara practically shouting.” It’s the opposite effect of what they. both hoped to achieve.”
“It’s hard to rationalize away a friend breakup. You can’t blame a fizzled-out sex life or an attraction to a new partner. There’s not even the classic half-hearted consolation of “We can still be friends” to fall back on. And so friend breakups can cut even deeper than romantic ones. “We feel almost all the time that no, no, this says something about me-not just as a friend, but me as a person,” Kirmayer says.”
“There are no rituals to help you heal and move on if the friendship falls apart. And that, Kirmayer says, “can really prolong and intensify the heartache that people feel when it comes to friendship breakups.””
“If intimacy is what makes family and romantic relationships both so rewarding and so complicated, why would it be any different for a Big Friendship? When two people entangle their emotional lives, it’s bound to be difficult sometimes. Not all friendships look the same for the long term, but one thing is guaranteed: any Big Friendship will face existential threats.
We can’t believe we never considered this! Our “too big to fail” hubris is stunning, really. So when we found ourselves in a period of emotional estrangement that we couldn’t seem to get out of, we felt a lot of things. Shame. A desire to run away. A desire to just wait it out and hope it got better. Frustration. Confusion. A lot of hurt. We had so many feelings. What we didn’t have was a way forward. We didn’t know what it looked like to fight for a friendship. We would have to make our own way through it.
And we realized we couldn’t do it alone.
A common thing at weddings is to have the friends and family in attendance say their own “I do” and pledge to help the couple make it through the tough times. But for us, the fact that we shared a community made things harder in this difficult phase, not easier. Because our friendweb was so interwoven, we didn’t want our honest attempts to resolve this communication breakdown to be perceived as gossip. We didn’t want to go to any of our mutual friends for support, because we didn’t want them to feel like they had to take sides. That led to both of us turning things over and over in our own heads, spinning out over perceived transgressions without a reality check and feeling ever more isolated as we tried, alone, to figure out the problems that had grown between us. Our journals from this period are a hot mess.”
“Ann was so afraid of hurting Aminatou that she was holding back. And Aminatou, sensing Ann was withholding, moved further away herself. Ann, who could tell that Aminatou was moving away, figured she had done something to hurt her and backed off even more. “And that’s why it’s called a cycle,” our therapist said.”
“We couldn’t believe how many big, important things — like needs and expectations and preferred modes of relating to people — we’d never explicitly discussed with each other. Much of the therapy process was about undoing our powerful story of sameness. We had to be shown how different we really are before we could start to understand our actions. We had made so many assumptions, most of them going back to the ease of our earliest days of friendship. And we are still learning how to unassume them.”
“Just as there are conditions for creating a Big Friendship, there are also some ways to make sure it stays big over many years. Emily Langan, the professor who applied attachment theory to close friendships, told us that staying attached to a close friend can be boiled down to three main things: ritual, assurances, and openness.
The first, ritual, is because “we need commemorative experiences together,” Langan says. This is why families rely on holidays to bring them together and why wedding anniversaries have endured as a way of celebrating the years of investment in a marriage. “Friendships don’t have the hallmarks,” Langan says. “They don’t have the milestones.” So it’s up to the people in the friendship to create them.
Our friendship anniversary is marked as an annual recurring event on both of our calendars. In previous years, we’ve sent gifts, gone to dinner, and made time for long phone calls to mark the occasion. You’ll find effusive anniversary posts about each other in our social-media archives.
Even when it’s not tied to a special calendar date, an annual getaway with friends is one reliable form of ritual. Traveling to the same point on the globe, especially if you live far apart, is more than a frivolous vacation. It’s how all the parties recommit to staying in each other’s lives. For all of its imperfec- tions, Desert Ladies is a great example of this. It happens every January, always in the golden light of the Southern California desert. It has food traditions (we order a catering spread called the “Business Lunch” from a Middle Eastern restaurant), private jokes, and a recurring guest list. Ann doesn’t feel like the New Year has truly begun until the Desert Ladies trip is complete.
Existing holidays can also be an opportunity for ritual. Aminatou has spent the last couple of Thanksgivings with the same group of friends. They always go somewhere out of the way. She has really come to appreciate, as life gets busier, what a gift it is for the people she loves to take two flights and a three-hour car ride to celebrate holidays together. The menu is different every year, but at the table, they always take turns saying what they’re thankful for. It is both a way of catching up on each other’s lives and collectively setting intentions for the coming year.”
“Whenever Ann visits her friend Josh — her bestie of more than 25 years — on her first night in town, they go to the same restaurant. And they order the same thing: two veggie burgers with bacon (Ann violating the terms of her vegetarianism is part of what makes this ritual a ritual) and two glasses of the house red. It’s a private tiny routine exclusive to that friendship, not just a story she and Josh tell, but something they do. Together.
Even when you’re separated by many time zones, digital connection allows for rituals too, like always texting each other whenever you’re doing a specific thing, or making plans to watch a show at the same time but separately every week. We have a shared Photo Stream with about a dozen far-flung pals, where we post selfies of our outfits any time we feel cute. Multiple nights per week, Ann’s high-school bestie Bridget will simply text her, “Good night!” at the end of the day. And whenever she flies, Aminatou sends her friend Shani her flight-tracking information. Shani, who knows Aminatou is a nervous flyer, texts back immediately and gently reminds her, “The plane knows what to do.” This makes Aminatou feel seen and comforted. Someone cares that she’s in a metal tube, 40,000 feet above land. The ritual also reminds her that she can always count on Shani.
Ritual alone is not enough, though. This is where assurances come in. Even the closest of friends need to assure each other that the friendship is important. Langan says that another key to staying attached is to find verbal and nonverbal ways to tell each other you plan to be there in the future. She offered an example from her own life: “I say to my friend Jill, ‘Well, imagine when we’re 65. Are we still going to joke about the bad time we had in Cancún?’ I’m giving a verbal indicator that I see us as friends when we’re 65.” It’s not exactly a marriage vow, but it hints at a long-term commitment.
And similarly, when the two of us joke about wearing matching caftans and sitting side by side on our Golden Girls-style lanai, it’s more than a joke. It’s an assurance that. we plan to be in each other’s lives that long. This happens in shorter-term ways too, like when you pick up the check for dinner and tell your friend, “Don’t worry, you can get me back next time.””
“Langan adds that being transparent also means opening up about how important someone is to you as a friend — making sure you are saying to them that you value their presence in your life. Don’t just occasionally think of your friend fondly. Tell them that your life would lose meaning if they disappeared from it. Tell them you love them. Tell them exactly why you want to hold on to this friendship and make it last for the long haul.”
“Observing ourselves in the mirror of others is how we improve as people. We can see our flaws illuminated in new ways, but we can also notice many good things we didn’t know were there. Until a friend specifically requests you bring your lemon meringue pie to brunch, you might not realize you’ve become an excellent baker. Until a friend finds the courage to tell you that she never feels like you’re listening to her, you might not realize this is how others are perceiving your chatterbox tendencies. After the third friend in a row calls you for help asking for a raise, you might finally give yourself credit as a pretty good negotiator. Once you’ve seen yourself in a mirror of friendship — in both positive and challenging ways — the reflection cannot be unseen.”
