“Old Woman in the Garden” (1906) by Paula Modersohn-Becker
This week’s Ask Polly featured a letter about fading friendships. The letter writer expressed sadness and regret about their friendships and said they feel like a misfit in the queer community. In my reply, I mentioned that anyone who feels the same way should email me and I would pass it along. Now I have 10k emails from queer misfits for the letter writer — a stated introvert!
So maybe I should try to pair everyone up, in the hopes of creating a bunch of queer misfit quarantine pen pals?
But that makes me worry about ALL of the misfits out there who need pen pals right now! And it’s also made me reflect on how hard it can be to join any community when you’re a little allergic to groups (I know I am!) (and how hard it is to make new friends when we’re all isolating) (and how hard it is to ask for what you want from your oldest friends).
That’s too many things to talk about! But fuck it, let’s do this! Why is friendship so hard? Why is community so hard? Why is connection so hard? Why haven’t most of us learned how to reach out to each other without fear?
AN UPDATE! The letter writer from yesterday says she wants ALL OF THE EMAILS from the friendly strangers! Very exciting! Maybe she'll post something here about her experience reading 10k emails from strangers!!! Yeeeeeeeeeee, stay tuned!
I'll start things off right here (gulps, taps microphone, stares out at empty room) by saying that I've been a misfit all my life, I've struggled with my oldest friendships for years, and I have a million and one things to say about making new friends and feeling left out and being a fucking weirdo who's always out of step with other people (while also presenting as a very socially skilled and not all that introverted human). And mostly I think the key is just jumping right in and being exactly as strange as you are. And also admitting that you're not that strange? And you're not that brave? And you're not that normal either? In other words, presenting yourself as the ever-shifting freak, the 15 or 35 different personalities, that you are, without fear, and seeing who bites. Who will bite? It's suspenseful. It's not a verdict on your value, though. It's just fun. And the more you do it -- stick your neck out, dive in -- the better it feels. It also makes you a lot less blamey with your oldest friends, the ones that kick up your weird defensive reactions the most. And it forces you to notice that you might FEEL open, but you're ALSO a tiny bit avoidant in your own ways. And that builds your empathy for others who might seem brutal from a distance, but are more like you than you think.
I've thought so much about friendship over the past two years. I'm a person who, probably because I don't connect with or even talk to my family, deeply values friendship, especially with women. Time and again, I find myself frustrated that friendship isn't given the same cultural significance as romantic partnership. Call Your Girlfriend taught me that this has apparently only been true in our country since the '50s, when the government aggressively pushed the nuclear family. Meaningful friendship started to decline then and is now on life support. I've seen the effects in my personal life many times.
The cultural message is that women should only be investing deeply into romantic relationships, especially if they're with men. I wish friends had the bravery, bandwidth, and societal permission to invest more in each other. Real, committed friends deserve the same longterm loyalty and devotion as partners.
And as Esther Perel always says, we shouldn't expect to get everything we need from one mate. We would benefit from different qualities of intimacy spread among various friends. Plus, we should be able to choose who matters in our lives, regardless of DNA.
FUCK YEAH, FRIENDSHIP!
*Readers should know this is coming from someone who started The Official Best Friends Club in second grade, named herself president, and made two little girls pout in opposite corners of the backyard at the very first meeting.
I literally had to go to therapy for this. I went to a therapist and said: look, I need to understand people. You understand them. Help me. It will probably take about 3 sessions. I explained my issues.
She just looked at me in silence and then said: this is going to take a lot more than three sessions.
FIVE YEARS later, and thank God for her.
I used to think that everyone was a universe inside, and if I could say the right things, engage the right way, I would see their universe and they would see mine and yay! Connection!
I finally figured out two things: first, that people are hard for me a lot of times because, here in the suburbs at least, people's values are different from mine. It took me a long time to stop judging them for that. I don't care who has more money. I don't like conversations where women judge other women based on their looks. But that's the stuff that comes up in conversation here. And it's still a bummer, and it's still true that I don't participate in those discussions. And I'm working on not judging them and feeling either superior to them or disappointed in them for it. They love their kids; I mine. They are kind and giving and funny. So I am trying to throw my shitty, trying not to be judgemental (but still judgemental) self out there in good faith and take them in good faith. And allow the little connections to be there.
Second, because my family is not a family, I think my idea of friendship is a lot more work than other people's idea of friendship. So all of it is more weighty because I think I always expected friends to be family and for myself to be family to them. DEEP understanding. INTENSE conversation. But no. That's not what friendship means to most people. Friendship is light to them. It's just hanging out. It's an escape from their family's heaviness.
So yeah. I still feel lonely sometimes. But I'm learning.
This is something I’ve only recently started trying to work though. I frequently felt (and still feel!) out of sync with the world around me. It’s so, so rare I feel fully comfortable around someone. I preemptively assume they’re going to judge me or find me strange, and I’m quick to assume they’re doing that when maybe they really aren’t. I have many flaws and things I want to work on, but I do feel I go out of my way to make room for people and to let them be themselves. I’ve always struggled to feel like this is being reciprocated, but I need to take a good, hard look at whether that’s really the case. Maybe I’m being unfair.
I’m also trying really hard to self-validate in situations where I feel othered or like I’m doing or saying something “weird.” I want to try harder to make room for myself in the way I try to for other people. I want to stop falling into a spiral of shame or anxiety when I feel out of step with what’s happening around me. It isn’t easy, but I do think I’m starting to get better.
As much as I like myself in the abstract, I want to like myself more in practice and be kinder to myself. I know my people are out there! I’ve even been lucky enough to find some of them! But I also want to be a better friend to myself. I want to build up the compassion and courage to enter a situation and be myself, unworried (or less worried) of how I’m perceived.
Wow. Reading all of these posts and I feel like I have found my people...I could have written so many of these posts, and I relate so much to what you all are saying! I will add to the conversation that especially as my friends pair up and cocoon with their romantic partners, it bothers me so much that friendship is treated as “lesser than” romantic relationships. I think this is part of why I feel so much anxiety around friendships. As someone who doesn’t really care to date at this point in time, I rely almost exclusively on friendships to meet my needs for emotional intimacy and connection. But for as wonderful as friendship is, because it’s so devalued, people tend not to prioritize it to the degree that I do. It often feels like I can befriend a coupled person, but feel like the relationship is permanently imbalanced as far as who is prioritizing whom, or I can befriend a fellow single person, knowing that the second they get into a relationship, there’s a nonzero chance they will disappear and I’m back at square one. All of this to say, I feel this inordinate pressure to constantly be making friends to guard against what I see as likely abandonment at some point by a good chunk of them. Obviously not a terribly healthy instinct, so I’m working on just trying to be present and enjoy the connections that I do have right now...and be more compassionate for both my own shortcomings and those of others.
Also mid-30's queer woman here. I agree! For me, it seems a lot about letting go of that standard I hold myself to: to be endlessly engaging, full of good advice, funny, charming and sympathetic all at the same time. I don't have to put on the pretense for old friends (whom I adore and am close with but no longer share a zip code) and that's so lovely. However, trying to make new friends after moving (or some other major life change) becomes so tedious when trying to fulfill those constructed expectations. I also find it pushes me to be disappointed in others too easily and usually unfairly. Not everybody has the same amount of energy to put in to relationships as I might - whether it be due to career, familial obligations or just different priorities.
That being said... it gets SO hard to meet people as you get older. Especially (for me, preferring friendships with women) when you work in mostly male-dominated professions. I usually pursue friendships on "dating" sites, but you still have to sift through so much flakiness. Feeling like we have so many options, I think, makes us less inclined to commit to a potentially awkward first hang unless we're in the perfect headspace. Heh, am I the only one?
Man, that column hit home for me. I've always struggled with friendships (and relationships) - not just for all the usual reasons but also because of the lingering effects of childhood trauma. It's left me with these warring impulses of feeling threatened by other people and wanting to shut out the world, and also desperately needing companionship and comfort. Lots of years of therapy have helped me understand the problem better but not really to solve that contradiction.
Hi, Queer latina misfit here. So, friendships are fucking hard, y’all. I’ve been trying to talk with that one friend from school, but you know, it’s me who always start the conversation, she texts back but the barely minimum. I don’t want to give up, I mean I disappeared 5 years into depression and she write me one of the most beautiful letters one can imagine. But times they are a changing, we’re not the same. And it hurts. I’ve been trying to make new friendships and I’m not that compassionate, neither with myself or with the other person. I’ve found myself worthless, without a job or a plan, what can I talk about? So, I try to make the other person talk about themselves, and then I feel resentful. Or, I’m sorry for this, they seem a little to much, there’s a point where there’s always complaints about everything and everyone and it seems like a red flag for me. But, oh god, how much I hope to find my people, that we care truly and deeply about each other.
I'm a 45 year old asexual gal who blossomed artistically later in life. Never married, no kids, stopped dating in 1999. What I've learned is that I'm a good friend to others, always a ready shoulder, a kind word or quick bit of optimism, but I've not really had a good friend for myself. It's always one-sided.... They call when they need something and I'm the genie that provides. But there's no one I would/could call in times of distress. Self-examination has failed to reveal why, other than some sort of 'friendship defect.' And yet, I'm content, generally speaking, with this version of life and am satisfied in my own hobbies to not mourn the lack of closeness. Which is not to say I wouldn't adore chatting with others of a similar bent :)
Very much generalizing but I feel like women are all traumatized by the sexual economy/patriarchal structures and rely on friendships with each other for a certain kind of survival.
So it's this very charged kind of friendship when it's two women (or maybe any two people who aren't straight men, I don't know).
Those are some of the best relationships in my life; on the other hand, I hate when women hold each other (well, me) to a higher standard than they would a man--higher and more difficult expectations for time, energy, loyalty, devotion. Codependent expectations. Because rejection wounds are being activated. It's like the way I treated guys when I was at my most unhinged, that's how some women treat each other.
One of the most saddest and must severely painful aspects of the last few years has been seeing my female friends react to the stress of this culture and historical moment by lashing out at and attacking each other. Friendship break-ups. Because, deep down, one person felt rejected in some way. And sometimes your female friends feel like the lowest hanging fruit, when you can't direct your anger at the real source. I fucking hate it.
I feel like we should be blasting all that destructive energy at the patriarchy instead. If you're gonna be vindictive and controlling, at least do it to a man. I know that's not morally sound reasoning, and there's a lot of gender essentialism here, but I still feel that way a lot.
I'm extremely lucky to have found, after many years, a like minded band of queer misfits / allies who I consider my chosen family. It took me a long time to trust them, and it's still a work in progress. When I was younger, I was a part of queer spaces that engaged in a lot of gatekeeping behaviors, and at the time it hurt so badly to think I had found "my tribe" only to be told in various ways that I wasn't really gay enough to fit inside of it (the type of people I was around then really loved to brag about their 'gold star' status and there was strong stigma against people such as myself who could not claim that.)
I still worry about not being "gay enough," though much less so than before. Rooting out all that internalized stigma can feel sometimes like constantly having to bat away weeds that keep cropping up no matter what I do. With my chosen family, still, I have moments, sometimes days or weeks of time that I find myself pulling away from them - I often use being introverted as an excuse, but I know deep down it's more than that. It's fear, really, and a lot of shame. I don't like to need anyone, ever, and I hate asking for help. I've carried this from years of living in a household full of double binds and loads of abuse. That mindset of steely determination really powered me through a very hard, often extremely lonely 20's...but now on the other half of 30 I've found less energy for that particular way of living. It's true, you just get a little more tired as you get older! Defense mechanisms that worked in the past also start to break down. (Years of therapy have helped, too). It requires a herculean amount of energy to push things down and keep them there, as I found out. And yet, for all the years of therapy and all the self help books and blogs and yes, wonderful advice columns such as Ask Polly, and really working on trying to be vulnerable and open up, trust is still a huge issue for me. Just within the past year my closest friend said to me, "You know that we aren't going anywhere, right? That we love you and are here for you no matter what." And even that was almost too much, though deep down inside I am forever grateful that she said that. I guess I'm just saying that it does take a lot, and even sometimes your own best friend looking you in the eye and telling you her truth still doesn't heal all the trust issues you have, and maybe they will never quite go away; recovery from years of abuse, I've found, is just going to be a lifelong journey. There are many days I don't want to accept that, because I carry a lot of shame still from it --- one big thing I've learned in therapy recently is that I tend to lead with my shame, especially early on in relationships. As in, "here is all my damage, hope you don't find me too repellent" and then just cringe and hope for the best...it hasn't led me down a ton of healthy avenues in the past, to put it mildly! And it was doing me a huge disservice - is the "damage" and all the accompanying shame really all that I am made up of? This type of thinking has walled me off for a really long time and I'm trying to undo it, piece by piece.
Sorry this was so long, hopefully even just this post can help someone. My heart goes out to anyone that feels isolated, or alone, or that no one feels the way they do. It's amazing that this call out to people got 10k responses! That alone is a pretty hard factual number to show that most of us feel like this at least some of the time. That helps. I hope everyone reading this can find that bit of healing for themselves, in some way, too.
Hi everyone. I live in Australia and read Ask Polly every week, it's helped me so much. I'm in my mid-30s, married, one child under 2. Married people want friends, too. I agree that our culture over-burdens the romantic partner relationship, and that it's unrealistic for one person to be your everything. It's unnatural! Married people need and want friends too. Personally I find myself longing to spend time with people who don't have small kids, rather than other parents, or couples...I just want to talk to people who are in the midst of life experiences that are different than mine. And with my married female friends with kids, I find myself wanting to see the women on their own, NOT with the kid, NOT with the partner, but this is really hard to achieve!
I also think that the way we make friends is through shared life experiences, often intense ones. For me it's been high school, theatre shows at uni, and then a few friends made on various overseas exchange programs and at past and present jobs. As you move on from these intense experiences, you might be lucky to keep one or two friends from each 'stage', as your lives move in different directions.
I recently had a friendship break-up with a female friend from one of these stages, forged on exchange in China, and it knocked me around. We both had babies at around the same time and fell out over the issue of vaccination (I am pro, she is not so much). I tried to handle it delicately and in a way that might see the friendship survive, but it imploded, she accused me of being a bully, and that was that, all contact cut off. That was a year ago, and while I feel that that friendship is now in the 'too hard' basket, it was 14 years in the making and it's so sad to see it end in such a shitty way, when good friends are hard to come by. I feel like I should just 'get over it' and forget about her, but it still hurts. Because it's 'just a friendship' there is no real grieving allowed. Anyway. that's my two cents to the friendship discussion. We all need and want more friends, but coming by them in adulthood (and keeping them!) isn't as easy as it seems - married people included!
This is really resonating. I had some pretty big friend heartbreaks, disappointments, confusions, false starts and lettings-go this past year. Some of it is just being out-of-step (married and divorced early, child-free, so-single straight feminist living in a Midwestern city where the patriarchy is thriiiiiiiving and social life is usually centered around nuclear families and couples).
A part of it was me flat-out friendship-failing, usually pulling back too far out of fear or not communicating well. But some of it was what I'll call the "carnage phase" of learning to own my weirdness, set healthy boundaries for myself, spend more time doing the things I love to do, and let go as gracefully as possible when friendship reciprocity isn't there.
I have a few long-time friends and some new friends who supported that growth--so thankful for them. But not all of my friendships or friend-groups survived those changes. That surprised me for some reason. I felt hurt, rejected and lonely a lot. I obsessed over what I was losing instead of appreciating what I kept and/or gained.
I'm slowly getting my courage back, trying to show up (remotely!) for the ones who "bit", and reaching out when I can. It's hard. It's scary. It's exhausting. I'm solo quarantining and aiming to maintain some version of mental health, so I'm not pushing myself too hard. Self compassion, self compassion, self compassion.
Interesting to note: The newer friendships I've made lately have all emerged from shared creative projects/passions. I'm definitely in the process of finding/celebrating my "swans"—highly rec the Ugly Duckling retelling chapter in Clarissa Pinkola Estes's Women Who Run With Wolves for anybody feeling misfit-y and friend-challenged right now.
Straight gal here. Wow - what a well timed thread, as my friendships have been a main topic of discussion in therapy lately. This might be an unpopular opinion but I am personally t h r i v i n g in quarantine. My work and exercise are locked in, and my romantic relationship is deepening, and my housemates and I are getting closer and coexisting very well. I am also virtually very involved with my parents and sibling.
Among all that, I can’t handle much more. But truthfully, many of my friendships were already struggling to feel vibrant before coronavirus, and it’s almost like I am grateful for a solid excuse of covid-19 related lifestyle changes to not have to engage. “I am too tired” lands better in pandemic times than it did back in January.
I have struggled with friendship for all my life. I have felt like a mean, lives-inside-her-head awkward, occasionally ugly, weirdo all my life, but contrary to my self-perception I have more than once been referred to as "popular". I will never forget a happy hour moment when my coworker sat down next to me and my work friend and shouted "Look, I'm sitting with the cool kids!" to another coworker way across the bar. Who, me?????
I know that I am overblowing this fear or ignoring my own deliberate choices but... I am very envious of people who have lifelong girl friendships or girl groups; my friendships have all struggled. I feel like a fraud, a lot - or a cheat - because every few years I morph into a new person with new interests. I also didn’t always act the best, especially in my teens and very early 20s (21-22). In my later early 20s my “growth” or “changing interests” caused friction, sometimes because I would drop people undeservedly, other times because some of my friends preferred sycophantic sidekicks to partners in parallel. With all these changes, I feel like I am missing out on having people know me all my life and knowing people all their lives. I broke my high school best friend's heart and I exited that group. Many people from that group are still in touch. In my junior year of college, I ended a 3 year relationship that felt bland and not me, exited that group, and found a newer one who shared my values of leftist politics and partying - many of whom I am in loose to close touch with. It was not without drama, though. I was close with a girl but that faded a year or two after we graduated. Now after a cross country move, and then a west-coast move, I almost roll with the punches — I know many of these relationships are not permanent or will end up in my phone - intermittent communication is the norm, it seems.
I feel my transience strongly but have almost embraced it. It’s not that I don’t have friends, it’s just that my expectations have really shifted - become low and neutral. There are 4-5 people who seem to be growing in tandem with me through this decade and I cherish them to bits. Our communication is mostly internet based due to my geography but sometimes it feels like I’m not present enough, or vice versa.
Over the past year or so I have had some big life changes - ended a toxic relationship, unexpected landed in an extremely healthy one, and had great progress in my career, which has changed me from a party girl with awful and funny Tinder stories to someone who reads about career development and goes to bed at 10. Old me was more fun, for sure. New me is a baller though, and happier to boot. Last year, I couldn’t get a text back from tepid dudes, was literally always tipsy at 5pm, and now boyfriend and I work out together and are planning to get a kitten. I make him strong Negronis and hardly ever make one for myself (none of this is a value judgment, just a personal shift). In this phase it seems like people I relate most to are people who are also developing their career and relationships, and I feel guilty for not wanting to engage with people who are in a different phase of life. I also know that anything could happen at any time and my current cruise control would be interrupted and I'd end up feeling lost and confused again, but yet I find myself unable to cultivate the relationships that have seen a lot of my past loss and confusion. Don't I owe them that? “This is why you don’t have a big group of girlfriends! Who’s going to be at your bachelorette party??” is something I often think to myself. I secretly wonder if I’m too judgy and unequipped to have friends.
My therapist and I have been talking about exactly this. I really resonate with what you said, Heather, as being someone who presents as perfectly competent but has this weird underlying sense of being out of step.
For me it's very difficult, shameful, to admit desire to other people. To say out loud, "I would like that cake" or "I would like to do this pleasurable thing with you."
This may be overly specific but many of my friendships have suffered to some degree from everything moving online - or more specifically, onto my phone. Of course it's always been harder to maintain in-person connection and spontaneity as people get older, take on other responsibilities, move to different cities, but something about texting or calling on the same device that I use to respond to work emails, read the news, track my fitness, etc. makes responding to or getting touch with a friend feel especially like one more item on an endless to-do list. And it's not just long-distance friends from earlier in life - it seems to me like texting/social media/etc. is the dominant mode of interaction even among new friends in the same cities. Of course, I'd rather have the online connections than not, and I do feel like even the friendships that are only a few lines of text a few times a year are genuine relationships. But without frequent, unforced, in-person interaction, it's just harder to keep connections meaningful, let alone make them in the first place.
I'm having this issue big time. 50% of my friends who are islands (in the stream?), introvert-y, totally down with talking online from the getgo. Those people are fine. I hear from them. No big deal. The other 50% is an in-person theater gang that I am having a hard time with since quarantine. Most of them haven't been heard from at all, or a few briefly surface to send me a yarn meme or something. Most turned me down for a group text (one said he didn't want his phone blown up and I was all, what the hell else do you have to do?!) and the group text of 2 has not gone well. I've invited the group to events and a few responded, but most are ignoring it. I got one local that went to my online birthday party, which should tell you something. I am Deeply Bothered by this, but it's like, what can I do? I don't want to be a naggy bitch who harasses people to do things, but if this is going to go on for years, we're gonna lose touch. So far it seems like I am not the Pied Piper who gets people to do things, but the director-sorts in my life have better odds of getting responses. I feel like I have a Cyrano situation going on where it has to go through the "right" person in order to happen. I can't be the messenger/asker person. I've asked how those people do it and they say stuff like "I call people" and "I just keep asking or assume they're doing it," but I'm so afraid of being Naggy Bitch, I can't do that.
And right now? I reaaaaaaaaaally wanna talk to my crush, who has barely said anything other than he's fine and working a few times since this went down. It's mutual but when he figured it out, he said he wasn't ready to date yet, so we've been in weird limbo on that topic and since he seems to be slow to get into relationships, I figured we'd just keep developing the friendship and see where it goes from there. Now everything is thrown all to shit and I don't know what to do. He's terrible at initiating (and said so to me, it freaks him out) and I'd be fine with doing it, but I straight up get upset if people ignore me or say next to nothing and I just feel like I'll be mad at myself again for trying AGAIN and he just sends a proof of life text. I have no reason to think he stopped caring, mind you, but everyone's f'd up these days and who knows. I just ruminate on this one all the time and make myself crazy.
Why haven't I learned how to reach out to each other without fear? I'm afraid of being ignored/blown off/ghosted and mad again. And in the case of the crush, I don't want to scare him off or go too fast or be too much when he's not ready, but I'm so tired of trying to figure out how not to scare a deer here. And even if this was going well, it'll be years, if that, before I can ever see him again, so what is the point?
I've had such a hard time creating meaningful friendships due to a number of factors, not limited to PTSD, depression, and symptoms that make it incredibly hard to open up about personal details. I've often been the receiver of others' trauma and thoughts rather than an equal participant in friendships I've tried to cultivate. I've grown a lot through treatment and recently coming out as nonbinary, but I do not have a real queer community yet as a recently emerged member, but I so value the writers and their communities which I am able to follow and interact with online. Side note-- pen pals are my jam!
Wow, I had absolutely no idea that your newsletter had a comments section. I don't know what I want to add to this right now except that I'm such a massive fan. I'm a 24-year-old living in Europe and have been reading all of your old and new columns for about 3 years now. I can safely say that they have had a very real positive impact on my life. The gloriousness and imperfection of the letters and your response turn me into a better and more understanding human (of myself and others).
This thread clearly resonated with many people. If anyone would like to continue the conversation via personal coaching sessions by phone let me know. I am finishing up my coaching training and have 60 free coaching hours to obtain by July. Email me at karenkozara@gmail.com
sorry, wrote and deleted a comment, couldn't bear it to have my full name show up, I didn't realise it was going to do that. but I'll enjoy reading others' comments. x
Thank you so much for your words about friendship. I was wallowing in self pity yesterday because I seemed to be the only one I know who has acquaintances but not close friends anymore. The older I become, the more and more time I spend in my own company, enjoying my favorite pursuits. I can’t decipher, however, if my evolving introverted behavior is in part because I can’t muster up courage to be vulnerable to others anymore. I had great close friends who over the years met their spouses/ partners. Is it true that singles stop being invited to couples homes? Or am I the one who has failed to water and tend my friendships?
Essentially, we're all alone.... Together! There's so many of us who missed the friendship gene and yet here we are, supporting each other like cousins in the family pool. We're actually pretty awesome. I think this calls for a Facebook group page!
I'm definitely a quality over quantity girl, and in every chapter of my life, I have at least one friend locally who is a true friend, and then I keep in touch with my other true friends from a distance.
I'm proud to report I have watched every season of The Bachelor on skype with my bestie from High School - going on 15 years! It's nice to have the ritual of something that keeps us "hanging out" on a regular schedule. Would I love to have fully formed friend groups? Yeah, sure. But I've accepted I'm never going to be that girl. I'm the 1:1 friend.
Friendship is hard for me right now because I've recently relocated for work and I don't plan to stay here long. Hard to invest in friendships without feeling rooted. I'm 40 minutes from my best friend of life, and 60 minutes from my sister, who I am very close to, so when I want to hang with a human, I drive to see them. I'm used to living in a rural community where everything and everyone is within a 10 minute radius so you see them more regularly...
Hmmm- I thought I had a subscription to Ask Polly but it doesn't look like I can access this original column? any ideas what I might be doing wrong? Thanks
AN UPDATE! The letter writer from yesterday says she wants ALL OF THE EMAILS from the friendly strangers! Very exciting! Maybe she'll post something here about her experience reading 10k emails from strangers!!! Yeeeeeeeeeee, stay tuned!
I'll start things off right here (gulps, taps microphone, stares out at empty room) by saying that I've been a misfit all my life, I've struggled with my oldest friendships for years, and I have a million and one things to say about making new friends and feeling left out and being a fucking weirdo who's always out of step with other people (while also presenting as a very socially skilled and not all that introverted human). And mostly I think the key is just jumping right in and being exactly as strange as you are. And also admitting that you're not that strange? And you're not that brave? And you're not that normal either? In other words, presenting yourself as the ever-shifting freak, the 15 or 35 different personalities, that you are, without fear, and seeing who bites. Who will bite? It's suspenseful. It's not a verdict on your value, though. It's just fun. And the more you do it -- stick your neck out, dive in -- the better it feels. It also makes you a lot less blamey with your oldest friends, the ones that kick up your weird defensive reactions the most. And it forces you to notice that you might FEEL open, but you're ALSO a tiny bit avoidant in your own ways. And that builds your empathy for others who might seem brutal from a distance, but are more like you than you think.
I've thought so much about friendship over the past two years. I'm a person who, probably because I don't connect with or even talk to my family, deeply values friendship, especially with women. Time and again, I find myself frustrated that friendship isn't given the same cultural significance as romantic partnership. Call Your Girlfriend taught me that this has apparently only been true in our country since the '50s, when the government aggressively pushed the nuclear family. Meaningful friendship started to decline then and is now on life support. I've seen the effects in my personal life many times.
The cultural message is that women should only be investing deeply into romantic relationships, especially if they're with men. I wish friends had the bravery, bandwidth, and societal permission to invest more in each other. Real, committed friends deserve the same longterm loyalty and devotion as partners.
And as Esther Perel always says, we shouldn't expect to get everything we need from one mate. We would benefit from different qualities of intimacy spread among various friends. Plus, we should be able to choose who matters in our lives, regardless of DNA.
FUCK YEAH, FRIENDSHIP!
*Readers should know this is coming from someone who started The Official Best Friends Club in second grade, named herself president, and made two little girls pout in opposite corners of the backyard at the very first meeting.
I literally had to go to therapy for this. I went to a therapist and said: look, I need to understand people. You understand them. Help me. It will probably take about 3 sessions. I explained my issues.
She just looked at me in silence and then said: this is going to take a lot more than three sessions.
FIVE YEARS later, and thank God for her.
I used to think that everyone was a universe inside, and if I could say the right things, engage the right way, I would see their universe and they would see mine and yay! Connection!
I finally figured out two things: first, that people are hard for me a lot of times because, here in the suburbs at least, people's values are different from mine. It took me a long time to stop judging them for that. I don't care who has more money. I don't like conversations where women judge other women based on their looks. But that's the stuff that comes up in conversation here. And it's still a bummer, and it's still true that I don't participate in those discussions. And I'm working on not judging them and feeling either superior to them or disappointed in them for it. They love their kids; I mine. They are kind and giving and funny. So I am trying to throw my shitty, trying not to be judgemental (but still judgemental) self out there in good faith and take them in good faith. And allow the little connections to be there.
Second, because my family is not a family, I think my idea of friendship is a lot more work than other people's idea of friendship. So all of it is more weighty because I think I always expected friends to be family and for myself to be family to them. DEEP understanding. INTENSE conversation. But no. That's not what friendship means to most people. Friendship is light to them. It's just hanging out. It's an escape from their family's heaviness.
So yeah. I still feel lonely sometimes. But I'm learning.
This is something I’ve only recently started trying to work though. I frequently felt (and still feel!) out of sync with the world around me. It’s so, so rare I feel fully comfortable around someone. I preemptively assume they’re going to judge me or find me strange, and I’m quick to assume they’re doing that when maybe they really aren’t. I have many flaws and things I want to work on, but I do feel I go out of my way to make room for people and to let them be themselves. I’ve always struggled to feel like this is being reciprocated, but I need to take a good, hard look at whether that’s really the case. Maybe I’m being unfair.
I’m also trying really hard to self-validate in situations where I feel othered or like I’m doing or saying something “weird.” I want to try harder to make room for myself in the way I try to for other people. I want to stop falling into a spiral of shame or anxiety when I feel out of step with what’s happening around me. It isn’t easy, but I do think I’m starting to get better.
As much as I like myself in the abstract, I want to like myself more in practice and be kinder to myself. I know my people are out there! I’ve even been lucky enough to find some of them! But I also want to be a better friend to myself. I want to build up the compassion and courage to enter a situation and be myself, unworried (or less worried) of how I’m perceived.
Wow. Reading all of these posts and I feel like I have found my people...I could have written so many of these posts, and I relate so much to what you all are saying! I will add to the conversation that especially as my friends pair up and cocoon with their romantic partners, it bothers me so much that friendship is treated as “lesser than” romantic relationships. I think this is part of why I feel so much anxiety around friendships. As someone who doesn’t really care to date at this point in time, I rely almost exclusively on friendships to meet my needs for emotional intimacy and connection. But for as wonderful as friendship is, because it’s so devalued, people tend not to prioritize it to the degree that I do. It often feels like I can befriend a coupled person, but feel like the relationship is permanently imbalanced as far as who is prioritizing whom, or I can befriend a fellow single person, knowing that the second they get into a relationship, there’s a nonzero chance they will disappear and I’m back at square one. All of this to say, I feel this inordinate pressure to constantly be making friends to guard against what I see as likely abandonment at some point by a good chunk of them. Obviously not a terribly healthy instinct, so I’m working on just trying to be present and enjoy the connections that I do have right now...and be more compassionate for both my own shortcomings and those of others.
Also mid-30's queer woman here. I agree! For me, it seems a lot about letting go of that standard I hold myself to: to be endlessly engaging, full of good advice, funny, charming and sympathetic all at the same time. I don't have to put on the pretense for old friends (whom I adore and am close with but no longer share a zip code) and that's so lovely. However, trying to make new friends after moving (or some other major life change) becomes so tedious when trying to fulfill those constructed expectations. I also find it pushes me to be disappointed in others too easily and usually unfairly. Not everybody has the same amount of energy to put in to relationships as I might - whether it be due to career, familial obligations or just different priorities.
That being said... it gets SO hard to meet people as you get older. Especially (for me, preferring friendships with women) when you work in mostly male-dominated professions. I usually pursue friendships on "dating" sites, but you still have to sift through so much flakiness. Feeling like we have so many options, I think, makes us less inclined to commit to a potentially awkward first hang unless we're in the perfect headspace. Heh, am I the only one?
Man, that column hit home for me. I've always struggled with friendships (and relationships) - not just for all the usual reasons but also because of the lingering effects of childhood trauma. It's left me with these warring impulses of feeling threatened by other people and wanting to shut out the world, and also desperately needing companionship and comfort. Lots of years of therapy have helped me understand the problem better but not really to solve that contradiction.
Hi, Queer latina misfit here. So, friendships are fucking hard, y’all. I’ve been trying to talk with that one friend from school, but you know, it’s me who always start the conversation, she texts back but the barely minimum. I don’t want to give up, I mean I disappeared 5 years into depression and she write me one of the most beautiful letters one can imagine. But times they are a changing, we’re not the same. And it hurts. I’ve been trying to make new friendships and I’m not that compassionate, neither with myself or with the other person. I’ve found myself worthless, without a job or a plan, what can I talk about? So, I try to make the other person talk about themselves, and then I feel resentful. Or, I’m sorry for this, they seem a little to much, there’s a point where there’s always complaints about everything and everyone and it seems like a red flag for me. But, oh god, how much I hope to find my people, that we care truly and deeply about each other.
I'm a 45 year old asexual gal who blossomed artistically later in life. Never married, no kids, stopped dating in 1999. What I've learned is that I'm a good friend to others, always a ready shoulder, a kind word or quick bit of optimism, but I've not really had a good friend for myself. It's always one-sided.... They call when they need something and I'm the genie that provides. But there's no one I would/could call in times of distress. Self-examination has failed to reveal why, other than some sort of 'friendship defect.' And yet, I'm content, generally speaking, with this version of life and am satisfied in my own hobbies to not mourn the lack of closeness. Which is not to say I wouldn't adore chatting with others of a similar bent :)
Very much generalizing but I feel like women are all traumatized by the sexual economy/patriarchal structures and rely on friendships with each other for a certain kind of survival.
So it's this very charged kind of friendship when it's two women (or maybe any two people who aren't straight men, I don't know).
Those are some of the best relationships in my life; on the other hand, I hate when women hold each other (well, me) to a higher standard than they would a man--higher and more difficult expectations for time, energy, loyalty, devotion. Codependent expectations. Because rejection wounds are being activated. It's like the way I treated guys when I was at my most unhinged, that's how some women treat each other.
One of the most saddest and must severely painful aspects of the last few years has been seeing my female friends react to the stress of this culture and historical moment by lashing out at and attacking each other. Friendship break-ups. Because, deep down, one person felt rejected in some way. And sometimes your female friends feel like the lowest hanging fruit, when you can't direct your anger at the real source. I fucking hate it.
I feel like we should be blasting all that destructive energy at the patriarchy instead. If you're gonna be vindictive and controlling, at least do it to a man. I know that's not morally sound reasoning, and there's a lot of gender essentialism here, but I still feel that way a lot.
I'm extremely lucky to have found, after many years, a like minded band of queer misfits / allies who I consider my chosen family. It took me a long time to trust them, and it's still a work in progress. When I was younger, I was a part of queer spaces that engaged in a lot of gatekeeping behaviors, and at the time it hurt so badly to think I had found "my tribe" only to be told in various ways that I wasn't really gay enough to fit inside of it (the type of people I was around then really loved to brag about their 'gold star' status and there was strong stigma against people such as myself who could not claim that.)
I still worry about not being "gay enough," though much less so than before. Rooting out all that internalized stigma can feel sometimes like constantly having to bat away weeds that keep cropping up no matter what I do. With my chosen family, still, I have moments, sometimes days or weeks of time that I find myself pulling away from them - I often use being introverted as an excuse, but I know deep down it's more than that. It's fear, really, and a lot of shame. I don't like to need anyone, ever, and I hate asking for help. I've carried this from years of living in a household full of double binds and loads of abuse. That mindset of steely determination really powered me through a very hard, often extremely lonely 20's...but now on the other half of 30 I've found less energy for that particular way of living. It's true, you just get a little more tired as you get older! Defense mechanisms that worked in the past also start to break down. (Years of therapy have helped, too). It requires a herculean amount of energy to push things down and keep them there, as I found out. And yet, for all the years of therapy and all the self help books and blogs and yes, wonderful advice columns such as Ask Polly, and really working on trying to be vulnerable and open up, trust is still a huge issue for me. Just within the past year my closest friend said to me, "You know that we aren't going anywhere, right? That we love you and are here for you no matter what." And even that was almost too much, though deep down inside I am forever grateful that she said that. I guess I'm just saying that it does take a lot, and even sometimes your own best friend looking you in the eye and telling you her truth still doesn't heal all the trust issues you have, and maybe they will never quite go away; recovery from years of abuse, I've found, is just going to be a lifelong journey. There are many days I don't want to accept that, because I carry a lot of shame still from it --- one big thing I've learned in therapy recently is that I tend to lead with my shame, especially early on in relationships. As in, "here is all my damage, hope you don't find me too repellent" and then just cringe and hope for the best...it hasn't led me down a ton of healthy avenues in the past, to put it mildly! And it was doing me a huge disservice - is the "damage" and all the accompanying shame really all that I am made up of? This type of thinking has walled me off for a really long time and I'm trying to undo it, piece by piece.
Sorry this was so long, hopefully even just this post can help someone. My heart goes out to anyone that feels isolated, or alone, or that no one feels the way they do. It's amazing that this call out to people got 10k responses! That alone is a pretty hard factual number to show that most of us feel like this at least some of the time. That helps. I hope everyone reading this can find that bit of healing for themselves, in some way, too.
Hi everyone. I live in Australia and read Ask Polly every week, it's helped me so much. I'm in my mid-30s, married, one child under 2. Married people want friends, too. I agree that our culture over-burdens the romantic partner relationship, and that it's unrealistic for one person to be your everything. It's unnatural! Married people need and want friends too. Personally I find myself longing to spend time with people who don't have small kids, rather than other parents, or couples...I just want to talk to people who are in the midst of life experiences that are different than mine. And with my married female friends with kids, I find myself wanting to see the women on their own, NOT with the kid, NOT with the partner, but this is really hard to achieve!
I also think that the way we make friends is through shared life experiences, often intense ones. For me it's been high school, theatre shows at uni, and then a few friends made on various overseas exchange programs and at past and present jobs. As you move on from these intense experiences, you might be lucky to keep one or two friends from each 'stage', as your lives move in different directions.
I recently had a friendship break-up with a female friend from one of these stages, forged on exchange in China, and it knocked me around. We both had babies at around the same time and fell out over the issue of vaccination (I am pro, she is not so much). I tried to handle it delicately and in a way that might see the friendship survive, but it imploded, she accused me of being a bully, and that was that, all contact cut off. That was a year ago, and while I feel that that friendship is now in the 'too hard' basket, it was 14 years in the making and it's so sad to see it end in such a shitty way, when good friends are hard to come by. I feel like I should just 'get over it' and forget about her, but it still hurts. Because it's 'just a friendship' there is no real grieving allowed. Anyway. that's my two cents to the friendship discussion. We all need and want more friends, but coming by them in adulthood (and keeping them!) isn't as easy as it seems - married people included!
This is really resonating. I had some pretty big friend heartbreaks, disappointments, confusions, false starts and lettings-go this past year. Some of it is just being out-of-step (married and divorced early, child-free, so-single straight feminist living in a Midwestern city where the patriarchy is thriiiiiiiving and social life is usually centered around nuclear families and couples).
A part of it was me flat-out friendship-failing, usually pulling back too far out of fear or not communicating well. But some of it was what I'll call the "carnage phase" of learning to own my weirdness, set healthy boundaries for myself, spend more time doing the things I love to do, and let go as gracefully as possible when friendship reciprocity isn't there.
I have a few long-time friends and some new friends who supported that growth--so thankful for them. But not all of my friendships or friend-groups survived those changes. That surprised me for some reason. I felt hurt, rejected and lonely a lot. I obsessed over what I was losing instead of appreciating what I kept and/or gained.
I'm slowly getting my courage back, trying to show up (remotely!) for the ones who "bit", and reaching out when I can. It's hard. It's scary. It's exhausting. I'm solo quarantining and aiming to maintain some version of mental health, so I'm not pushing myself too hard. Self compassion, self compassion, self compassion.
Interesting to note: The newer friendships I've made lately have all emerged from shared creative projects/passions. I'm definitely in the process of finding/celebrating my "swans"—highly rec the Ugly Duckling retelling chapter in Clarissa Pinkola Estes's Women Who Run With Wolves for anybody feeling misfit-y and friend-challenged right now.
Straight gal here. Wow - what a well timed thread, as my friendships have been a main topic of discussion in therapy lately. This might be an unpopular opinion but I am personally t h r i v i n g in quarantine. My work and exercise are locked in, and my romantic relationship is deepening, and my housemates and I are getting closer and coexisting very well. I am also virtually very involved with my parents and sibling.
Among all that, I can’t handle much more. But truthfully, many of my friendships were already struggling to feel vibrant before coronavirus, and it’s almost like I am grateful for a solid excuse of covid-19 related lifestyle changes to not have to engage. “I am too tired” lands better in pandemic times than it did back in January.
I have struggled with friendship for all my life. I have felt like a mean, lives-inside-her-head awkward, occasionally ugly, weirdo all my life, but contrary to my self-perception I have more than once been referred to as "popular". I will never forget a happy hour moment when my coworker sat down next to me and my work friend and shouted "Look, I'm sitting with the cool kids!" to another coworker way across the bar. Who, me?????
I know that I am overblowing this fear or ignoring my own deliberate choices but... I am very envious of people who have lifelong girl friendships or girl groups; my friendships have all struggled. I feel like a fraud, a lot - or a cheat - because every few years I morph into a new person with new interests. I also didn’t always act the best, especially in my teens and very early 20s (21-22). In my later early 20s my “growth” or “changing interests” caused friction, sometimes because I would drop people undeservedly, other times because some of my friends preferred sycophantic sidekicks to partners in parallel. With all these changes, I feel like I am missing out on having people know me all my life and knowing people all their lives. I broke my high school best friend's heart and I exited that group. Many people from that group are still in touch. In my junior year of college, I ended a 3 year relationship that felt bland and not me, exited that group, and found a newer one who shared my values of leftist politics and partying - many of whom I am in loose to close touch with. It was not without drama, though. I was close with a girl but that faded a year or two after we graduated. Now after a cross country move, and then a west-coast move, I almost roll with the punches — I know many of these relationships are not permanent or will end up in my phone - intermittent communication is the norm, it seems.
I feel my transience strongly but have almost embraced it. It’s not that I don’t have friends, it’s just that my expectations have really shifted - become low and neutral. There are 4-5 people who seem to be growing in tandem with me through this decade and I cherish them to bits. Our communication is mostly internet based due to my geography but sometimes it feels like I’m not present enough, or vice versa.
Over the past year or so I have had some big life changes - ended a toxic relationship, unexpected landed in an extremely healthy one, and had great progress in my career, which has changed me from a party girl with awful and funny Tinder stories to someone who reads about career development and goes to bed at 10. Old me was more fun, for sure. New me is a baller though, and happier to boot. Last year, I couldn’t get a text back from tepid dudes, was literally always tipsy at 5pm, and now boyfriend and I work out together and are planning to get a kitten. I make him strong Negronis and hardly ever make one for myself (none of this is a value judgment, just a personal shift). In this phase it seems like people I relate most to are people who are also developing their career and relationships, and I feel guilty for not wanting to engage with people who are in a different phase of life. I also know that anything could happen at any time and my current cruise control would be interrupted and I'd end up feeling lost and confused again, but yet I find myself unable to cultivate the relationships that have seen a lot of my past loss and confusion. Don't I owe them that? “This is why you don’t have a big group of girlfriends! Who’s going to be at your bachelorette party??” is something I often think to myself. I secretly wonder if I’m too judgy and unequipped to have friends.
My therapist and I have been talking about exactly this. I really resonate with what you said, Heather, as being someone who presents as perfectly competent but has this weird underlying sense of being out of step.
For me it's very difficult, shameful, to admit desire to other people. To say out loud, "I would like that cake" or "I would like to do this pleasurable thing with you."
This may be overly specific but many of my friendships have suffered to some degree from everything moving online - or more specifically, onto my phone. Of course it's always been harder to maintain in-person connection and spontaneity as people get older, take on other responsibilities, move to different cities, but something about texting or calling on the same device that I use to respond to work emails, read the news, track my fitness, etc. makes responding to or getting touch with a friend feel especially like one more item on an endless to-do list. And it's not just long-distance friends from earlier in life - it seems to me like texting/social media/etc. is the dominant mode of interaction even among new friends in the same cities. Of course, I'd rather have the online connections than not, and I do feel like even the friendships that are only a few lines of text a few times a year are genuine relationships. But without frequent, unforced, in-person interaction, it's just harder to keep connections meaningful, let alone make them in the first place.
I could use some more friends who have emotional intelligence. :)
I'm having this issue big time. 50% of my friends who are islands (in the stream?), introvert-y, totally down with talking online from the getgo. Those people are fine. I hear from them. No big deal. The other 50% is an in-person theater gang that I am having a hard time with since quarantine. Most of them haven't been heard from at all, or a few briefly surface to send me a yarn meme or something. Most turned me down for a group text (one said he didn't want his phone blown up and I was all, what the hell else do you have to do?!) and the group text of 2 has not gone well. I've invited the group to events and a few responded, but most are ignoring it. I got one local that went to my online birthday party, which should tell you something. I am Deeply Bothered by this, but it's like, what can I do? I don't want to be a naggy bitch who harasses people to do things, but if this is going to go on for years, we're gonna lose touch. So far it seems like I am not the Pied Piper who gets people to do things, but the director-sorts in my life have better odds of getting responses. I feel like I have a Cyrano situation going on where it has to go through the "right" person in order to happen. I can't be the messenger/asker person. I've asked how those people do it and they say stuff like "I call people" and "I just keep asking or assume they're doing it," but I'm so afraid of being Naggy Bitch, I can't do that.
And right now? I reaaaaaaaaaally wanna talk to my crush, who has barely said anything other than he's fine and working a few times since this went down. It's mutual but when he figured it out, he said he wasn't ready to date yet, so we've been in weird limbo on that topic and since he seems to be slow to get into relationships, I figured we'd just keep developing the friendship and see where it goes from there. Now everything is thrown all to shit and I don't know what to do. He's terrible at initiating (and said so to me, it freaks him out) and I'd be fine with doing it, but I straight up get upset if people ignore me or say next to nothing and I just feel like I'll be mad at myself again for trying AGAIN and he just sends a proof of life text. I have no reason to think he stopped caring, mind you, but everyone's f'd up these days and who knows. I just ruminate on this one all the time and make myself crazy.
Why haven't I learned how to reach out to each other without fear? I'm afraid of being ignored/blown off/ghosted and mad again. And in the case of the crush, I don't want to scare him off or go too fast or be too much when he's not ready, but I'm so tired of trying to figure out how not to scare a deer here. And even if this was going well, it'll be years, if that, before I can ever see him again, so what is the point?
I've had such a hard time creating meaningful friendships due to a number of factors, not limited to PTSD, depression, and symptoms that make it incredibly hard to open up about personal details. I've often been the receiver of others' trauma and thoughts rather than an equal participant in friendships I've tried to cultivate. I've grown a lot through treatment and recently coming out as nonbinary, but I do not have a real queer community yet as a recently emerged member, but I so value the writers and their communities which I am able to follow and interact with online. Side note-- pen pals are my jam!
Wow, I had absolutely no idea that your newsletter had a comments section. I don't know what I want to add to this right now except that I'm such a massive fan. I'm a 24-year-old living in Europe and have been reading all of your old and new columns for about 3 years now. I can safely say that they have had a very real positive impact on my life. The gloriousness and imperfection of the letters and your response turn me into a better and more understanding human (of myself and others).
This thread clearly resonated with many people. If anyone would like to continue the conversation via personal coaching sessions by phone let me know. I am finishing up my coaching training and have 60 free coaching hours to obtain by July. Email me at karenkozara@gmail.com
sorry, wrote and deleted a comment, couldn't bear it to have my full name show up, I didn't realise it was going to do that. but I'll enjoy reading others' comments. x
Thank you so much for your words about friendship. I was wallowing in self pity yesterday because I seemed to be the only one I know who has acquaintances but not close friends anymore. The older I become, the more and more time I spend in my own company, enjoying my favorite pursuits. I can’t decipher, however, if my evolving introverted behavior is in part because I can’t muster up courage to be vulnerable to others anymore. I had great close friends who over the years met their spouses/ partners. Is it true that singles stop being invited to couples homes? Or am I the one who has failed to water and tend my friendships?
Essentially, we're all alone.... Together! There's so many of us who missed the friendship gene and yet here we are, supporting each other like cousins in the family pool. We're actually pretty awesome. I think this calls for a Facebook group page!
If anyone is still reading:
Come join our forum of queer misfits seeking friends! Now live, thanks to a kind reader!
https://connectoryx.com/
I'm definitely a quality over quantity girl, and in every chapter of my life, I have at least one friend locally who is a true friend, and then I keep in touch with my other true friends from a distance.
I'm proud to report I have watched every season of The Bachelor on skype with my bestie from High School - going on 15 years! It's nice to have the ritual of something that keeps us "hanging out" on a regular schedule. Would I love to have fully formed friend groups? Yeah, sure. But I've accepted I'm never going to be that girl. I'm the 1:1 friend.
Friendship is hard for me right now because I've recently relocated for work and I don't plan to stay here long. Hard to invest in friendships without feeling rooted. I'm 40 minutes from my best friend of life, and 60 minutes from my sister, who I am very close to, so when I want to hang with a human, I drive to see them. I'm used to living in a rural community where everything and everyone is within a 10 minute radius so you see them more regularly...
Hmmm- I thought I had a subscription to Ask Polly but it doesn't look like I can access this original column? any ideas what I might be doing wrong? Thanks