friendship – just moving along like everyone else

the power of friendship

sounddesignerjeans:

princess-mint:

alarajrogers:

niambi:

I’m????

Oh my God this actually explains so much.

So there’s a known thing in the study of human psychology/sociology/what-have-you where men are known to, on average, rely entirely on their female romantic partner for emotional support. Bonding with other men is done at a more superficial level involving fun group activities and conversations about general subjects but rarely involves actually leaning on other men or being really honest about emotional problems. Men use alcohol to be able to lower their inhibitions enough to expose themselves emotionally to other men, but if you can’t get emotional support unless you’re drunk, you have a problem.

So men need to have a woman in their lives to have anyone they can share their emotional needs and vulnerabilities with. However, since women are not socialized to fear sharing these things, women’s friendships with other women are heavily based on emotional support. If you can’t lean on her when you’re weak, she’s not your friend. To women, what friendship is is someone who listens to all your problems and keeps you company.

So this disconnect men are suffering from is that they think that only a person who is having sex with you will share their emotions and expect support. That’s what a romantic partner does. But women think that’s what a friend does. So women do it for their romantic partners and their friends and expect a male friend to do it for them the same as a female friend would. This fools the male friend into thinking there must be something romantic there when there is not.

This here is an example of patriarchy hurting everyone. Women have a much healthier approach to emotional support – they don’t die when widowed at nearly the rate that widowers die and they don’t suffer emotionally from divorce nearly as much even though they suffer much more financially, and this is because women don’t put all their emotional needs on one person. Women have a support network of other women. But men are trained to never share their emotions except with their wife or girlfriend, because that isn’t manly. So when she dies or leaves them, they have no one to turn to to help with the grief, causing higher rates of death, depression, alcoholism and general awfulness upon losing a romantic partner.

So men suffer terribly from being trained in this way. But women suffer in that they can’t reach out to male friends for basic friendship. I am not sure any man can comprehend how heartbreaking it is to realize that a guy you thought was your friend was really just trying to get into your pants. Friendship is real. It’s emotional, it’s important to us. We lean on our friends. Knowing that your friend was secretly seething with resentment when you were opening up to him and sharing your problems because he felt like he shouldn’t have to do that kind of emotional work for anyone not having sex with him, and he felt used by you for that reason, is horrible. And the fact that men can’t share emotional needs with other men means that lots of men who can’t get a girlfriend end up turning into horrible misogynistic people who think the world owes them the love of a woman, like it’s a commodity… because no one will die without sex. Masturbation exists. But people will die or suffer deep emotional trauma from having no one they can lean on emotionally. And men who are suffering deep emotional trauma, and have been trained to channel their personal trauma into rage because they can’t share it, become mass shooters, or rapists, or simply horrible misogynists.

The only way to fix this is to teach boys it’s okay to love your friends. It’s okay to share your needs and your problems with your friends. It’s okay to lean on your friends, to hug your friends, to be weak with your friends. Only if this is okay for boys to do with their male friends can this problem be resolved… so men, this one’s on you. Women can’t fix this for you; you don’t listen to us about matters of what it means to be a man. Fix your own shit and teach your brothers and sons and friends that this is okay, or everyone suffers.

The next time a guy says, “What? You don’t want to be my friend?” I’ll text him this and then ask if he really wants to be friends or just have another potential girlfriend.

y’all I am living for these analyses where the new way to fight the patriarchy is to teach men to love each other and themselves

Im a communication student and can confirm the above is absolutely 100% accurate and it’s called agentic vs communal friendship theorized by Steven McCornack

ineptshieldmaid:

And I think part of that process of combating loneliness involves
acknowledging that close friendships aren’t necessarily easy. It’s like
exercise; some people are naturally drawn to working out all the time,
but most of us like “having exercised” but still groan as we schlep down
to the gym.

The most successful healthy people are often not the people who love
exercise, but who have accepted that the minor unpleasantness of putting
in an hour down at the gym will make their lives infinitely better.

Friendship, at least for me and my wife, is a weird balance, because
as introverts we have a natural reluctance to going out with people.
Left to our own devices, we’d rather nest in at home every evening –
we’ve spent time working, we want to relax, going out with people and
putting out more energy seems exhausting.

Yet we do it. Because we realize that if we followed our natural
instincts all the time, we’d be unhappy in the long run. We need
friends. But we can’t just call up our friends when we need them –
that’s treating them like tools. So we gotta get our duffs off the couch
and say those precious, precious words:

“Wanna hang out?”

We need to reach out and cultivate those relationships in advance,
to schedule nights out, to go to events we’re not really thrilled about
when we start out – because, like exercise, a lot of the time it
actually turns out to be pretty awesome once we’ve started. You feel
pumped, you feel jazzed, you feel glad that you went and did it.

A lot of maintaining good friendships is getting past that inertia of
“Don’t wanna.” (The other half is knowing which nights you’re
absolutely right to spend at home alone.)

Friendships are wonderful, and empowering, but they’re not a free
natural resource for most of us. And I think a lot of people wind up
lonelier than they should because they’ve got this weird, sitcom-fed
idea that friendships just happen – Joey and Monica and Chandler just
wind up on the couch at the coffee shop by magic every night.

Whereas the truth about friendships is that those “you wind up in the
same place every night” usually only happen when you’re living in the
same place, which only really happens in college. Once you’re a grownup,
your friends scatter, and you have to chase them down – Joey’s at the
cafe every Tuesday for open mic night, and Monica lives on the other
side of town but really wants to see that show at the Capitol Theater,
and Chandler’s working lots of overtime but hey do you wanna catch a
drink when he gets off work at 8?

You have to schedule. You have to go to places with people you’re not
100% comfortable with yet. You have to decide to leave your apartment.

That all takes a certain amount of labor. And you get rewarded big in
the end – there’s nothing better about walking into a room and seeing
that smile when your buddy shows up and getting that hug and knowing
that yeah, this evening was totally worth going out for because you
stuck with these people until you had a history together.

Ferrett Steinmetz, Not Being Lonely Is Hard