Friendship Requires Effort

[unspeakablehorror]

Never let anyone tell you that nonsense about 'you shouldn't have to initiate contact, your real friends will initiate contact with you'. If everyone did this, everyone would have exactly zero friends. 

Think about it a moment.

You wait for your 'real' friends to initiate contact with you. Naturally, they also wait for you to initiate contact with them, to prove you are their 'real' friend. No one contacts anyone and eventually neither of you would know how to contact the other even if you wanted to. Everyone henceforth exists in a state of permanent forlorn friendlessness.

The truth is that friendship takes work.  The truth is that in our increasingly isolated world, where you may see more ads in a day than you see people, people are increasingly unequipped to understand how to do that work, or too afraid of rejection to try.

As someone who lived a long time with both a lack of basic understanding of how to cultivate and maintain friendships and who suffered from intense social anxiety, I can tell you that if never initiating contact with people was how you made 'real' friends, I would've been the world champion of friendship. Spoiler alert: I was not. Over the years, I've gotten better at managing my anxiety and learned how to socialize by carefully observing what people with a lot of friends do. Which is this: they are the ones initiating contact more often than not.

People are busy, or bad at socializing, or have a social anxiety disorder, or have executive dysfunction, or all of the above and more. Even if you are always the one initiating contact, it doesn't mean they aren't a 'real' friend. Only the nature of your interactions with them can determine that, not who initiates them.

Comments

[bushwah]

Fairly sure that advice is intended for if you've been initiating over and over again and they haven't initiated at all in that time.

On the other hand... this sort of tea-leaf-reading isn't really applicable to close relationships. If you know someone well enough to ask, you can just ask. This is advice for sorting acquaintances who have an interest in you from acquaintances that may just be being polite.

And it accepts as a necessary cost that some, perhaps many, perhaps all of those acquaintances will be casualties.

[unspeakablehorror]

Fairly sure that advice is intended for if you've been initiating over and over again and they haven't initiated at all in that time.

And that was included in what I was arguing against as a criterion for a 'real' friend. I just don't think it's actually a good indicator of whether someone would like to be friends or is a person that's enjoyable to be around.

Now, how someone acts when you talk to them, regardless of who initiated the contact, is a good indicator. If they're always ghosting you, never respond to anything you say, always getting in arguments with you, don't seem to enjoy talking with you or you don't enjoy talking with them, I think those are all things that could indicate problems. But as someone who wouldn't have friends if I wasn't more proactive about initiating contact (and someone who spent a lot of my life just chronically being unable to do that), I just don't think it's good advice.

If you have the luxury of having enough people you want to spend time around being better with initiating contact, or you just don't care if you make any extra friends, that's great! You don't need to worry about this. But some people aren't in that situation, and I think being more proactive about contact is something that is important in those situations.

[bushwah]

Oh, absolutely! It's a way to filter your acquaintances very roughly to ones who you know are interested in you and ones who might not be. Specific use case. Not applicable to you, and not applicable to me, either.

There's no such thing as fully general social advice. I'm not saying you have to do this, just outlining the circumstances in which someone might want to, since you seemed confused by why the advice exists, and it exists for people in situations different from yours.

Thank you for pointing out a situation in which the advice is harmful.

[unspeakablehorror]

Oh, absolutely! It's a way to filter your acquaintances very roughly to ones who you know are interested in you and ones who might not be. Specific use case.

I think part of my objection to it is the particular reasoning it ascribes to this behavior. Because the reason given is that real friends can be identified by frequency of contact initiation.

But while I would agree that there are probably situations where it makes sense to focus on relationships where the other person frequently initiates contact, I also think that factor is incidental and it's not what makes those particular people better friends. The person just happens to have really good friends who also initiate contact with them a lot. Also, sometimes people who aren't initiating contact really just aren't interested in being friends. Some situations are simple like that.

But people can have a lot of reasons for initiating contact with someone, and not all of those reasons are things that make a person a good friend. Some people are just really controlling, for example, so what initially may seem like a person initiating contact out of caring can eventually become a nightmare of them always trying to know and dictate your every move. Likewise, as I mentioned earlier, people can have a lot of reasons for not initiating contact with someone, and not all those reasons are because the person doesn't care about them or wouldn't make a good friend. I think this is true both of people who generally don't initiate contact and people who generally do but suddenly stop (since something may have happened in their life to preoccupy them that has nothing to do with the other person).

So while I do think there are scenarios where it's reasonable to filter friends that way, I don't think the reason of 'initiating contact tells you who really cares about you' is a good one.

There's no such thing as fully general social advice.

I certainly agree! A prescription to do X or Y thing to make more friends regardless of what a person's situation is will probably fail a lot of people. Social situations are just too complex for that.

Thank you for pointing out a situation in which the advice is harmful.

Glad I could illuminate some thoughts on that.

[bushwah]

Hmm, yeah, "real friends" is an unnecessarily exclusionary way to refer to the subset of friends that do the social labor of checking up on people they haven't heard from in a while. Especially because, like all forms of labor, there are disabilities that make it impossible.

You're not wrong that there are less sympathetic and even dangerous reasons to reach out to someone. It's a filter for strong feelings and an ability and willingness to do social labor regarding you, but it doesn't mean the person is actually friendly.

Is this amatonormativity again? Because I keep writing out the words "a lot of people want someone to chase them" and that sure feels like amatonormativity.