Contents
We are closely connected with others: we learn from them, we work and play with them, we exchange information and emotions. We need communication, but maintaining relationships is not always easy. Is it possible to “sort” friends, why do we love childhood friends and what is the “porcupine effect”?
Communication is as necessary to us as food. When we are hungry, the same neurons are activated as when we cannot communicate with others, neuropsychologists write. Our species, like wolves or horses, needs to be in a group.
Isolation was killing us both figuratively and literally, weakening the immune system. We tend to unite around ideas, parties, trade unions, common interests that separate allies from enemies, good from bad. This allows you to find your place in the world.
Three types of friendship
Aristotle distinguished three types of friendship.
- Friendship based on usefulness. Today it can be communication that helps us improve – with a colleague or with a friend from a fitness club.
- Friendship for fun. It is based on mutual understanding, when the other allows us to fully enjoy the joys of life.
- Friendship for good. It is based on mutual respect, which binds together those who have the same views on life and moral principles.
We need not only strong ties with loved ones, but also regular, superficial, but friendly contacts – for example, an exchange of remarks with a neighbor or a seller in a supermarket. A violent run-in with a stranger on the street can ruin the whole day, as it touches on the need to be appreciated and loved.
A characteristic feature of the current era: in social networks, many spend more time with strangers than with family and friends.
Friends of childhood
Childhood friends hold a special place in our hearts. We share common memories. They saw with their own eyes our first hardships, took part in the first big stupidities. By the mere fact of their existence, they confirm that all this was in fact.
Communicating with them, we begin to realize how much we have changed. And we also ask ourselves: “Were my actions right? Is the life I’m living really right for me? Maybe I ruined those inclinations that I had in my youth and youth?
That is why we retain a special tenderness for childhood friends throughout our lives. Even if there is nothing to say to each other after we have become adults.
porcupine effect
Sigmund Freud also made an attempt to rethink the relationship. Following the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, he likens people to porcupines: we need each other, but we get hurt if we get too close. We need another, but at the same time, the very fact of its existence limits our freedom. Freud did not believe in the universal love that religions preach. In truth, he was convinced that not all people are worthy of love.
The psychiatrist wrote that the other deserves our tenderness for two reasons:
- or because he looks like us – then we love ourselves in him,
- or because he is so much more perfect than us that we see him as our ideal.
From Freud’s point of view, any relationship is a form of manifestation of eros as a powerful sexual instinct. We communicate not only to make life easier, but also to soften the instinct of aggression that is in everyone. This is how the ground for ambiguity and hidden hatred appears.
Aggression does not necessarily show up openly. The frankness that some of our loved ones pride themselves on (“I tell you everything I think”) is sometimes just a strategy to be sarcastic without taking responsibility for this behavior.
But the absence of criticism is not a guarantee of a healthy relationship. Many will remember friends who are always ready to compliment how we dress, cut and work, and they really think so! But at the same time, they secretly enjoy seeing that skinny jeans accentuate our figure flaws, or saying to themselves that they would do our job much better.
It all starts from infancy
We do not choose the first social connections. A completely dependent infant, in order not to die of hunger or cold, spontaneously attaches itself to an adult who recognizes his needs and satisfies them. Naturally, this demand for self-care turns into a desire for love. Of course, in addition to the family, there are other places of socialization in which they learn how to behave with others (kindergarten, school, work …).
But the early emotional experience with parents, brothers and sisters affects the nature of attachment to others and the manner of behavior with them in friendly, personal or industrial relations. Without knowing it, we really want to rediscover what was already familiar. Or, on the contrary, we try to avoid it: in this case, often against our own will, we reproduce old unsatisfactory schemes.
happiness Formula
Not everyone is equally capable of happy relationships. In addition, is it easy to really determine for yourself what is useful and what is not?
Relationships with others can be very turbulent, enthusiastic, and at the same time disturbing and destabilizing. They take over us completely. This is their difference from harmonious attachment, which involves a double dimension: we trust another, about whom we know not so much, and at the same time we hear ourselves and our feelings.
If we do not love ourselves enough or are going through a difficult time, we may want to dissolve into the other completely and forget about our existence. Surprisingly, those relationships that others would consider pathological can be perfect for us at some points in our lives.
It is impossible to derive a formula for ideal friendship, as well as for ideal love. Each new relationship we have with another person is an equation with many variables. But this is what makes any relationship in our life interesting and somehow special.
Test of communication
Crises in various fields – health, politics, finance – test the strength of our ties. Relationships change, and not always for the better. At the same time, they make us think about who we ourselves are and what has real value.
Troubled times reveal qualities in us that we did not suspect in ourselves. In some, unexpectedly for them, altruism wakes up, while others become egocentric. For 45-year-old Elvira, the period of self-isolation was the reason for reconsidering the relationship: “My friend went with her husband to live in the country and regularly sent me views of her flower beds and picturesque surroundings, which she walked around, while I myself was locked in my city odnushka ! These photos were supposed to cheer me up, but it seemed to me that there was a desire to remind me that they had a country house, unlike me. Of course, I read in Freud that all relationships are somewhat ambivalent, but it turned out to be too much for me. I ended our communication.”
Disagreements with others discover what each of us believes in. At the same time, we find out whether we are ready to endure differences in our beliefs for the sake of maintaining relationships. “I had a fight with my best friend because I refused to go to a rally in support of Navalny,” says Varvara, 30. – A friend called me a coward and a fit. We didn’t talk for a month. Then she apologized for the harshness, and I said that I understand the reason: it was caused by the fact that a friend wanted a better future for the country. I want it too, although I see the way to it differently. We found something in common that still unites us.”
Relationships are never completely painless. The need for communication is basic, but this does not mean that it will always be satisfied. Hence the suffering that accompanies our life with others. “Adulthood can be considered a developed ability to endure a certain level of social pain,” emphasizes the philosopher and psychoanalyst Jules Rechet. – Like a child, an adult needs someone else to take care of him, but, unlike a child, an adult is supposed to be able to do without guardianship. An adult is an orphaned child, even if his parents are still alive. Love is also impossible without social pain. There is no other way to know that we love another than to experience his painful lack and become hypersensitive to his attitude – that is, take everything too personally.