In Defence of “Fair Weather Friendship”

The title of this post is a bit provocative, what I want to defend is often seen as “fair weather friendship” but might more accurately be called “Friendship with maintained boundaries around emotional sharing, advice-giving and receiving and other emotional work”.
First, I’ll explain what the term “fair weather friend” is supposed to mean. It comes from the idea that it’s in a crisis or bad situation that you find out who your “real” friends are – they are the people who stick around and help – and who your “fake” or “fair weather” friends are – they’re the ones who are suddenly nowhere to be found and may suddenly re-appear once the crisis is over.

The problems start when, like me, you’re a mentally ill person with numerous mentally ill friends. There is *always* someone having a crisis and often several friends in crisis at the same time. Sometimes I too am in trouble and need help, sometimes I know that getting involved in trying to help a particular friend or a particular crisis will trigger me into a crisis of my own, will exhaust me or will just demand more of my time, energy and empathy than I have going spare. So I don’t attend to everybody, because I can’t. Am I a “fake” or “fair weather” friend? Well, not really. I love my friends and they love me.

One of the things I love about being part of the mentally ill community is that we look after our own – and one of the most important things I have learnt and taught as part of this community is that you need to learn to recognise when the best way to help someone is to stay out of their way. Sometimes it’s a case of securing your own metaphorical oxygen mask first and recognising that you are not fit to help other people right now. Other times it’s recognising that you can only help a tiny amount and what someone else actually needs is professional help. Sometimes you have to step back and recognise that you do not know how to help or that stepping in to help when the other person hasn’t asked for help is denying the other person their agency just when they most need to have it affirmed. The kindest thing to do sometimes is to offer specific help, accept the yes or no gracefully and affirm that the other person is in control of how to respond to a crisis. And sometimes the kindest thing to do is nothing at all.

When do I respond to someone I love in crisis by doing nothing? When I know that getting involved will harm me, when I know that what they are facing is too similar to stuff my own brain is prone to throwing at me and I’m at risk of making helping them more about me and my problems than them and theirs or when their problem is so different from mine that I struggle to see the problem from their point of view. If I’m feeling like just stating an “obvious” solution at them or annoyed that they aren’t doing x, y, z that’s my cue to stop engaging. When trying to help will hurt me or them or others, I leave the helping up to other people. I do nothing.

Well, not nothing. I continue, as far as it is safe to, to behave towards my friend as normal. Still sending links that I think they’ll like, still inviting them to whatever, still adding *offers hugs* to statuses from time to time. When it would hurt me to engage, I do set my facebook privacy settings so certain friends never see any new statuses from me or I never see their statuses in my newsfeed or they never see me on chat whilst remaining facebook friends. I used to be ashamed of doing this but not any more.

If I don’t reach out to help you when I know i can’t or shouldn’t, I won’t be offended or upset if this means you want to end the friendship because I was a “fairweather friend” and disappeared when you most needed friends. That’s okay. I do it because I know that trying to help you would sometimes hurt one or both of us more than losing the friendship this way could. I love you, my friends, and don’t want to hurt you. Sometimes this is the kindest, most compassionate thing I can do.
I’ve learnt much of this the hard way and am writing it the hope that others can learn it more quickly and more painlessly than I did.

No-One Owes You Friendship

The latest post from the wonderful Captain Awkward has spurred me into finally writing a post that’s been stewing in the back of my mind for months now.

I have a hard lesson for you. I had to learn it and a lot of people don’t seem to have learned it. It’s summarised in the title of this post – NO-ONE OWES YOU FRIENDSHIP.

You deserve friends, dear reader, you deserve to be loved and wanted and appreciated for the beautiful, unique, irreplaceable person that you are. You deserve to be surrounded by people who love you and are happy to see you, people who you love and whose company you enjoy. You deserve that and I hope you have it.

But if, now or in the future, you don’t, you can’t demand it of anyone. No-one owes you. No other person in the entire world has to love you or like you or be your friend. No person is obliged to take delight in you, to want to spend time with you or find you endearing.
No matter how many hobbies or interests you have in common, no matter how much DNA you share, no matter how many hours you have to spend together at college or Uni or work together anyway, no matter if you think they’re the best person in the world – no person is obliged to like you or want to spend time with you. Nothing you can say or do will mean a person has to be your friend and even someone who was your friend isn’t obliged to always stay your friend.

I know it’s scary but it’s true. It’s also kind of liberating.

Since nothing you do can make someone be friends with you, you can concentrate on just being the awesomest person you can be and then people will want to be your friend.

“BUT BUT… ” I hear you say, “But Rahamim, surely people do have obligations to each other, no one is an island and all that?”
Well, yes. People owe you exactly what you owe them. They should treat you with respect and kindness because you are a person, they should help you with your struggles if they can and do what they can to see to your safety. They should respect your boundaries and your autonomy and treat you as a person with your own life beyond whatever circumstance they meet you in. You should try to do that for everyone you meet too. People who can’t treat you with respect and decency when you’re not their friend are not people you should become friends with, they are likely not very nice people.

We all want and deserve friendship. We are social creatures after all. But please don’t let your need for friendship turn into a sustained attempt to get friendship out of one particular person or group of people.
I’ve had people try to become my friend or assume that they are my friend because we have a few things in common and it isn’t fun. They tried to tell me that we were friends even though I didn’t feel it or that we should be friends even though I didn’t want to just because we had things in common. This made me really uncomfortable and I’ve had to get my actual friends to help me say “No, we are not friends. I’m sure you’re a nice person but you’re not my friend and I don’t want to be your friend. Please stop following me around”. It’s confusing and upsetting but I can see how easily I could have done much the same thing.

No-one owes you their friendship and nothing you can do will make someone be your friend. Someone not being your friend or not wanting to be your friend doesn’t mean they think you’re a bad person, just that they don’t want to be your friend. Maybe you look like someone else they used to know and didn’t like or maybe you talk too fast for them to understand you. Maybe they only want to have three friends and they’ve already got three. That’s on them. Just be the most awesome, most kind and respectful, wonderful YOU you can be and see if any friends come along.

“But what if someone doesn’t like me because of my disability / race / sexuality / trans status / gender / HIV status / accent / religion / nationality /etc? Once they know more about it / me, surely they’ll have to get over their prejudice and be my friend, right?”
That’s still on them. As much as it is awful that someone might miss out on being friends with the awesome person that is you because of a fact about yourself that you can’t change, they still don’t owe you friendship even if you try to teach them about it. And as you’re not a mind reader, you can’t be sure you have the whole picture. Does your workmate find your accent annoying or is he perhaps hard of hearing and literally cannot understand what you’re saying without extensive lip-reading? Is your friend avoiding you since your transition because she is transphobic or because she knows her parents are?
And if it turns out that their reasons for not being your friend are in fact based in prejudice and bigotry, here is a serious question for you – why do you want them to be your friend?

I know it’s scary. I know how easy it is to catastrophize and imagine yourself doomed to eternal friendlessness. It’s okay.
Just throw yourself into being an awesome person. Trust me on this. Even if you don’t make friends from it, you’ll still be awesome. But I bet you’ll make friends too.