In a thread I can’t seem to find now, a poster was asking if s/he should drop friends with whom the poster has extreme arguments over certain topics like politics and religion. A lot of people advised the poster not to talk about those topics.
Rather than hijack a thread that I can’t seem to find anyway, I wanted to know if that’s what most people here do? For me, I can’t see the point of keeping a friendship that requires significant self-censoring on my part to maintain. I like to talk about politics and religion and other “hot” topics and the idea of intentionally avoiding these issues to keep a relationship on life support seems self-defeating.
I do admit that I employ this strategy with some relatives, but I see those interactions as obligatory and so I endure them, rather than enjoy them.
How about other posters? Do you like to argue with your friends, or just stick to safe topics? If you stick to safe topics, what are they? Just bored and curious, I guess.
Yes. I have certain friends- they live in my neighborhood, or a friends through work whom I treat this way. While they are nice people to know and it would be awkward to cut them out of my life, some of those friends have very different views than I do about religion and politics. Rather than lose a pleasant acquaintance, who is fine to be around when watching the kids play or hanging around the swimming pool, we just stick to good enough topics to spend a nice afternoon. While they are not my inner circle of friends, they are more than just passing acquaintances and worth making the friendship work out.
I think when you introduce kids, it adds a different dynamic. We don’t have any kids, but I could see how you probably would want to be on friendly terms with your kids’ friends, that hadn’t occurred to me.
I wouldn’t talk about stuff that would lead to a knockdown, drag-out fight, no. Frankly, I don’t see the appeal of arguments. Good-natured debates, sure. But arguments? No. Just no. I spend enough of my day arguing with people about whether or not their dog is going to drop dead if we don’t do its vaccines/toenails/dental flossing/insert other bullshit here RIGHT NOW, and about why we can’t just dispense medication for an animal we’ve never seen before, and all sorts of other crap. Why on earth would I want to come home and spend more time and energy arguing? Home time is for being happy, or at least relaxed.
I typically don’t talk to my friends much about religion or politics because it just doesn’t come up. Those topics are utterly irrelevant to 95% of our interactions.
I immediately thought of this woman that I’ve worked with in various roles for at least a decade.
I know her kids and grandkids. I went to her youngest daughter’s wedding. I sat and cried with her when her mother died. I absolutely adore her as a person.
Politically, we have just agreed to drop the conversation when it gets to a certain point b/c we will never agree. (Example: I voted for Obama–She and her husband were disgusted with McCain b/c he isn’t conservative enough.)
But I value her as a good friend and I’d rather just agree to disagree and drop it. I
I’m sure if she were asked the same question? She’d say “well, there’s this woman I work with…she’s a nutso liberal but I like her so much, we agree to disagree…”
The point being there is probably a ton of OTHER stuff you can do and talk with them about BESIDES religion and politics.
And besides, IMO most discussions about religion and politics is nothing more than mental masturbation. How often does one person change someone elses mind? Or change their own?
And think about this.
Say you have this stance on abortion. You could spend a few hours making your point. All well and good.
But do your long term friends want to hear that same song and dance for the 500th time? Even if they agree with you?
In my opinion attitudes about politics, religion and culture say huge things about a person. I also think the ability to discuss rationally a subject with someone who holds radically different views than yourself says a lot about your own character. Not every discussion is necessarily an argument although they do often lead to argument.
And I’m not talking about having the same conversation over and over with unwilling participants. But I just don’t see the point of not discussing huge important issues with people with whom I am ostensibly close. I do admit that casual aquaintences and people with whom I am forced to have a certain closeness (in-laws spring to mind), I will avoid certain topics.
Because people are close in different ways. I have a friend whom I really enjoy playing cards with, but whose political philosophies I disagree with so fundamentally that neither of us enjoy discussions. But I like the card games.
Yeah, I’ll back away from a topic if things start looking flammable, and I’ll entirely avoid any kind of conversation topic with someone if I know they have a hot-button response to it.
I enjoy a debate or discussion, but I don’t enjoy fighting. If a friend fights - *really *fights - with me, then that’s it; they’re not my friend any more. There’s no coming back from that, because they’ve proven they can and will hurt me just to prove a point.
So generally I just back away from any topic that looks like going that way, and head the whole thing off at the pass. Each friend has different hot-button issues; I refuse to be drawn into discussion of those with them, but anything that can be discussed rationally is fair conversational game.
One of my closest friends, who I love to plan parties and play music with, believes that abortion should be universally banned. We can crack a few bottles of wine open and talk until 3 am about almost anything: politics, media, art, feminism, cultural appropriation, religion, whatever, but abortion is the one that we just do not bring up. It’s like there’s a little distortion shield around the topic in our conversations: we just pretend the debate doesn’t exist.
It’s not like we’re about to run out of things to talk about any time soon!
Well, okay, but are there other topics you don’t find very hot that you avoid? Your assumption is that politics and religion are so important to talk about that the rest of us are “significantly” self-censoring if we don’t talk about them. That may not be true, it might just be a small self edit.
Some small self edits I do: sports. BORing. But no sports fan wants to hear why I don’t care. I just don’t care. I like, pretty violently, don’t care about sports. So my friends and I don’t talk about sports. I don’t diatribe to them about how I don’t like sports, and they, for the most part, remember not to ask me if I saw the game last week.
Ditto cars. I don’t do car talk.
Religion, for a few friends. If they won’t try to get me to go to church, I won’t try to get them to come to Beltane. Granted, most of my best friends share my faith or something like it, but there are still a few for whom it’s best just not to bring it up.
I don’t really mind the occasional respectful conversation about politics or religion, but it’s a fairly small slice of my conversational pie chart, because I also like talking about art, literature, science, sports, pop culture, koalas, etc. Over the years, I’ve observed that people often have very different ideas of what falls under the umbrella of “respectful conversation.”
I have one friend, and I do like him very much, who has some blind spots when it comes to realizing that a politics conversation has come to its natural conclusion and it’s time to move on to something else, like vacation plans or the latest Michael Chabon book.
Another friend will use phrases like “only an idiot would believe that!” in conversations about religion, and after he laughs it off because it was part of a “lively debate,” and does not get it when other people aren’t especially interested in having a second “lively debate.”
The problem isn’t so much with the topics themselves, but with people not being adept at picking up on the conversational cues that signal when others are ready to move on from the topic. I have heard people say things like “I love friendly debates about topics like politics and religion, but none of my friends do” and I can’t help but think “… or they don’t like talking about those issues WITH YOU.”
Thats funny. I also VIOLENTLY don’t like sports (mostly the lets watch it kind). I’ll grin and bear it if need be.
I left a family thanksgiving one time because of it. Big family of extended and half this or that relatives. A few nice folks I only see a couple times a year I got to talk to. Then the whole thing got taken over by a giant screen blaring whatever big football game there was.
After about an hour of barely being able to talk, and being subject to something I can’t stand. I finally left.
Like you, I am polite when someone wants to do a little chit chat about sports, and once in a great while what they say might even hold a slight interest for me. I dont tell em how stupid I THINK it is. But long conversations about it? URG
I am sure many honest, decent, and intelligent folks generally feel the same way about many things religious and political.
If you can be a RESPECTFUL discusser AND lissener, not a debater or argueer, AND can pick up someone’s signals as to whether they are enjoying the converstation or not, great IMO.
But its also been my experience that most folks REALLY into politics or religion arent that good at that sorta thing. Particularly ones that have a particular stance on this or that issue.
I find discussions about religion and politics to be boring at best. Mostly it is worse. I agree with this and place half the threads in GD into this category:
