Sure, I can imagine a true friendship where one person has limited communication. I can totally see myself enjoying the company of someone who can make me laugh just by their humorous facial expressions. My cat entertains me on this level and that is why I enjoy being around him.
But if that person is in a vegetative state and has been in that state for years with no hope of coming it of it, it would be hard for me to feel like our relationship is a true friendship. I might still care for that person, though.
You seem to be drawing a different inference from that quote than the one I have formed. Or maybe you are giving it more relevance to this conversation than I think is warranted. It is very easy treat a person well without feeling any fondness for them, without ever thinking you are their friend. I have given panhandlers on the street fairly handsome monetary donations despite finding them a bit of a nuisance. Am I being a friend to those people? Or do I simply enjoy doing random acts of kindness and sharing my wealth with the less fortunate? Several years ago I used to spend my weekends giving my artwork away to any stranger who happened to show an interest. Was I doing that out of sense of personal connection and love for them? No. I just enjoyed seeing the happy shock on their faces. I don’t know if I am a good person, and yet I regularly meet the criterion established by that quote. I really don’t think that criterion is that hard to achieve.
My definition of a friend is perhaps not as lofty as doreen’s, but it is perhaps not as basic as yours. I have been treated very kindly by lots of people in my life for no apparent reason at all. But the number of people I claim as friends doesn’t come anywhere to close to the number of people who have blessed me through the years.
I totally agree that being able to show kindness with no expectation of reciprocation is indicative of a non-sociopathic person. But I don’t think it is reasonable to expect a friendship between average human beings (as opposed to virtuous saints who love all of humanity, no matter what the condition) to be sustainable over a long period of one-sideness. I think we can disagree on what constitutes “long period”, while still agreeing that a person who feels like a friendship has ceased being emotionally beneficial to them is not the worst person in the world.
I think I understand this set of feelings. But you might be surprised if you knew how they feel about their relationships with you. Maybe not all of them are circumstantial at their core.
Building a friendship is an act of commitment on both sides, in my opinion. The length of time and the number of shared experiences create a kind of momentum that keep the friendship going. For me, emotionally, a friendship is rather like a marriage in that I have made a relationship based on mutual positive feelings. When I am your friend I like you for who you are not just what you do. So if you become ill or unable to contribute much from your side, the biggest favor you can do for me is to allow me to continue to express my friendship for you in deeds as well as in thoughts, secure in the knowledge that anything I do is done out of positive feelings, not guilt or shame.
For one thing, I’d recommend he see a doctor for depression.
For another, I’d consider the possibility that he didn’t like me all that much, and that he wanted me to go away.
For a third, I’d try to think of something he might be interested in that we could do inside the house besides watch football. Staying home doesn’t mean no movies; hasn’t for years. It never meant no board games, no card games, no music.
If none of that worked, and I didn’t think the problem was that he wanted me out of his hair, I wouldn’t spend hours on end there. But I’d stop by or at least call/email/text/whatever occasionally, because I’d think he was probably feeling pretty miserable, and he’d helped me have some good times, and maybe if he kept having some connection with people it would increase the chances of his coming out of the state he’s in.
It’s normal for relationships with people you haven’t much in common with to fade out over time. Nobody’s got time enough to keep up contact with everybody in the world; and nobody’s required to keep up contact forever with somebody just because they knew them once. Plus which, there are in most people’s lives a number of people who they’re friendly with but not friends with – workmates, neighbors, the regular clerk at a regular store. Such people can become actual friends, of course; but that requires going further than just seeing them at work or in the elevator, or even having a drink after work if it’s the kind of workplace where that’s expected. But not keeping up contact with such people when one of you moves or quits, or not keeping up contact with the high school friend who’s on the other side of the continent, or not keeping up with the high school friend who now refuses to talk about anything other than how you should join their religion or even refuses to talk about anything other than their kids or golf game for years on end, isn’t the same thing as dropping contact because somebody’s ill or injured, or can’t afford to do the things you like doing, or has to visit with you at their house instead of going out on the town because their ill mother can’t be left alone.
How long would you give a relationship after a “storm” before “fair weather” doesn’t apply? I would think giving a relationship a couple of years to reach a new equilibrium would be fair, so that if you starting fading out after that point you wouldn’t be a fair weather friend. You would just be someone who is looking for something more in a friendship.
You are the one that said it–don’t blame me for saying that you sound like you are right. We’ll see what happens if you get sick–will they remain at your side, or will they dump you because you no longer provide an equable entertainment transaction?
monstro is very eloquent and able to defend her position. I am less articulate and there is work I ought to be doing right now. However, I just wanted to say that I agree with and understand all she has posted.
Different people have different kinds of friendships and feel them differently. There’s no “rule” here.
I have had lifelong friends fade out of my life for all sorts of reasons; geography, diverging interests, diverging lifestyles . . . who knows.
Some of them I’d still sacrifice a lot for . . . maybe they’d do the same for me. Maybe they don’t need me as much as they used to, or I them. Maybe we’ll never find out or have to put that to the test.
Relationships are always changing, even married relationships. The idea that one is committed to a lifelong friendship because one was once a friend is nonsense.
That said, if I met someone who said “my best friend of 30 years has been bedridden for two years and can’t hang out, so I’ve just kind of stopped thinking about them or trying to communicate,” well, I’d question whether or not that person was the sort of person I’d want to develop deep relationship with.
On the other hand, if someone said, “my best friend of 30 years has been bedridden for two years and has trouble communicating. I’ve tried but it’s really been taxing as attempts to communicate are almost completely one-sided and leave me stressed and upset. I just couldn’t deal with that kind of emotional effort while working two jobs since my wife lost her job, so I’ve kind of dropped that friend. I feel bad about it sometimes, but I also needed to take care of myself,” well, I’d understand that.
I wouldn’t want them to dump me. But I wouldn’t think they were a shitty sociopath just because they couldn’t hang in there with me for years on end without me doing anything to make it worth their while. I am not that awesome of a person to feel entitled to such unwavering, unconditional support.
I think with all relationships be they casual, platonic, romantic, etc. both parties must get something out of it, even if it’s something that is ultimately bad for them, there is still something they are getting out of that relationship, but there is also usually some power differential, and the person with less investment is usually more likely to walk away when things go south.
With casual friendships it doesn’t take much to make a friendship not worth sustaining, morals don’t really enter into it much, but everyone has their ups and downs and things are never completely equal. I’d feel less judgmental about someone abandoning a casual friend over a health issue than their wife of 20 years for instance.
Real relationships take work and investment from both parties, that’s why they are also more fulfilling than superficial ones. You can’t have your cake and eat it too.
I have a bond with my sister that transcends all intersteller space and time. I can’t imagine loving anyone as much as I love my sister.
Having said that, I don’t feel like I am entitled to her unconditional support. If I was dealing with severe mental illness that turned me into a horrible person and I was like this all the time with no end in sight, I would like to think that the sane part of me would totally understand why my sister wouldn’t want to hang out with me. I certainly wouldn’t think she was a sociopath for staying away. Sure, I would want to know that she still cares about me. But I wouldn’t want her to put up with me only out of a sense of duty. I would want her to look forward to our visits, not see them as a chore.
This sounds like a simple case of fading out of one another’s lives, and simply being straightforward about what you define as a “friend”. I have come to see all friendships as temporary; everyone leaves eventually, so don’t get too hung up on the concept of friendship, is my personal stance. So if someone could not communicate with me any more, there’s nothing left to form a friendship off of. They were my friend. If they get better and call me again some day, they can be my friend again. But while we are incommunicado for years; no, we’re essentially not friends. It’s quite simple.
I basically never say this when talking to someone else about people like this. Sometimes I define them by a period in my life, “one of my college friends–”, but most often I just say “my friend used to–”. I don’t bother going into explaining, “this person I used to be friends with once, but stopped talking to me for one reason or another, so now we’re not really friends, you know” because nobody else cares. And there’s lots of people who define mere acquaintances they met at a couple parties as “friends” (that’s weird but you do you). They’d never get it. So I just don’t go into all the friendships that have ceased to be over the years.
I think there’s some people in this thread getting a little too defensive about never “abandoning” a friend, but if you never have a conversation with someone for years, how can they even be a friend anymore? It’s not a matter of you deciding they can’t be your friend. It’s just that there isn’t a minimum basis of friendship anymore. They can come back anytime, but they’re not here now. It’s not like you looked at them and said, “nah, get out”. It’s not an active choice. It’s just a thing that happens.
OK but this gets back to the usual problem with multi-sided discussions like this on the internet: different people are relating it to their real experiences in life and everyone is on a different page.
I don’t have any friendships that approach family relationships in their importance to me. Whether that’s because I have ‘inadequate’ friendships or am especially family-oriented doesn’t really matter. That point while hypothetically valid doesn’t apply to me.
And the whole thing tends to revolve around who the friend is and what the person means to you, before the change. Like I said before I could imagine a case where a person had a lifelong close friend and ‘dropped’ them in time of need, and others thought poorly of them for doing that and/or it bothered that person on reflection. But more likely real case in my life would be one among many people I was kind of friends with (just introducing the word ‘acquaintance’ doesn’t magically resolve it either), drifted apart from when what we had mainly in common ended (same school, same workplace). Then they got sick. I might then visit them, and thus go from zero contact back to some. OTOH likely situations with me where I hiked, biked or whatever with some people they wouldn’t really be close friends, and if health issues made them drop that activity then OK they wouldn’t be in the hiking/biking group anymore. We might go over and visit a time or two.
It’s just pretty vague IMO. I could see cases where I had to resist my human inclination to judge other people (something the internet really needs to work on in general ) because one friend dropped another. Or where I understood it (again as if they should care what I think). Or hypothetically where it was me, or where it was me in real life with people who aren’t really close friends. But there’s nobody outside my family with whom I have a comparable to family relationship and that’s probably not so rare. There’s nobody I’d think for a split second about saving in lieu of saving someone from my family if it was one or the other, for example.
I have BEST friends I haven’t seen in several years and might text sporadically or talk to on the phone once a year at most. Also, many other lower-tier friends I know I could talk to or hang out with or whatever out of the blue with no expectation of staying in touch regularly. So, the entire premise of this thread is beyond me.
The problem here is, as others have noted, the lack of a simple agreed-upon definition for the term “friend”. If a person’s really important to you, I don’t think that goes away just because through no fault of their own they’re unable to keep in touch the way they used to. Someone you only knew through participating in one shared interest, on the other hand, would naturally drop out of your life if that interest became no longer relevant to them.
If I missed communicating with a friend and I knew they could still read and enjoy what I wrote, I’d still want to write to them even if they couldn’t write back to me. Not as an obligation but because I missed them.
If it was a close personal friend and the incapacitating factor wasn’t illness but, say, being wrongfully imprisoned and not allowed to send non-trivial communications, although the imprisoned friend could still receive them, would you drop them then? I think part of the issue with illness is that we are liable to try to avoid even temporarily and curably ill friends just because illness scares us on a fundamental “it could happen to me” level.
) because one friend dropped another. Or where I understood it (again as if they should care what I think). Or hypothetically where it was me, or where it was me in real life with people who aren’t really close friends. But there’s nobody outside my family with whom I have a comparable to family relationship and that’s probably not so rare. There’s nobody I’d think for a split second about saving in lieu of saving someone from my family if it was one or the other, for example.