Platonic, page 24
But Margaret S. Clark, a professor at Yale University, has done amazing work that shows that what’s appropriate in a relationship depends on the nature of the relationship. As we get closer to one another, our relationships transform into what she calls “communal relationships,” where even if it costs us, we give in times of need.[*]
Communal relationships, Clark argues, are ones where we “give benefits in response to needs to demonstrate general concern for the other person.” The greater the communal strength of a relationship, the more we’re willing to sacrifice when someone needs us. Communal relationships are the deepest and most significant relationships in our lives. Studies find that people are more willing to be vulnerable in these relationships—to express happiness or sadness. They are our closest relationships, according to other studies. One researcher defines communal relationships as the definition of love, as well as the “key to optimal relationship functioning and, indeed, the sine qua non of close relationships.” These are the types of friendships we’ve been waiting for.
What maintains communal relationships is not boundaries, as we’ve come to define them. It’s showing up. One study found that when a friend responds in times of need, people are more likely to support that friend deeply by doing things like telling them they’re okay just as they are, listening to them, cheering them up, and telling them how close they feel to them. The more support we get from friends, another study found, the more support we give to them and the more secure and close we feel to them.
In other words, we find communal relationships when we offer them. You cannot develop deep friendship without being accountable to a friend in need, even when you’re uncomfortably full from the grand slam at Denny’s, or from watching I Love Lucy reruns, or from beating your top score in Call of Duty. When you choose to be a friend, you choose to show up. Research finds that support in times of need is a key factor that makes people more secure over time, and as other studies find, the more secure we are, the more supportive we are right back. When we feel prioritized in times of need—our needs attended to, our welfare considered—we reciprocate. So, for friendship to flourish, we need to know if we call a friend crying because we got fired from our job at the nuclear power plant, they won’t text back, “I am currently unavailable.”
Setting these kinds of individualistic boundaries destroys communal relationships because these statements say prioritize yourself, put yourself first, put the oxygen mask on yourself, even while your friend asphyxiates. They assume friendship is opt-in, something we can offer only when we’re rested, exercised, worked out, bronzed, and full from a nutrient-dense meal. They suggest we shouldn’t ever feel taxed, inconvenienced, or put out, and the instant we suspect we will be, it’s our duty to apply the boundary as our first line of defense. Boundaries, in how we’ve come to understand them, are expressions of our deepest realms of individualism, justified under the guise of self-empowerment.
Is there no place for boundaries, then, in our most intimate friendships? No, that’s not it. We still need boundaries, but of a different kind. Communal boundaries, swaddled in love rather than self-protection, are different. They’re kinder, creative, more fluid, a negotiation that honors both parties. They’re less binary—one person doesn’t get their space while the other writhes in the gutter. In our friends’ times of need, new age friendship boundaries default to the all-or-none of “Given my current state, I can’t offer you anything,” whereas communal boundaries require us to ask ourselves, “Given my current state, what can I offer?”
With communal boundaries, we show up for a friend in crisis because we practice mutuality. We zoom out to assess the friendship. We ask ourselves, if we consider both our needs, whose are more urgent? It’s not a submission of self for the other, nor a domination of the other for the self. It is a coming together, a collaboration, a synergy. Communal boundaries are context-dependent; otherwise, they are walls. With communal boundaries, if I have a bad day at work and don’t want to talk, I can say, “Let’s talk some other time,” when my friend calls me to debrief about the season finale of Lost, but not when they call because their kid is self-harming. Mutuality means that when someone important to us is in crisis, we prioritize them unless we are in crisis ourselves.
Communal boundaries, mutuality, are not meant to protect the self; they are meant to protect a relationship. As my neighbor Kirsten put it, “We often use boundaries in ways to disconnect, but boundaries should help our relationships flourish, so we can connect in a way to meet people’s needs,” or in the words of Prentis Hemphill, a healer, Somatics teacher, and writer, “Boundaries are the distance at which I can love you and me at the same time.” Communal boundaries stop the car to refuel so it can keep driving, whereas individualistic boundaries stop the car to park it in the driveway.
Outside of crises, communal boundaries do not mean we always show up exactly how our friend wants, because attending to our needs too is in the service of the friendship. When our friend asks us to babysit but we had a date planned, or they ask us to walk their Pekinese when we live an hour away, we say no because if we decline now to attend to ourselves, we can give more in the long run. When Melody’s best friend, Chelsea, moved to St. Louis to be near her, Chelsea wanted to hang out every day. Chelsea was single and unemployed, and Melody, juggling twelve-hour workdays and a boyfriend, just didn’t have the same availability. Constantly worried she’d disappoint Chelsea, Melody wished she’d just brought up their clashing needs to negotiate a setup that worked for them both: “I could have said, ‘I know it’s hard to move to a new city, and I want to be there for you. My job is stressing me out, but you’re important to me and I’d love to hang out. What if we have a weekly dinner?’ ”
On the flip side, mutuality also means we adjust to our friends not meeting 100 percent of our needs when doing so compromises our friend. Figuring out how much slack we give to friends isn’t always easy. It’s less of a science and more of an art and requires us to be honest to ourselves about how urgent our and our friend’s needs are. For Chelsea, mutuality meant tolerating not seeing Melody as often as she’d like because Melody’s priorities were also important to her. But if she was really struggling, she might have pushed back and asked Melody for two dinners a week.
Casey, who works at a nonprofit, didn’t receive mutuality from her friend. Around the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, she suddenly starting fainting nearly every day, and the doctors couldn’t figure out why. Her friend Elma asked her to join a dance competition. When Casey said no because of the pandemic, especially since she had a mysterious illness, Elma told Casey she was a bad friend and was abandoning her. The irony is that in demanding that her needs be met without considering that Casey’s life was literally at stake, Elma was acting appallingly. When we embrace mutuality, we want our friends to take care of themselves, yet we want to take care of ourselves. Both are important. We can understand that our friends have boundaries to replenish themselves so they can keep showing up for us, or stay alive to show up for us in Casey’s case. Their boundaries, then, are the ultimate act of generosity.
For mutuality to work, we must be clear with our close friends when we have an important need because in the words of author Neil Strauss, “Unspoken expectations are premeditated resentments.” How can our friend know that now is a time to prioritize us if we don’t say, “Hey, this is really important for me”? We need to get comfortable imposing when we need to impose. Because if the other person is comfortable asking and we are not, even our healthiest friendships will jut unevenly. Being understood isn’t just about the other person putting in the time and effort to get us. It’s also about us making ourselves understandable. Knowing this research, after I went through a breakup, I texted my friends, “Support for me right now looks like spending time with me and bringing over food.”
Mutuality keeps us in equilibrium in the larger scheme of the friendship, but importantly, it allows disequilibrium and self-sacrifice to occur, not chronically but in moments of need. Sometimes we give more, like when Derrick let Park stay on his couch for a year. And then we take more, like when Derrick stayed on Park’s couch after he moved to DC and visited New York, so, in the larger scheme of things, generosity equals out. It’s not a tit-for-tat equality of keeping tabs, but instead we trust, if we are committed to showing up for each other, that things equal out.
Finding win-wins is also a form of mutuality, since it requires us to ask, “Is there a way to meet both our needs?” Melody realized she could have achieved a win-win with Chelsea if they co-worked a few days a week at the coffee shop near her apartment. Chelsea could have her company, and Melody could sift through her 187 work emails. My friend Allie Davis offered a touching win-win. She said that if a friend was in crisis and she was too, instead of telling the friend she’s too overwhelmed to speak to them, she’d say, “Thanks for texting me. I’m really sorry you’re going through that. I’ve been having a hard time too. Do you want to FaceTime to cry together?”
Mutuality win-wins mean even if I am embroiled in my own crisis when my friend needs me, I can still provide some empathy while also getting the space I need to recover. That might look like “That’s so awful. I’m so sorry. I’m glad you reached out. I can chat later tomorrow.” Consider how that rings differently than “I’m drained. I will respond when I have energy again.” Both phrases achieve the same thing: a break to chat later, but one isn’t just focused on ourselves. One affirms that our friend’s needs are still a priority.
Individualistic boundaries
Communal boundaries
I prioritize my needs.
I consider both our needs and prioritize whoever’s needs are more important.
I don’t offer anything if I’m exhausted.
I evaluate what I can still offer despite being exhausted.
My boundaries are the same, no matter the person asking or the urgency of their needs.
My boundaries shift depending on my relationship with the asker and the urgency of their need.
Boundaries are used to protect me.
Boundaries are used to protect the friendship.
I consider my boundaries without regard for the other person’s.
I welcome my friend’s boundaries since I am invested in their well-being.
I never self-sacrifice.
I self-sacrifice when a close friend is in need.
When my needs conflict with a friend’s, I prioritize myself.
When my needs conflict with a friend’s, I assess if there’s a way to meet both our needs.
Mutuality is how we balance selflessness and selfishness. It’s where giving tree and new age generosity find compromise. But an important caveat to mutuality is that we cannot offer it to everyone. As much as we’d like to care for citizens of all seven continents and those of their corresponding archipelagos and islets, we cannot. The more contacts we have, one study found, the less time we spend with each one. That study also found that the larger our network, the weaker our relationships tend to be. If we try to invest in everyone, we may end up investing in no one.
To embrace mutuality, then, we first need to figure out who our friends are. Mutuality isn’t something we can assume with someone we just met. It’s a gradual process, and ultimately a by-product of a strong and stable friendship. If mutuality isn’t, well, mutual, then we’ll extend ourselves for friends who use individualistic boundaries on us.
But knowing who your friends are is tougher than you think, given that research finds that half our friends don’t consider us friends. The authors of the study explain that most of us may deny that a friendship isn’t reciprocal so as to not feel too bad about ourselves. This discrepancy may also be a by-product of the “false consensus effect”—our bias to assume others see things just as we do.
Shasta Nelson, a friendship expert, describes another type of conundrum in which one friend feels closer than the other. If you and a friend rank your friends from a 1 to a 10—10 being top friends and 1 being acquaintances—it’s possible you rank them a 5, and they rank you a 10. You want to get lunch once a month, but they want to hang out every day, go to you with woes, ask you to come over with chicken noodle soup, and expect the same. If this occurs, we can talk to a friend about what they’re willing to give, or we can assess the relationship ourselves by asking: Am I always the one reaching out? Asking for support? The only one being vulnerable? As Melody revealed, if the friendship is one-sided, we should bring up the issue, adjust expectations, or else seek mutuality elsewhere.
Knowing where we fall with people and adjusting expectations accordingly helps us not get hurt. If we’re anxious, we might be tempted to push harder and ask for more when we sense a friend isn’t as invested, but as we will learn in the affection chapter, love isn’t forced. It is freely given. Just like people must sexually consent, new friends should emotionally consent to the level of intimacy we want. So, if someone isn’t willing to consent, accept it and find another friend who will.
When people are generous to us, not because they love us but because we pressured them into being so, they will be more likely to resent rather than enjoy their giving. The motivation behind generosity predicts whether we enjoy it. One study involved people reporting on acts of giving and why they gave for two weeks. On days when they gave because they enjoyed it and it fulfilled them, they felt better and more energized and experienced upticks in self-esteem. On days when they gave because they felt obligated, worrying they’d be a bad person otherwise, they were worse off on these outcomes than people who didn’t give at all. When I provided a level of generosity to Margaret that I wasn’t ready for, it pushed me further away because I felt my generosity was the result of not love, but pressure.
We also feel obligated rather than energized by our generosity when we are asked to be generous to people we’re not close to. In one study, people recalled a time they spent $20 on either a strong tie (e.g., a good friend, family member, or romantic partner) or a weak tie (e.g., an acquaintance, co-worker, or classmate). They felt better after recalling an instance of generosity with a strong tie. Another study found that people’s mood improved after helping someone they desired a relationship with but not when helping someone they didn’t.
Giving to someone we’re close to also has a greater impact. A study found that people were happier to receive money from someone they were close to, rather than someone they weren’t. More generally, the closer we get to someone, the more, as Dr. Clark puts it, we “automatically empathize with [them] and see their environment through their eyes,” so giving to them feels like giving to ourselves. When we give to people we love, generosity isn’t just a threat to self-care. It’s also a form of it, allowing us to give more in the grand scheme.
Overall, these studies suggest that we should engage in mutuality with friends we’re truly committed to, rather than with everybody. Be generous, but when generosity is taxing, let your generosity be proportional to the depth of the friendship and give yourself a get-out-of-guilt-free card for saying no when the friendship isn’t as important. On the other hand, when it comes to our expectations, we should incrementally build them up rather than expecting an outpouring of generosity from the start. When the friendship is more established, it’s more likely that our friends will give to us because they love us and want to. But when we put too much pressure on a budding friendship, we may drive people away because their giving comes from fear of disappointing us rather than love. Mutuality requires that both parties are willing.
Casey learned the hard way the importance of tapering generosity depending on the depth of the friendship. A natural empath and an absorbed listener, Casey was the confidante of choice for many, to the extent that her phone became a 24/7 therapy hotline. Once, when she was in high school, she was texting an upset person into the late hours of the night, even though her parents forbade phones in bed. When she texted that she should get to sleep, the text back read, “No. I need you right now. Show up for me.” Her mom saw the glow from her cell phone through the crack of the door. As she came in to check on her, Casey chucked her phone under her bed so her mom wouldn’t see. “When you have to lie to others about how much you’re helping, then maybe you shouldn’t be,” she said.
Casey’s generosity reached its limit one night when she received a call from an unknown caller, who said, “Matt’s in the hospital. He broke his femur. What’s wrong with you? You should be there already.” As Casey drove to the hospital, she felt deeply ambivalent. Everyone should have someone to show up for them, that much she knew, but should that person be her? She had had maybe three conversations with Matt in her life. Then, when she arrived at the hospital, she got another call. It was someone else in crisis.
Casey is a naturally generous person who derives joy from helping. Her problem was not that she showed up in times of crisis. It’s that she had no discernment. She’d do just as much for her friends as she would for a stressed acquaintance. Like the giving tree, she’d repeatedly give, at grave personal cost, to people who took from her but never gave to her. She wasn’t sleeping or eating enough. Every time her phone pinged, she’d startle. When she waited an hour to respond, her phone would buzz with angry texts: “Why aren’t you responding. I need help!” Her so-called friends would get offended if she made new ones. She wasn’t only neglecting her needs. She was also letting people into her life who neglected them too.
