Continuing on from Part One and Part Two, here are some more quotations I thought were interesting from various podcasts discussing the questions and uncertainties involved in cultivating deeper friendships.
Ep 3: Friendship & Loneliness – Things You Can’t Ask Yer Mum
‘It’s one of those things where people say you pick up where you left off. We don’t have to be in each other’s lives constantly to know we still love and care about each other and we’d be there at the drop of a hat. And that’s actually the key of adult friendships. Not holding anything against each other when you’ve got no time… You just dip back into it or see each other after a few months, and it’s like you’ve been speaking to each other every day. ‘Cos you need that, and someone that makes it feel high maintenance is just not going to work ‘cos that’s not what you need from friendships, I don’t think. You don’t want someone making you feel guilty when you haven’t got time, or when you’re very busy or stressed, or something else. It doesn’t mean that friendship is less important; it just means life is happening, and friends stick by no matter what is going on.’
Lizzy Hadfield and Lindsey Holland
How to Cultivate Deep Friendships: LIVE with Callie Duke – The Woman Podcast
‘I think being able to be vulnerable is so important, and that’s where friendships really deepen.’
Callie Duke
‘I think we’ve got to look for people who are going to spur us along in our spiritual growth… You need friends that care more about your long-term holiness than your short-term happiness.’
Callie Duke
Are some Friendships too much work? Emotional labour, boundaries and pity friendships – I Said What I Said
‘Another thing is I’ve learnt to be honest with myself about whether this is actually my friend or whether this is just an acquaintance, or whether this is just someone I’ve outgrown… I wonder if we need to be clearer? I just don’t see, like, my male friends going round calling people friends as easily as I do. And I wonder how that hurts people, how that confuses people. I think the difference between men and women in this context is that men aren’t socialised to edit themselves for people’s comfort… Even if that means lying to ourselves and others, women are a lot more willing to overstep our own boundaries or to lie to ourselves just to make people comfortable.’
Mukundwa and Nyak
‘I’m curious about what friendship is to begin with. I think, when you do these really fun interviews with your nieces and nephews and you ask them these questions, and you ask them a question “what is friendship?” and some of their answers were, you know, “I know someone’s a friend if they talk to me, if they share with me, and if they smile at me.” It’s so simple for them. And so much, so much of that is true. Like, “if I have a good time with you and you’re kind to me, we’re friends.” But now there’s so much more complexity. Like, very few of my friendships now, few of them reflect that still. Some of them are, there’s just added complexity because of geography, because of time, because of you’ve got this partner and that partner and now you’re divided. This is what your work means for your time, and your mental health is coming to the party now. When you’ve got all of these dimensions I just never had to deal with.
So I used to be a very good friend because all I needed to do was to show up, and at school I had no choice but to show up because I had to show up for school. The structure of your life literally is conducive to friendship. And I think now that a lot of us have friends spread around the world, it’s hard to, it’s starting to distance in terms of [not just] geographical distance but emotional distance. [It] starts to tease out the fissures in your friendship, and the nuances… I think that’s just a bit complex, having these partitions in our friendships because I just feel like that wasn’t what we were told. We were told a friendship – for women – a best friend is everything. And that’s just not the case.’
Mukundwa and Nyak
#1 Teaser | Flying Solo – Adulting
‘It seems as though one of the resounding aspects that affects all of us when becoming an adult is a feeling of isolation and maybe even loneliness that we really didn’t expect. I think it can be quite a shock to the system when a huge number of us; you spend a vast amount of time in education, and at school you kind of have no choice but to be involved in some kind of peer group, and of course you’re all on the same wavelength, you have the same goals. And then perhaps when you go to university, once again you’re still not quite adulting. In fact, I’d say uni is a little bit like a waiting room. Like, you might get some people who pass it and go straight into work. And already the structure that made up your background bubble starts to break apart and then some people never leave the waiting room. I’m sure we’ve all got friends who seem to be perpetually studying or studenting or travelling. And once you’re flung from the comforting arms of education – never really thought that I’d say that – the world seems a lot bigger and then a lot smaller all at once.
And then the thing that you seem to have been preparing for all you life – which is your career – isn’t at the end of the tunnel, it isn’t directly ready for you all packaged up neatly once you’re out of education. And when you’re at uni or school, I think it was a bit more of a relay race, a team effort… it’s still very much like you’re all in this together. But then suddenly you’re on a straight and narrow… and suddenly it’s very uneven and you might feel like you’re lagging behind, or you might feel like you’re doing slightly better than your friends. And it doesn’t really matter where you are on the scale. I think for everyone it’s slightly uncomfortable to feel as though, oh, I don’t know what’s happened to that really comforting array of people that were around me and are now spread out maybe all over the country, maybe abroad, maybe in completely different fields to [what] you thought… I think what it forces you to do is really look into yourself in a way that maybe you’ve never done before, and kind of see yourself in a whole new light as a whole individual rather than as part of a team. And I think that can be quite difficult.’
Oenone Forbat
Feminine Finishing School 