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December 12 - December 31, 2023
Thriving means you don’t invite destructive people into your life because they give you the opportunity to earn love. It means people who love you freely are no longer suspicious and those who withhold are no longer motivating. It means you are generous because you love someone and want to show it, not because someone doesn’t love you and you want to change that. When someone withholds love, you thrive when you walk away instead of working harder. Because it’s not your fault they don’t love you and it doesn’t mean anything is wrong with you.
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?”
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.
Why do we go mum about our love toward friends? We just don’t get the same permission to express it as we do for our spouses. Hallmark cards, love letters, and physical touch: in the US, so many earmarks of affection are confined to our spouses, although they need not be. For our significant others, we have anniversaries, Valentine’s Day, and wedding vows to impart our love. For friends, well, there’s International Friendship Day, but no one’s heard of it (it’s July 30).
Another reason showing love for friends isn’t popular (relative to doing so for romantic partners) is because of the jumbling of any type of love with sexual love. We are petrified to express love for our friends because if we do, we risk accusations of being attracted to them. But this muddling reveals our collective confusion as to different forms of love. Angela Chen reveals in her book Ace: What Asexuality Reveals About Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex, that we feel platonic (appreciation and liking toward someone), romantic (heady passion and idealization of someone), or sexual
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It’s not that we don’t love our friends like we do our spouses. In fact, one study finds that women experience more intimacy with their same-sex best friend than they do with their lover, and both genders report having more in common with best friends than with lovers. But when it comes to friends, we feel more pressure to conceal that love. Expressing it requires us to transcend homohysteria by challenging homophobia and acknowledging that sexual attraction isn’t conveyed by the entire gamut of affectionate behaviors. Transcending it also looks like giving ourselves permission to express to
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Telling people you appreciate them, value them, or see so much good in them builds friendships, no matter how close you are. The more you show affection, the more likely you are to not just make friends, but also deepen the friendships you already have.
Unless we have a reason to think otherwise, if someone expresses affection toward us, we should assume their intentions are pure. This not only feels better than assuming they have some other motive, but it also nurtures the friendship and our self-esteem, which is another important filter for how we receive love.
