How to Talk to People - What do we owe our friends?

Episode Date: June 5, 2023

The terms of friendship are both voluntary and vague—yet people often find themselves disappointed by unmet expectations. In this episode of How to Talk to People, we explore how to have the difficult conversations that can make our friendships richer and how to set expectations in a relationship defined by choice. This episode was produced by Rebecca Rashid and is hosted by Julie Beck. Editing by Jocelyn Frank and Claudine Ebeid. Fact-check by Ena Alvarado. Engineering by Rob Smierciak. Special thanks to A.C. Valdez. The managing editor of How to Talk to People is Andrea Valdez. Be friends with How to Talk to People. Write to us at [e-mail]. To support this podcast, and get unlimited access to all of The Atlantic’s journalism, become a subscriber. Music by Alexandra Woodward (“A Little Tip”), Arthur Benson (“Charmed Encounter,” “She Is Whimsical,” “Organized Chaos”), Bomull (“Latte”), and Tellsonic (“The Whistle Funk”). Click here to listen to additional episodes in The Atlantic’s How To series. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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arts, culture, and international flair. DC isn't just the capital of the United States. It's the capital of the best day ever! You know Washington! Now, experience DC! Plan your trip today at washington.org. He had a bachelor party, and half of his friends bailed last minute and he was talking about these friends and how one of them lived next to him I thought in my head those are not friends. How is this kind of finding friendship?

Is this when I get out of my soapbox? So Flaking I Hate it So flaking. I hate it. I think doing the thing where you just don't show up is really not cool. If you just think it happens organically, you're going to not have friends. Hi, I'm Julie Beck, a senior editor at The Atlantic. And I'm Becca Rashid, producer of the How-To Series. This is How to Talk to People.

Becca, I know it might seem strange to suggest that we don't know how to talk to our friends and we need a podcast to tell us how, but actually there are a lot of common conflicts and misunderstandings in friendship that often go unspoken. Friendship can encompass so many different kinds of relationships, but that means that sometimes friends have clashing expectations of what the friendship should look like. And they don't always talk about that explicitly. Like flaking is a prime example of this kind of unspoken friction that can build up in friendships.

What is it about flaking in particular that bothers you? It's not just that it annoys me like in a general sense when people flake like I don't think anybody likes being flaked on. It's this sense that it has become so very normalized in our culture and it's just like a routine part of social life that you actually almost have to expect, that like a good percentage of the time if you make a plan with somebody, like that plan is going to change or get canceled and you can't rely on it happening. I think we're a little too quick to be like,

if I am not in optimal tip top shape, to show up for you, then I won't show up. Or that we have to be like completely at ease, completely comfortable, completely full of, you know, them and bigger to hang out with our friends. Totally get it and I'm not upset if you lose your childcare and you have to back out or if you get sick, things happen, life happens and I think we can all be

understanding. I think what bugs me is that it feels just completely fine and a lot of social circles to just cancel with no explanation. Or the reason is just, I'm not feeling up to it today or I'm really tired from work. I think it's kind of part and parcel with a big premium that we put on protecting our energy as like the greatest good that you need to protect your own bandwidth and your own energy. But I don't know if we should protect our energy at the cost of our relationships. There's a certain point where it just feels like, okay, do you care about this friendship? I think that Lizzie Post could help us with this.

She is a great, great granddaughter of Emily Post, who is a famous etiquette expert who wrote, you know, a well-known column about 100 years ago. And Lizzie is now the co-president of the Emily Post Institute, and she recently published the sort of updated Centennial edition of Emily Post's etiquette. There's definitely no shortage of like dating advice columns

or even like parenting advice out there. But I think what we wanted to find was some more etiquette tips or best practices for managing those tricky conversations in friendship, where expectations are less well-defined, and that's right up list, exactly. I'm going to start with a big philosophical question. Okay. What do you owe your friends. We are such individuals and just like in relationships, your love language might be different in friendships, your friendship language is

different. So what one person thinks we owe a friend, another person might think, no, that's ridiculous, no way. So I think it's a very, very personal question. And that makes navigating those relationships that are our friendships a little bit more difficult and something that we want to pay more attention to to recognize that not everyone sees friendship the exact same way that we do. Something that I have noticed is that it feels totally normalized to flake on plans. So for instance, if you and I make a plan today to get drinks next Friday,

I'm gonna feel like when Friday comes around, I'm gonna feel a need to text you to ask, are we still on for drinks today? And it would not be strange for you to text me the day before or even day of to say, you know, actually something came up or I'm just not feeling up to it. Have you observed this too?

Absolutely. I think to a certain degree, it's always been the norm that if you don't feel well or if an emergency happens, if you've caught a stomach bug, that's understandable, that's not flaking out, that's life happening and getting in the way of fun social plans. Yeah.

But I do think that there is a larger trend of being much more willing to let the emotional do I feel like it play a factor in whether or not they end up committing to or actually following through on plans. Or the, yeah, the sense that the plans that we make are not set in stone or what takes precedence is like just needing to do what's best for you. Well, and some people even say that it's like an insult to the friendship of getting together that it's like, oh, hanging out with me sounds like a chore for you right now. And there are times where that's true. We get it. Like, we all have learned that bandwidths have capacities.

I get it. I don't know that we need to be leaning into that every week. Yeah. And I mean, I've been told that I am too curmudgeonly about this. Like I remember planning a party and sort of complaining to someone about how I couldn't really plan like how much food to buy or anything because half of the people who responded yes to the invite wouldn't show up. And the person told me that I was being unreasonable that I needed to accept and account for the

fact that this is just part of social life. I would not have been pleased if I had been told that by a friend to just expect that 50% of my guest list isn't gonna show up for a party that they said they would come to. I would let friends know, like as we talk about entertaining styles and preferences,

I mean, these are things friends can talk about. And you also get to be you. You're creating your own entertaining style. You're creating your own adult life in this world. And it might be something that you find you really value in friendship is cultivating a group of friends who really stick to their plans. Yeah. Some of it has to be just sort of the deep-seated, like childhood fear of throwing a party and nobody comes, right? I have that too. Yes.

I mean, if something happens often enough, is it just not rude, but just the way that things are, and we need to just deal with it? That's a great question. The place where this one doesn't check that box for me is that there's enough people like you and me out in the world who don't appreciate this, who don't see this as a good trend. You know what I mean? This idea of committing to things and canceling very last minute for effectively no reason other than just not totally feeling up to it even though there's nothing wrong with you. I think that this is something that's frustrating a lot of people.

The same way people for a good 20, 30, 40, 50, I think even my great, great grandmother was right in about us. We're going to go ahead and say 70 years people have been annoyed at the fact that people don't RSVP well. There's always going to be a couple of friends who no matter what show up really late. There's always going to be someone of friends who no matter what show up really late. There's always gonna be someone who's your most likely to cancel. There's also always gonna be the person most likely

to always show up, you know? The person most likely to offer to bring something or to surprise you, you know? Like there's the good stuff too. Yeah, we should give those people a medal. Yeah, they just, they have school stars. So... Becca, there was a really interesting study that I saw a while back where the researchers asked people how they would approach different conflicts with friends versus with a romantic

partner. And generally, like people expected that you would actively address a problem with a romantic partner, you would talk about it. You know, they say, like, never go to bed angry, but they found that there was more of a culture of passivity in friendships, that people were more likely to say nothing and just kind of hope that issue went away on its own, or kind of quietly put some distance in the friendship, rather than talking about a problem. Passivity in my own approach to friendships comes from a fear that being too direct may come across as aggressive or asking for too much.

It makes my desire for a deeper connection with friends, especially in adulthood, feel needy or childish or sometimes even a bit inappropriate or like overstepping. [♪ music playing in we talk about how to practically handle these situations? Like if a friend clicks on me, how should I respond? Right now I feel like my only option is to just say, okay, I understand. I often feel resigned to polite acceptance as well. I think that this is one of those things where in the moment that really is the best thing you can do

because if they're canceling really last minute like within the day of the party, you've got things you're busy doing and you've got other guests that you have to focus on. So in some ways, it makes your own life easier to take that kind of etiquette high road route and say, oh, you know, I'm really sorry to hear that. If you change your mind, feel free to come, you know, especially if it's

that I just don't feel like it. You know, hey, if you find after an hour, you've rebounded and you're ready to come on over. I mean, is there a waiter respectfully say that it bothers you or would you even recommend doing that? This is something that I might do at a different time. It might be one of those things where you find a good moment where you're talking about your friendship. A moment will present itself and you can say, hey, you know, I got to be honest, that's actually something that I will cop to. I feel hurt when that happens.

This sort of no worries if not culture. This is a phrase that I hear a lot and find myself using and then hate myself for using a lot, which is it, you know, it feels hard or burdensome to ask friends for help or ask them to show up for us in some type of way. So Lizzy, would you mind like pet sitting my cat while I'm out of town, but no worries if not. So just immediately giving you an out. Yeah.

It feels like an etiquette thing because it feels like I'm being polite and deferential but is being polite really equal to not asking each other for anything? It's more so acknowledging that this person might really want to do you a favor and be there for you and you want to let them know it's truly okay if they can't. I think a lot of that is about removing pressure for people and that I think is polite. Like I can find politeness in that. Yeah, yeah, it's very situational.

Maybe I just got broken up with. I'm so upset. And I'm like, Lizzie, can you please talk? But no worries, if not. But then there are some worries, if not. You know? I also just feel like I don't understand why you would think of showing up for a friend as a burden.

I think a lot of it is that it can be. If you have a lot going on, if you're going through a lot, sometimes adding that moment of someone else's need that isn't a partner, that isn't a child, that isn't a parent, they don't live with you, that it can feel like something you don't have the capacity to do at the same time. It's amazing to see what you actually still have

in your reserves when you attempt a moment of giving and generosity when you feel like you don't have anything. I think what I really like about modern friendships is the willingness to ask if it would be okay to lean on someone. That's something I don't always think has been a part of things. I don't know that in Emily's day, when things were really hard, just how much you got to lean into a friend the way we lean into them now. I'm not a bad guy, I'm not a bad guy I'm not a bad guy, I'm not a bad guy I'm not a bad guy, I'm not a bad guy

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Totally. I mean, the thing about friendship right is that it's purely and entirely defined by choice. So what our friendship looks like and what obligations we put onto each other are things that we as friends have to decide within every single friendship. And etiquette can be a really helpful framework for thinking through this or that specific

situation, but I think a lot of people could benefit from broader, bigger conversations about the foundational issues of their friendships. Like how intimate is this friendship? What do we want our role in each other's lives to be? What do we expect from each other? Like, friends are friends because they choose to be, not because they got a marriage license, not because somebody gave birth to somebody. You choose to be friends,

and so you choose to show up for each other. And when we live in a culture that's so individualistic, like you said, we can default to that kind of you-do-you and we'll just give each other what we can, when we can, having any sort of understood obligation to one another can be hard. If you're expecting something different than your friend is expecting, just getting on the same page about what this friendship is and the level of expectation that we have of each other, it can be tricky. I had a friend who was coming back from Mexico, and she was arriving the airport at midnight. Marissa Franco is a psychologist and the author of the book Platonic.

And this is a friend I really wanted to get closer to, and I know that, you know, going out of your way to help someone in a time of need, great way to get closer to someone. Hot tip. Yeah, tip. But I'm like, oh my gosh, I hate staying up late. I'm a morning person. I go to sleep at like 10.30. Do I want to pick her up?

I've got to pause this conversation. I was having with Marissa Franco for a second. Because while we were talking, I found myself thinking about Lizzy Post's etiquette advice. And I actually think that sometimes we can be too polite to our friends, like maybe we're hesitant to even ask in the first place whether they can pick us up at the airport. And that sort of over-politeness, I think, can hold us back from having deeper friendships. And with her airport example, Marissa offered a sort of straightforward framework for figuring that out for yourself. And Julie, I

literally had to ask myself, would I do this for a romantic partner? Because of the ways romantic partners have monopolized what my brain associates with like deep love. So I had to ask myself that question. And when I did, I said, yeah, I would pick her up. I would pick up a romantic partner at the airport. Merce is someone who's thought really deeply about how our culture encourages us to put friendships last on the priority list. And that can lead to us being weirdly overly polite to our friends, like we're putting ourselves last before even talking about whether that's what we both really want. She and I talked a lot about the communication challenges that can happen if you want friendships to be more central in your life.

The model of friendship that we have is just so threadbare. More threadbare than it feels like it's ever been that it's just... This is just someone who we go to once a month happy hours with. Yeah, it's so interesting to me to see the way that friendship is defined by flexibility in a way that no other relationship is. There's no specific role a friend has to play in your life. If I introduce you to somebody and I say, this is my friend Marissa, that could anything. From we have known each other since the day we were born and have never been a part to a week at coffee at work sometimes. Every friendship is different and it has to be designed by the friends themselves. And of course that endless possibility is a strength of it,

but do you think it can also be overwhelming to people? Yeah, definitely both things. It's something that I love about friendship because it's like, whatever need I have, I can get met through friendship. Like, we could be platonic life partners, or we could hang out twice a year. But the slipperiness of that is that I think a lot of the times there's conflict in friendship because this is my understanding of friendship versus yours. You're like friendship is trivial and not something to put a lot of effort in and good vibes only and I'm like friendships are deep and sustaining and profound relationships for me. And if we have that different view of friendship, you're not going to show up at times

when I really need you and you're not going to expect me to get upset because if I had your expectation, I might not have gotten upset. I was talking to a friend's husband and he had a bachelor party. And half of his friends bailed last minute on his own bachelor party. Everyone had to pay $1,000. Yeah. Awful. $1,000 to go to his bachelor party for like two nights and

He was talking about these friends and how one of them lived next to him I thought in my head those are not friends. How is this guy defining friendship? Like that is not how I define friendship and so that made me think of the difference between Good friend versus good company good company. I like you as a person. We enjoy our time together. We have good conversations. Good friendship, a friend, is it someone you invest in? It is a commitment. It is, I'm showing up in your times of need.

It is, I'm doing things that sometimes might inconvenience me because I'm thinking about how much they'll mean to you. It is, I'm going to celebrate your successes. It's, I'm going gonna follow through with what I say that I will do to the extent possible. I'm basically considering you and I'm considering your needs. And I think in a lot of our culture, we're stuck on good company

and we haven't gotten to good friendship. How do you set those expectations in a friendship when it is a voluntary relationship? With communication, like I've had to tell friends, for example, I would love to hear from you more. I noticed I'm often the one here reaching out. Would you be open to that? And it's taking that risk, right?

Because it is a risk. Because that could lead them to say, this person expects too much. I'm a back away. But it could also lead them to say, yeah, I'm going to show up and I'm going to reinvest and I'm going to make sure Marissa feels like she's in a reciprocal friendship. It's also okay to just talk about it in a more up front way.

Like I went on a retreat with some friends. I guess it was like a series of questions that went around in regards to like how do we support each other as friends. And one of the questions was like, do you like when friends show up last minute at your house? It's a helpful question to ask, you know? Like sometimes I'm in your neighborhood, I'm like, should I reach out? Should I not? If I don't ask, I might assume no. And then there's a misopportunity to connect. So yeah. The showing up last minute, well, first of all, I feel like that's something that always

happens on TV shows, right? Like on the OC, they were always just walking over to each other's house to have a serious conversation without ever like calling to say I'm coming over. And so it feels very unrealistic. And at the same time, I do have a friend who lives around the corner who will sometimes text me like, I'm walking by your place. Do you want to come down? I think something that I've observed is a sort of strange politeness or formality in the way that people sometimes interact with their friends. For example, we

text to set up a time to call instead of just calling. Are we just avoiding inconveniencing each other? Why would that be such a worry? Yeah, I think a lot of the times we fear in posing. We fear burning people, but the biggest burden we place can sometimes be our silence because we want it to be polite. And yeah, I think people think this is me not in posing, this is me trying to respect or understand a friend's boundaries, but the thing is, we don't actually ask what they are. What I tend to see is it's more from a place of,

this friend doesn't want to hear from me, or this friend will be burdened by me. So it's the kind act for me to do less. Let me not reach out when they're going through all this grief because they probably want their time alone, you know? What I think, so one thing that I always talk about with making friends is assume people like you because it's going to trigger a set of behaviors, warmth, openness that is going to make that more likely to be true.

But I also think the more we assume people like us, the more intimacy that we have with them. So the more we assume, they're just going to want to hear from me on the phone. I don't have to say it up this time to call. I'm assuming that you love me. I teach a class on loneliness. And one of my students is like, I just think if I had to go to the hospital in the middle of the night, like, who could I call? And I'm like, how would you feel if one of the friends that you made reached out to you in the middle of the night because they needed help with going to the hospital? He says, I would feel totally honored that they picked me.

And the problem is, when it comes to our glitchy brains, when we're predicting how we come off, we tend to be a lot more cynical and negative than what is the truth, especially with asking for help from friends, I get really nervous about it, and I take myself through that exercise where I'm like, well, what if this friend asked me for the same thing? How would I feel that's probably the more accurate outcome? Yeah.

Is there a sense that we feel like we need to be deferential to everything else that our friends have going on in their lives to the degree that we deprioritize ourselves before they have a chance to deprioritize us. Yes. I think that's right. You know, there is this theory basically arguing that we operate along two poles of protecting ourselves and protecting the relationship.

And there's a lot of people who are often in this place of protecting themselves by not reaching out and being overly differential, not being vulnerable, not initiating, but they don't often realize that there's a cost to all that self-protection, which is your relationships. I feel like to some degree, there's a feeling that we're supposed to just accept whatever it is that our friends are able to offer, that the highest value or the truest truth is that everybody needs to do what's best for themselves. I think that's so stars and stripes American. I don't know if it's that way everywhere.

But I think maybe it would be helpful if you can explain what individualistic boundaries are and what the boundaries you're seeing that you think are overly self-focused look like. Do you have examples? Yeah. I think the self-focused boundaries look like in a sort of overarching way. I'm going to fulfill my needs no matter what your needs are,

which looks like, hey, you know, if you call me really upset at 10 p.m., I'm not going to answer. Or, hey, like, I don't need to make time for you because at this time in my life, I'm very very busy. To me, setting a boundary is a communal act. It's like I set this boundary for myself so I can invest in our friendship in a long term and not get burned out and it's I'm gonna consider your needs when I set this boundary and it's almost like a I'm gonna set this boundary and also offering offering like oh, I'm not free to talk at that time. What about another time? Or even like, you know, I'm not free to come to that, but I'm rooting for you,

and I'm supporting you. Sometimes it's just the affirmation that's the offering. Do you have a sense of why you think that is a genre of boundaries that's become popular? Is it sort of self-care? The sense that this is self-care, and I need to put my own oxygen mask on before I can put on yours? Yeah, I think about for a lot of like friendship behaviors, there's a emotional incongruency. What I mean is that your experience of this act is very different from your friends in a way that you're not always privy to. So you might set this boundary thinking about, oh, I'm really busy and this is going to

benefit me. But when your friend receives that boundary, they're feeling like, I'm so alone and I have no one in this moment where I really, really need someone. And so there's just this, I guess, this disconnect between our two emotional worlds in that moment, because if we're only thinking about our reality and makes a lot of sense, but when we think about our co-reality, our reality and the other person's reality, then we might realize that even if this act benefits us,

the cost for our friend or for our greater. You know, when you have a healthy relationship, what happens is you begin to include them in your sense of self. So there's a disconnect happening when you're willing to completely upset and let down your friend to meet your own needs. Yeah. And that's kind of what I'm referring to with these individualistic boundaries, which is like, I'm going to get 100% of my needs met, even if 0% of your needs are going to be met.

The communal boundary is to protect the relationship. The individualistic boundary is to protect yourself. So we're so I've been reporting on friendship for a long time. And when we're discussing kind of how do we make friends and how do we maintain those friendships, I feel like the conversation often stops that this very simplistic platitude of friendship takes work. And that's very vague and general,

but I'm also wondering with your perspective as a psychologist, whether you see anything kind of dicey about suggesting that friendship is labor. I think so. I mean, what are all our associations with work, like negative, something that we have to do, something that we need to get compensated for to be able to do. And I think when we use those capitalistic terms for friendship, we not only are applying that term, but the web of associations that we add to that term, the baggage of all of

those associations. So I like the idea of friendship taking effort rather than friendship taking work. What I want to convey is that in friendship we're going to be inconvenience, in friendship we're going to do things that we don't want to do, in friendship we are going to have to go out of our way and take initiative and be proactive in all of those things. And I think those all fit into the realm of effort. But when we say work, it's almost like it's something that we don't want. I mean, I don't think most people's intentions are usually bad. It just seems like some of the norms in our culture are steering us towards undermining our friendships without maybe realizing it, where if it is something that you really want to prioritize that in your life, it feels

a little bit like swimming against the current. It does. It can feel like unrequited love a lot, but I will say there's also subcommunities like queer communities where it's a lot more common for people to put a lot more value on friendship and there's talks about asexual communities, there's talks about platonic life partners. I think queer communities are the pioneers of friendship and could teach heteropepal. A lot. I don't know if you've heard the term relationship anarchy but it's um... No, can you explain faith? It's this idea that we don't need to use what society has told us as our guideposts

for the value that we place on different types of relationships. We can choose what resonates with us. And my choice is I want to value again, friends as much as a potential spouse. Like that's the hierarchy that I would want in my life in the larger anarchy framework. If you start from a place of anarchy, where would you want friends to be in your personal valuing system? So when I was out of town for a week, last week, Julie, one of my best friends texted me saying, okay, I'm gonna be full, needy boyfriend when you're back.

And we hadn't been talking for a week or so because we were both too busy. And I just thought it was so nice that she sent that little note. And the first thing I thought was a lot of times when we're trying to express to friends how much we miss each other or love each other or need each other, it's kind of as if we only have the language of romance to express that. And sometimes we use the language of love that we understand through romantic partnerships to express that we have that need for our friends at all.

Right. It was very cute and sweet that she said that, but also, you don't have to minimize wanting to hang out with your friend by pretending you're acting like a needy-boyfriend. You are a lot of miss your friend, also. Totally. No, it's that study I referenced earlier that was talking about a culture of passivity. It was sort of focusing on conflict, but I would venture to say that there's kind of a culture of passivity in the good times as well.

You know, where friendship is too often like a relationship of convenience or we'll go with the flow and I'll see you when I see you. And it's hard to actually keep up a friendship if you're being passive in that way and you just expect it to come effortlessly. Right, and I genuinely don't know how a lot of my friendships would function if we didn't put in that quote-unquote work, because two of my best friends live outside of the U.S. and we are in different time zones and don't catch each other easily. And usually one of them tries to call me super early in the morning, my time, which half the time I can't even pick up the phone.

It's just emblematic of that sort of small gesture you can make for a friend. And it shows me that they tried to catch me. And if they could, they would be on the phone with me right now. And do you feel like that quote unquote work and effort that you put in to try to catch each other in different time zones is a burden to you? No, not at all. It's the smallest, you know, gesture of love that we could sort of show each other and

takes almost no effort. Yeah, that's why I think it's so strange that it's like, oh the work of friendship is some hard or negative or burdened some thing like you're so happy to see that missed call and I'm sure she was so happy to call you. That's all for this episode of How to Talk to People. This episode was produced by Becca Rashid and hosted by me Julie Beck, editing by Jocelyn Frank and Claudine Abade. Fact check by Anna Alvarado, engineering by Rob Smurciak. The managing producer of How to Talk to People is Andrea Valdes.