Friendship Ego

When Facebook first started becoming popular in my life, something interesting became more obvious or apparent, and that’s that you could count the “number of friends” you had. And that number on the screen, for many, became the actual goal of life. Without realizing it, many people made a game out of getting that number higher, which typically meant meeting someone in person for just long enough that you could add them as a friend. And since there were many other people playing that game, many were willing to accept friend requests from people they were well aware would never play a role in their life again.

This “friendship ego” can be likened to clinging to other types of ego, or identifying with something in the external world. To allay our deepest fears, we glob on to concepts and ideas about reality, models of what the world ought to be. Facebook just put more and more in plain sight what people had been doing for a long time, which was identifying with the idea of a friend, and what the ideal of that friend should be. In the process of forming that mental model, it became all but impossible for people to actually sit and experience one another, they just work off of their model of the friendship or of the other person.

The surface level friendship many people probably are well aware of. I noticed in myself that I liked having people over for dinner. Once they came over for dinner, I very often didn’t reach out to them again, or invite them back for dinner. And I realized that having them over for dinner wasn’t to enjoy their presence, but to put a notch on my belt and to put them in a model in my head of “friend.” It didn’t matter that it was a grand total of maybe one or two hours of their time in our house, what I was really looking for, without realizing it, was the mental model of them being my friend.

Another type of friendship ego is worse, and that is where you tell yourself this person is “in my special circle” of friends, and therefore has certain qualities that other people in the world don’t have. Most often we do this in romantic relationships–the modern term for this is “love is blind.” Friendships can be blind, too. And when they are–when we create a model of who that person is supposed to be in our eyes–we both suffer intensely when they inevitably deviate from that model (“they aren’t a good friend, they should have done x, y, or z, or been there for me in a, b, or c way”), and we also end up driving them away in the process, by pushing them in a direction that isn’t natural for them. Everything in the universe is allergic to feeling controlled.

It wasn’t obvious to me that I had been doing this, but I clearly had. I had a good friend who I talked into going to nursing school once. After graduating college, he was living with his mom in a rough part of town, driving a broken down minivan, and working as a driver of sorts, one of those around town pick up shredding services. I subtly looked down on him for buying himself a nice car, for buying a house before paying off his student loans, and for marrying a girl who didn’t have any work ethic. And then I got down on myself because he didn’t ask me to be a groomsman in his wedding, and later that resentment drove me to be really pushy about him not spending enough time with me. You can probably guess whether he returns my phone calls now.

I saw him recently at a group function, and resolved to do my best to just see him as he was. One of the things he emphasized was that his wife was starting nursing school and quitting her job “because she knows it’s not where she wants to be.” Memories of him saying in an emphatic tone of voice “I need a place of my own” and, when talking about his car “oh man, the dude hooked it up.” And you begin to see that everyone, literally everyone is playing an ego game, and we are so distracted and absent minded that we are embarrassed at how obvious this was once you actually look at it.

Compare the two: the idea of someone, the model of them that exists in your head, and talking them in in real life. Compare the state of tension that exists when you think about how to try and control your friend and force them into a way of being, versus just existing and seeing what they are really like. Look very hard at the depth of the satisfaction you get when you finally talk them into your perspective. You’re getting something out of it, so what is it?

In my case, what I got out of it was a brief feeling of superiority, of solidity, followed by not understanding them and not feeling any lasting peace. Compared to the peace of enjoying a scientific-like conversation where you can really discover someone else, it’s nothing to compare to at all.