Tag: Vulnerability

What are some important lessons you’ve learnt from your friendships?

A student wrote to me, asking:

What are some important lessons you’ve learnt from your friendships?

Thank you for this very thoughtful question. Here are two very important lessons on friendship that I have learnt since I graduated:

(1) The nature of your friendships will change over time and that’s not always a bad thing. Your friends will get attached and they will spend less time with you; they will transition to working life and they will have less time to spare; their experiences at work and with love will also transform them for better or for worse, etc.

Just because you hang out less or talk less to each other doesn’t mean that you aren’t friends anymore or that the friendship has ceased to exist. The friendship is still there and they will be there for you when you need it most. I have close friends who, when I say I’m going through a difficult moment, will not hesitate to drop all their commitments and travel all the way from East to West just to be with me when I need them most. We used to hangout and talk a lot every day when we were students. These days, not so much because of our commitments. But the close bond still exists.

In fact, I have friends who, though we haven’t spoken to each in years, we’re still able to talk to intimately and intensely as if we just picked up from where we left years ago. Of course, I have lost friends because we change and our values change greatly, and so we don’t see eye to eye on critical matters. But that’s ok. It happens. Don’t blame yourself. It happens.

The point is that don’t regard the change in the nature of your friendships as a bad thing. It just happens as a fact of life. They are still friends. Those years of shared experiences you’ve had, those moments of fun, and heart-to-heart discussions. These have contributed in forging friendships that will last after graduation.

(2) Being vulnerable is very important to developing close friendships. How close you are to your friends depends heavily on how vulnerable you are willing to be with them. Most of us are stuck in some kind of deadlock with each other, unsure of whether to be risk being vulnerable to the other. But if you play the waiting game and invest little or nothing, your knowledge and bond with that friend remains superficial.

If you want a way to gauge how superficial or deep your friendships are, ask yourself: How many friends do you know well enough to know about their sad/tragic chapter of their lives? Everyone has a sad/tragic chapter of their lives that defines them (who they are) and how they behave now. If everyone around you seems to be living very happy peaceful lives, then you haven’t grown close to them to know their dark stories. These are just friends whom you hang out with, but you’ve not grown close enough to discover their vulnerable side, the sad/tragic story of their lives that they’re often too ashamed to reveal.

If you initiate by being vulnerable yourself, they will reciprocate and be vulnerable too (assuming they are good friends to begin with). That’s when you know your friendship has begun to deepen.

Now, I know it can be very hard, especially if you’ve been through a lot of hurt and pain in the past. It feels awful to be betrayed or hurt by someone we care so much for, and from someone we call a friend. But I think it’s important that we try again and again to risk that vulnerability. If you think about it, if we fell from a bicycle and hurt ourselves, we don’t usually say, “I will never ever cycle again.” We’d pick ourselves up and continue cycling. So why do we behave so differently when we are hurt by people close to us? Is it really very different? Should we treat these hurts any differently?

So let me end with a quote that someone shared with me recently: “The decision to love (friends or a partner) is the decision to risk hurting yourself.”

Do you trust someone easily?

A student wrote to me, asking:

Tell me, do you trust someone easily?

Here’s my answer:

Yes I do. I believe that it’s better to start off trusting someone (even a stranger), unless there are red flags that indicate that I shouldn’t trust the person. And only if the person violates that trust do I then reduce my trust in that person.

A lot of people confuse trust with revealing your most vulnerable self to another. The process of revealing your vulnerable self to another is a process for establishing intimate friendships (includes romantic relationships too).

Yes, trust is a necessary prerequisite for intimate relationships. If you cannot trust someone, you won’t want to open yourself up to reveal your most vulnerable true self, with all your worries, insecurities, etc. BUT, it’s very important to recognise that trust and revealing your vulnerable self to another person – these are two very distinct things.

So, you can trust people – and I do mean trust in a very deep sense – without necessarily having to make yourself vulnerable. Trust, after all, is the fabric of society, and it is the invisible connection that allows us to work with people and do all kinds of things. You don’t need to reveal your vulnerable self to others to establish good professional working relations with them.

Of course, this probably isn’t your primary concern with the question you’re asking (I’ll address it soon enough). But the reason why I made the distinction between trust and vulnerability is that people who have difficulties being vulnerable to others conflate that with the notion of trust, and they thus have difficulties trusting people even in a professional working relationship. And this becomes a huge problem for them. The inability to trust others fuels their insecurity, and this actually leads them to act in very toxic ways without being aware of it.

Let me illustrate with an example: In times past, I used to work with a team of students, and in that team were two students who had major trust issues. They were so awfully toxic, that they almost destroyed the cohesion of the team by spreading false rumours. They just couldn’t trust others. They found it hard to believe that people actually genuinely wanted to help them. So they perceived attempts at helping them as malicious personal attacks on their weaknesses. It baffled me how they couldn’t accept that people just wanted to help.

The point I wish to make here is this: Don’t conflate trust with revealing your vulnerable self. See the difference so that you can learn to trust others. Otherwise that mistrust will be destructive to yourself and to everyone around you. It isn’t pleasant working in an environment where everyone’s suspicious of everyone, and it sucks to be in a situation where you feel that you can’t trust anyone to be on your side. But they didn’t realise that they were responsible for creating that environment for themselves and everyone around.

Now that I’ve covered trust, I can talk about intimacy and revealing our vulnerable selves. I like to think of human relationships in terms of the Hedgehog’s Dilemma. This idea came from the German philosopher, Schopenhauer. In the winter, hedgehogs will come together to stay warm. The problem with hedgehogs is that they are very spiky, so the closer they get to each other, the warmer they felt. BUT, they also began hurting each other with their spikes, and so they keep apart. But the process repeats because they are cold and they need the warmth. So the hedgehogs are in a dilemma: how do I stay warm without getting hurt? The answer is: You just have to learn to get close to others so that you don’t hurt and be hurt.

Humans are like these hedgehogs. We want the warmth of love and friendships, but when we get too close (i.e. when we begin revealing our vulnerable selves to them), we hurt or be hurt. It’s part and parcel of this hedgehog-like existence. So we have to be ready to embrace the hurts along the way. It’s a risk in relationships. But at the same time, we have to learn how to avoid hurting others, and how to handle others so that we don’t get hurt. It’s going to be a very prickly affair, and one of much trial and error. And of course, we can learn a lot from the good practices of others.

Easy to say, difficult to do. For starters, I think we just need to learn to be kinder to ourselves and kinder to the people around us.