What Are Friends Even For?

“Drop toxic friends before they drag you down.” We’ve seen the message repeated hundreds of times recently, especially if we follow social media: some people have personalities so poisonous, we must jettison their influence immediately. If you’re anything like me, your mind immediately flashed on that “friend” we all have, the friend who foments quarrels for kicks, or encourages you to drink past your limits, or spreads conspiracy theories, or is just an insufferable jerk.

In an article that isn’t recent, but nevertheless recently crossed my desk, political journalist Ephrat Livni complains that this reasonable goal, of removing influences which dirty our spirits, has become itself toxic. Livni cites multiple articles, from top-drawer newspapers and journals, encouraging readers to disaffiliate themselves from friends with glim personalities, negative traits, or poor personal habits. She protests, not unreasonably, that this reduces friendships to capitalist exchanges, and relationships to long term personal interest.

I find myself torn. Like many suburban White kids, I grew up encouraged to be endlessly accommodating, to keep making friends, and never surrender on existing friendships. “Make new friends, but keep the old,” the campfire song we learned in Cub Scouts taught us: “one is silver and the other’s gold.” Even when dealing with schoolyard bullies, my adult influences encouraged me to befriend them: maybe they’re angry, parents and teachers suggested, because they’re lonely.

This encouraged a cycle of enabling dysfunctional personalities and catering to unreasonable demands, a cycle I must consciously resist in adulthood. Not coincidentally, as we witness the violent predations of dysfunctional, unreasonable people like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, I’ve realized this message of appeasing destructive people isn’t merely misguided or naïve; it serves a sociopolitical order where hoi polloi like me cater to our overlords’ pig-headed demands. It’s political control disguised as common ethics.

Plato and Aristotle argues what makes a good
friend, too. They never found an answer.

However, I’ve also known people whose personality traits deserve ostracism. People who, for instance, seek justification for their self-destructive habits by encouraging me to mimic them, and finding ways to make me feel belittled if I don’t. People who see disagreement as personal disloyalty, and respond with shock-and-awe force. People whose demands for comfort and nurturance become constant, making me into a surrogate parent for a damaged adult. Sometimes you have to draw the line.

One of modern adulthood’s most vexing questions is: how do we make friends once we’re past traditional school age? As we’ve become unrooted from geographic place and erited community, many grown-ups struggle to make meaningful friendships. Which, I suspect, explains why adults need reminded to shun toxic people, because we fear returning to that unmoored state. Bad friends feel better than loneliness, right? In the short term, anyway. And, oops, capitalism is all short term.

Social and economic orders seek rules which bureaucrats can enforce without recourse, because if everybody follows the same rules equally, nobody can claim they’re treated unfairly, right? We know, of course, that this isn’t so. In third grade, Brian Morse clotheslined me from behind for “being a nerd,” and we both got three days’ detention for “fighting.” That’s how I discovered that treating everyone fairly doesn’t mean treating everyone equally. Bureaucratic rules are frequently unfair.

This applies to friendships, too. Both the heedless adherence to rules like “drop every toxic friend now,” and the magical thinking of believing that I can befriend, and thereby detoxify, every schoolyard bully, mean the application of unthinking bureaucratic rules where they often don’t apply. We seek rules because they provide one-size-fits-all coverage, except they don’t. We’re uniquely human, and so are our friends. Put complex individuals together in friendship, and our uniqueness becomes cumulative.

Psychologist Ellen Hendrickson answers the question of making friends in adulthood concisely. Our friends, she writes, aren’t the people we share the most values and interests with, but those we share the most time with. That’s why children make friends at school, and adults make friends at work. We can govern our time to ensure we meet, and keep company with, people who suit our values. Perhaps we should. But genuine friendships happen over time.

Ephrat Livni bewails using metrics to determine who constitutes a “positive friend.” Me too, because friendships sustain us through bad times, and give us opportunities to practice empathy. But, sometimes healthy people need to discontinue chronically unhealthy influences. Mindlessly applying rules, whether to keep or snub friends, leads us into unhealthy conclusions. Friendships aren’t passive. We must remain actively committed to making wise, adaptive choices. Stop looking for rules, and get to know your friends.