Friends and Enemies: Our Need to Love and Hate. Dorothy Rowe

of achievement – but often life forces us to choose between them. If we are wise we know what our top priority is and we make sure we fulfil it in some way. No matter how vast Fay’s work commitments are she always surrounds herself with family and friends. When Irene was diagnosed with lung cancer she chose not to go immediately into treatment. Instead she flew to Paris from Sydney to spend two weeks touring the art galleries. What mattered most to her was exploring ‘that marvellous, exciting world out there’.

      Opposites, so they say, attract, and where love and sex are concerned a couple is always a pairing of an introvert and an extravert. We see in the other something we do not have. The central character in Tim Lott’s White City Blue is Frankie, an estate agent and an extravert. He says of himself,

      I’ve always liked to be liked. Everyone does, I suppose. I’m just prepared to admit it. It’s more of a naked need than a desire for me. I hate it if someone doesn’t like me. And so a job which seemed to turn so much on making people like you, on making them trust you, appealed to me. And you don’t have the effort afterwards of maintaining a friendship. If you sell their flat at a good price, or find them a nice one, they love you. I get kissed, hugged, praised, thanked. It’s terrific for self-esteem. Then it’s goodbye and on to the next person to woo.¹³

      Frankie’s affairs are as transient as his customers. Then he meets Veronica. He does not understand her, but he recognizes that she has something he does not have.

      As I chatted to her, I realized with a certain amount of surprise that I actually did like her – not only her looks but the way she kept herself apart from herself. There was – how can I put this – a decent gap between when she thought and when she spoke, there was consideration. It was a mark of self-possession, something I find greatly attractive for that reason. Perhaps because it’s the quality I’ve always lacked. Events sweep me up, clean my clock, leave me gasping.¹⁴

      We might not always be what we appear to be. A couple might appear to be two extraverts, but one of them is a socially skilled introvert; or two introverts, but one of them is a shy extravert. Where friendship is concerned, introverts can be friends with introverts and extraverts with extraverts, but often a lengthy friendship, one that withstands the changes that life brings, is between an extravert and an introvert. One of the reasons that the friendship John McCarthy and Brian Keenan formed when they were hostages together in Beirut was so strong was because John was the extravert and Brian the introvert, and each was prepared to supply what the other lacked.

      However, misunderstandings and enmities can arise because one person does not understand or will not accept that the other has a different priority. Only now does Lesley see how she, the extravert, misunderstood her introvert husband. Often such misunderstandings turn into intolerance. To an extravert the introvert’s refusal to display emotion can seem to betray a complete lack of feeling, while an introvert can despise the way in which an extravert puts relationships above principle. When I was in Greece I met a designer, a woman in her fifties from New York, who told me how she had lost a friend.

      She said, ‘I was invited to submit a design for a particular project. I was interested in doing this because it was something I hadn’t attempted before and it was a chance to try out some ideas, but I wasn’t passionately wedded to the design I developed. I’m too long in the tooth now to get overinvolved in the work I do, but it was interesting and I wanted feedback from the man who’d commissioned it. Well, this person was someone I’d known for years. I knew him socially as well as through work, and I thought of us as being friends, not close friends, but friends. One thing I knew about him was that he really liked to be liked. I never saw this as a problem because he’s a really likeable guy. Everybody likes him. I never thought this would take precedence over the work. Yet this is just what happened. He couldn’t bring himself to say he didn’t like my work because he thought that would mean I wouldn’t like him. That was just ridiculous. It never crossed my mind that his opinion about this piece of work would cause me to dislike him. I never think about whether I like or dislike people because on the whole I really like people. I can think of only one person I actually dislike, and that’s very personal. A lot of people I judge very harshly but I don’t dislike them. It mightn’t always be liking but I guess I feel sorry for people. Everyone gets a rotten deal one way or another. Anyway, what happened was that there was a big performance in which he talked to other people but he didn’t talk to me. The first I knew of it was when a mutual friend – you know the sort of friend who can’t get to you quick enough with bad news – rang me to say he’d spoken to her husband and of course her husband had told her. He should have just given me his opinion straight but he didn’t. It really wasn’t any big deal but at the time I thought it was important. I came to feel that he’d acted in bad faith. That’s a harsh judgement but that’s me. I think that worrying about whether people like you is a weakness.’

      The lack of understanding and tolerance between an introvert and an extravert can become the basis for enmity.

      Perhaps the greatest contrast between friendship and enmity is that friendships are often difficult to establish and always hard to maintain, while enmities are easy to establish and simple to maintain. Friendships always involve trying to understand another person and, in opening yourself to that person, making yourself vulnerable. Enmity always involves turning the enemy into an object which requires no understanding and, in closing yourself off from the other person, making yourself aggressive and strong. Enmity always makes us less of a human being and friendship makes us more. To achieve that more is not easy.

      I have been asking people whether they find friendship easy. The consensus of opinion is that friendship is demanding and difficult.

      When I asked Miles if he found it easy to make friends he said, ‘It is quite hard.’ I asked him what he found hard about it and he said, ‘Well, if there’s someone new the teachers want you to be nice to her and if you really don’t like her, or him, at all, it’s very difficult and she can’t be a real friend to you.’

      ‘When you meet somebody you think you might like, do you find it hard then to be friends?’

      ‘Sometimes, but sometimes it’s easy.’

      ‘What makes the difference?’

      ‘Well, if it’s someone you like but they’re not so keen on you, it’s quite hard. Or if you like one thing and the other person didn’t, and that person hated it and threw it away, then that would be quite hard because you’d be using it and the other person would be wrecking it.’

      Miles has spent seven years of his life negotiating his friendships, first with family and family friends, and then with fellow pupils. He is a warm, outgoing boy, keenly interested in other people and in the world around him, he has the unwavering support of his parents, yet he finds friendship far from easy. How much more difficult is friendship for someone who, no matter how warm and friendly they might be, has no secure background.

      Diyana was enjoying her life in Sarajevo when the war came and destroyed much of what she held dear. After enduring months of shelling and sniper fire from the Serbs she made a desperate and dangerous journey with her little daughter from Sarajevo to London, where she found asylum. I asked her, ‘How easy are you finding it to meet people here and really make friends?’

      She said, ‘It’s easy to meet people, very easy, but it’s very difficult to make a friend and start a real friendship. First of all you don’t understand the people – it’s not just a matter of language, it’s a matter of a different mentality as well. Sometimes you don’t understand somebody who is maybe offering you help, maybe really wants to help you and to make a friendship with you, but you just can’t understand. It can take years and years to get used to English people. I don’t think they’re worse than my people, or that they are any worse than any people in the world, you just need time to get to know the English.’

      How many times have I heard an Australian or an American say that about the English! I said, ‘Everyone who comes here says that.’

      Diyana went on, ‘I find it very easy to communicate