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

one of the women had rated friendship as completely easy, but she had written, ‘I seem to offer and receive a very durable and rewarding level of friendship, but I do screen people out if I don’t take to them.’ Only one man had rated friendship completely easy, but in the two days I was with the workshop group I saw how he worked ceaselessly to make and to maintain friendships. I could see why when he told me of one of the worst experiences of his life when, in his last year at school, all his friends left and he was completely alone facing what he felt was his annihilation as a person. He now put a great deal of highly skilled work into making sure that that never happened again.

      Creating and maintaining friendships and overcoming enmities are not easy tasks. Ed Cairns, a psychologist who had studied the effects the Troubles in Northern Ireland had had on the people there and who was an elder of the Presbyterian Church, told me, ‘I think that for us to move on, all that we have to do in Northern Ireland is to learn to tolerate each other at some level; we don’t actually have to learn to love each other; we don’t have to learn to forgive each other. It would be nice if these things come about, but I think in the first instance we just have to tolerate each other, which people are often not prepared to do at the moment.’

      My friend Judy told me, ‘I’m prepared to put in the work it takes to become friends with people. It takes work, it takes a while, doesn’t it? You can’t just walk into a party and pick up four people, it takes a whole lot of work. You say, well, come over and have a coffee, and you find out if you’ve got anything in common or not, and vice versa, and maybe you never see them again. And if you’ve got something, great, and it goes on from there. It’s a sort of commitment.’

      With her lifelong devotion to friends and friendship Judy would see much truth in what Andrew Sullivan said of that which is central to the experience of gay men: friendship. He wrote, ‘It is a form of union which is truer than love, stabler than sex, deeper than politics and more moral than the family.’¹⁵

      However, friendship is always open to betrayal, and betrayal, real or imaginary, is always at the heart of enmity. Aaron Hass, writing about the betrayals experienced by Jews in the Holocaust, said, ‘Betrayal leaves one feeling exceedingly alone. The boundary between I and Other becomes impermeable, perhaps forever.’¹⁶

      Friends and enemies, closeness and isolation. When friendship is so vital to us, why do we betray and are betrayed? Why is it that we find that most precious condition, friendship, so difficult?

       2 Learning to Become Ourselves

      Why do we long for friends who understand us and why do we find friendship such a difficult task?

      It is because we are all such peculiar people.

      If we were not such peculiar people the lonely hearts pages would always be successful in matching one person to a soulmate, with disappointments only when the advertisements did not tell the truth. My friend Helena, once an enthusiastic practitioner of the absolute freedom of love, had turned forty and was looking for a lifetime relationship. Somehow there were fewer attractive men around. She knew it had become fashionable to advertise for a partner, and so she did. ‘Professional female, into personal growth, classical music, walking and travel.’ All of this was true, and so was the advertisement which caught her eye – ‘Spiritual man, loving, caring, well-travelled, loves art, music, literature and poetry.’ I do not know who contacted whom, but Helena and Ian met. All went gloriously well at first. They each recognized that they had the same need to find a partner, not just for a sexual fling, but someone who would assuage that terrible ache which they would name only in the dark night of the soul – the ache of loneliness. What they wanted was a true friend, but somehow, despite great sex and much impassioned discussion of travel and the arts, despite the skills they had each acquired in getting along with people, a friendship did not grow. Together they each felt lonely. For all their education they did not know why.

      They invited me to dinner, and I soon discovered it was not just for the pleasure of my company. They wanted my expert opinion. Helena showed me the advertisements which had brought her and Ian together, and explained that, as much as they enjoyed one another’s company, somehow they weren’t getting anywhere. I did not waste any time on the subtleties of psychotherapy but went straight to the tough question. I asked Helena, ‘Why is personal growth important to you?’ and Ian, ‘Why is being spiritual important to you?’

      Their answers could have revealed that there were some common elements in the importance she gave to ‘personal growth’ and he to ‘being spiritual’. It could have turned out that they were using these terms in very similar ways, perhaps in that they both placed great importance on self-knowledge and being open to change. As it turned out, they were each talking about very different things. Helena saw ‘personal growth’ as the means to understanding other people, forming good relationships and being better able to care for other people, while Ian saw ‘being spiritual’ solely as a way of seeking a close, individual relationship with God, a relationship where worldly goods and people were of no importance at all.

      I could then have asked each of them, ‘Why is travel important to you?’ but through what they had told me in other contexts I felt I knew what their answers would be. It would have been nice to discover that each saw travel as one of the ways of making their life rich and exciting, but I knew that Helena gave to ‘travel’ a meaning which betrayed her restless and desperate need of excitement, while Ian no longer felt that travel to exotic places was important to him. The only travelling he wanted to do was inside his head.

      It is these underlying but vital meanings which determine whether a friendship ever takes root. The underlying meanings of two people do not have to be identical. As often as not complementary meanings do very well. Someone who gives prime importance to looking after people can get along very well with someone who gives prime importance to being looked after. But where the underlying meanings are antagonistic the relationship will either never start or, having begun because each person was ignorant of the other’s underlying meanings, will fail once these meanings are revealed through the person’s actions.

      If asked, Helena and Ian would have said they had a good knowledge of how their bodies functioned. They understood about nutrition and exercise, and they always read the self-help best sellers, but, like many educated people, they did not understand the curious physiology of our bodies which makes us, in essence, meaning-creating creatures. We exist by creating meaning. Every moment of our lives we are in the business of making sense of everything we perceive. Indeed, perception and creating meaning are an identical process. Our perceptions are what Richard Gregory¹ called ‘Perceptual Hypotheses’ – guesses about what is going on. Seeing something and making sense of something are the same, even if the sense we make is: ‘I can’t make sense of this.’ The meanings we create are ours alone, and alone is the operative word, because no two people ever create exactly the same meanings. To see a rainbow we need the sun to be behind us and rain ahead, but the existence of that multi-coloured bow depends on the particular perspective of an individual’s eyes. We each see our own rainbow. Even when we share an experience with others, the meaning we each give to that experience will be different. One person’s rainbow might have the connotations of magic and a pot of gold, while another person’s rainbow is no more than a sign that the evening will be dry. Thus each of us is alone in a separate individual world of meaning, and when we try to contact other people our messages are often misunderstood.

      Over the last twenty years I have been writing about this because our failure to understand the nature of our existence is the basis of all the suffering and sorrow we inflict on ourselves and on other people. However, over those twenty years what I can say about our curious physiology has changed because scientific knowledge and interests have changed.

      Twenty years ago physics, neurophysiology and psychology were entirely separate disciplines with nothing to say