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

her London house. I’ve got pictures of all of you here. There’s Polly in Scotland. I think of you all living your lives as I know them now.’

      What Una liked about friendship was the conversation, exploring a topic together. She was conversing most of the time, directly with friends and neighbours, and her cat, or indirectly by telephone and letters. Yet, when I said to her that she had a talent for friendship she denied it.

      She said, ‘I have a talent for friendship like when the plumber came today. I can talk like that very easily. I can get on with working men in pubs in England as very few people can. And there are certain people in shops I can talk to, and my neighbours, but I have been living here for twenty years so that’s not surprising. We have over-the-fence chats to each other but we have got absolutely nothing in common except neighbourliness. When I go into groups with my peers I’m one of the less comfortable ones. I think people like me and they look to me for certain things. I do have close friendships but they took a long time to build up and they’re often quite ambivalent. At a distance I can be friendly and helpful, but I find it hard to cope with intimacy. That’s why I live on my own, I suppose. I find it hard to tell people, “I like you. Can I see you again?” Maintaining a friendship is a problem with me. I am grieving over several lost friendships where we have just drifted apart. And that’s hard. My friend Belinda, we shared flats together and so on, and even after she married and had a kid we saw each other quite frequently. Now she no longer rings me. I ring her and keep in contact. But she has got grandchildren and her husband has retired, and it’s very rare that she gives me a thought, I think, and I find that hard.’

      I asked my workshop group if there was a talent for friendship and, if so, whether it was innate or learned. They answered:

      • ‘I have learned to respect others through therapy. I learned from appropriate modelling of others who have been through similar processes.’

      • ‘I haven’t a talent for friendship. I think friendship is learnt; by giving friendship to others one receives friendship back and people benefit and grow.’

      • ‘No talent. I was brought up by a puritanical grandmother who allowed no one into the house. No child was quite good enough for me to play with.’

      • ‘In the main, we learn how to make friends by observing others, initially our parents and siblings and, as we get older, our peers and work colleagues. To observe the making of a friendship by others teaches us to behave in a fashion to create our own.’

      • ‘I grew up with no social skills apart from being polite. My best friend grew up with good social skills and she became my role model.’

      • ‘I think I have a talent for friendship because I am open and honest and I have a great faith in people. Unfortunately this sometimes leads to my downfall because other people then hurt me.’

      • ‘I value friendships highly. Because I think friendships are important I think I make a good friend.’

      • ‘I think that I probably choose not to develop any talent I may have for friendship as I do not feel the need for many friends, although I do like other people to accept me in a friendly way as a friendly person.’

      Underlying these answers and indeed the words of everyone quoted here is a division which runs like a great fault-line across the world of friendship. It is the line which divides us all into one of two groups, according to how we experience our sense of existence. These groups I have called extraverts and introverts. In my earlier books and especially in The Successful Self I have looked at how this division affects our relationships. What I have said has arisen out of extensive research. I now know that whenever I talk or write about this matter some people, usually those I call introverts, will say, ‘Yes, I recognize myself in what you say,’ and some people, usually those I call extraverts, will not recognize what I say and instead be puzzled or insist that they are a bit of both, no matter how much I explain that it is not a matter of what you do but why you do it. However, it is not surprising that such a difference arises because introverts turn inwards to their internal reality of thoughts and feelings, and thus are likely to be aware of why they do what they do, while extraverts turn outwards to their external reality, where they are more interested in doing than in examining the reasons why.

      Other people are of enormous importance to extraverts because extraverts experience their sense of existence in relationship to other people. Lesley, an extravert, explained this. ‘If you are an extravert who feels in danger of disappearing, friends are vital landmarks on your map who need to be kept in place at all costs. Without them there is the feeling that you don’t exist because you can only get some sense of yourself if it is reflected back at you. It is as though the reflection is real and exists but you do not exist without the mirror of people relating to you. If you feel like that any expenditure of effort on friends is worthwhile.’

      The writer Fay Weldon told me, ‘I had the art of placating and always had fans, even as quite a small child. I would always have a little group of supporters who would fight my corner for me with teachers. I just like friends. I just like talking to people, I enjoy conversation. I just went to school because I liked my friends.’ It has always amazed me that Fay ever gets any writing done because her home is always full of people, but she explained, ‘I’ve rather cunningly always surrounded myself with children, which is another way of creating your own world downwards because there isn’t anything particularly solid behind you. So now there are children, and grandchildren, and Nick has three boys – one, fifteen years old, lives with us and the other two visit. I just think I was born sociable and gregarious.’

      Extraverts often envy introverts for having – or appearing to have – a deep, still centre, but Lesley clearly does not envy introverts. She wrote,

      Then there are those strange people called introverts. I have the feeling that many of these characters are so bound up with what they are doing or thinking and are so happily and securely independent that they don’t realize that extravert partners may feel shut out and neglected. I misunderstood my introvert ex-husband, because he was much more bound up in his medical practice than in what I and the children were doing or feeling. I reached the perfectly logical conclusion that he didn’t care about us. In fact he did and does, but he doesn’t want his family to take up much of his valuable time.

      What Lesley was describing here was how introverts experience their sense of existence through a sense of achievement, organization and control. They often lack the social skills which extraverts acquire so easily.

      Some introverts do learn the art of being sociable. Irene described her progress to me: ‘Control is important to me. Wild emotion and a lot of impinging of emotion I can’t deal with. Sex drives I could understand, but I could never understand why people were dependent on one another. Even as a child I couldn’t. There was all that marvellous, exciting world out there, and so many things to see and do. I resent people who try and restrict me from being myself, from doing what I want to do. It took me a long time to be part of a group. Right up until I was fifty I hated groups, but gradually I’ve learned to cope. I’ve done it, I feel, successfully, and it’s been a great help in my life. I remember talking to you years ago – I’d just turned thirty-six, I think, and I said to you, I just suddenly felt that everybody else felt the same sort of inadequacies, fear and anxiety as I did. I didn’t feel isolated any more. Because that’s what I felt before, that I felt this and everybody else was going along having a great time. I think that gradually in the eighties – it was doing those various personal development courses and group activities – I realized more fully that everybody’s much the same. It was good to learn to work with a group and accept a role in that group, and usually, if I’m not the leader, I’m close to the leader. I would hate to be without friends. The fact that they exist and are part of the circle that I can relate to is very comforting to me. I haven’t got perfect friends, but I’m not a perfect friend either. I can be happily occupied by myself, fiddling around with paints and looking at things, but friendships are part of the pattern of my life.’

      Extraverts, as Lesley described, need other people to maintain their sense of existence, and introverts, as Irene mentioned, need other people to reduce their sense of isolation, but for extraverts relationships with