Status Updates From Friendaholic: Viciada em Am...

I think the reason a lot of gay men find the most comfortable people to develop friendships with to be straight women, or gay women, is because there's no sexual energy, except for the mutual interest in men. So there's something to talk about! But there's a comforta-bleness.

Not expecting anything in return meant that when I did feel seen and supported by him, it was a pleasant surprise rather than a measly sticking plaster applied too late over a wound that had festered for years.

By seeing it as service, I no longer expected anything back. More than that, I would no longer be hurt by it. It would be a bit like Parenting a tired child throwing a tantrum in the sweets aisle of the supermarket. A good parent in that situation would understand that their child was not acting on a set of conscious, rational decisions, but rather that they were responding to a desire they were not able to meet p223

Maybe you can think of it as charitable service. Every year, I give a certain amount of my time and money to charity. Why don't you start seeing the time you spend with [him] as that? You're doing something nice for him because he needs it and presumably gets something from it. It doesn't matter if you don't get
anything back because it's a charitable act.' p222

‘He's great when you're sad, he said. 'But he's not happy for you when you're happy? He was right, of course. And I was coming to understand that one of the foundational tenets for real friendship is generosity of spirit and meaningful reciprocity.p222

Holt-Lunstad and Uchino went on to do more studies in this area. In 2014, Holt-Lunstad wrote that “concurrent positivity and negativity in ambivalent friendships was associated with higher rates of depression and greater cardiovascular reactivity to stress. Uchino found in 2012 that that the more ambivalent ties a person has in their social network, the more likely they are to have shortened telomere lengths

In 2003, several thousand miles away from Ferrance's Naples, two psychologists from Utah called Julianne Holt-Lunstad and Bert Uchino conducted an intriguing experiment. They asked 102 participants to wear blood-pressure monitors for three days and to record every social interaction lasting more than five minutes, noting their feelings and responses.

And besides, it would be hard to leave, wouldn't it? Because he gets so angry, and you spend most of your time together trying not to trigger his rage and - here's the thing - you're normally so good at avoiding it. You're excellent at treading lightly on eggshells so that the thin membranes don't crack or splinter. You know how to do it, somewhere deep in your muscle memory.

had such an impact on your romantic life that you found yourself in an emotionally coercive relationship without realising that's what it was because not even the language existed back then. p215

Let's say you are someone who has grown up around unpredictable moods and atmospheres. Let's say you get so accustomed to the febrile nature of these shifting tensions that you begin to equate love with uncertainty, with the idea that you're never quite sure of what you might get. And let's say, hypothetically speaking, that this conflation- p214

(Frenemy) a friendship that is so confusing you never quite know what you're going to get.
They're the ones guaranteed to tell you a new haircut is interesting' rather than giving a straightforward compliment. They're the ones who are secretly threatened by your success rather than rejoicing in it. p209

you need to stand up for the things you believe are integral to lasting friendship and only admit those who respect the entry requirements and the code of conduct. If friendship is a nightclub and you are the manager, it is up to you to decide what kind of music you want to play, the crowd you want to attract and who you're going to throw out for acting like a drunken prat and ruining it for everyone else. p193

Conventional wisdom has it that thinking in this way is a form of thoughtfulness (look at empathetic little old me! Constantly worrying about everyone else!). It was a way of centring myself in a narrative that didn't, in truth, revolve around me. An unexamined part of me that preferred the idea of a friend being angry with me to the idea of a friend not thinking of me at all? p185