keepupwithchris’s Reviews > Friendaholic: Confessions of a Friendship Addict > Status Update

Grief is uncomfortable and spiky to look at. People often don't know what to say and would therefore rather remain silent in order to avoid further hurt, as if grief can be heightened by an ill-judged comment. It can't. Grief is absolute. It can't be made any worse than it already is, any more than an animal can become less extinct. They now knew it was more important to say something than nothing.

Brené Brown says that 'shame cannot survive being spoken'." She was right. Once I had started speaking, I couldn't stop. My sense of personal failure dissipated.
Sharing became a necessity.

What I had learned over the preceding years was that friendship, in these circumstances, was not about the doing as much as the being. It was so lovely to get those auber-gines and flowers, but the real meaning lay behind the action. It was the intent to mark and acknowledge what we were going through that was important.

This, then, was the place I found myself when my truest friends revealed themselves. Emma was constantly in touch via text and FaceTime. She also called Justin to see how I really was and, in the weeks that followed, the two of them kept a lovingly close eye on me. Others followed suit. Our friends Bette and Sinead immediately offered to do a grocery shop and leave it on the doorstep.

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