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

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СКАЧАТЬ wonder if many Americans realize how big a part they play on the world stage as the universal enemy. But that is one of the dilemmas of friendship. The more powerful you are the fewer friends you are likely to have.

      I am sure that many Americans would be greatly hurt to know that millions of people beam great amounts of enmity at them and take no account of how many Americans – though not always the American government – have tried to help impoverished people and, however ineptly, to secure world peace. Fortunately, not all foreigners do this. When I was in Vietnam in 1997 I discovered that the Vietnamese discriminated carefully between the American government that inflicted the most dreadful war on the Vietnamese and the Cambodians, and Americans generally, whom the Vietnamese saw as friends or potential friends. Such subtle discriminations require a subtle mind, which is lacking in those people who want to divide the world into two groups, friends and enemies.

      Yet friends and enemies are rarely discrete categories. Friends can easily become enemies. In Northern Ireland I met Martin at a Sinn Fein Advice Centre in Fermanagh. He had recently been released from Long Kesh jail, where he had been serving an eight-year term. We got on to the subject of education and he told me how, in many places in Northern Ireland, Catholic and Protestant children would attend the same primary school. His best friend at primary school was William, a lad from a Protestant family. He said, ‘We played football together, we went fishing together, we did everything boys do together. In our last year in primary school, when I was eleven, I was one of six boys who passed the eleven-plus exam to go to the Christian Brothers School. William went to the local Protestant high school. The next time I saw him it was on a street in Castlederg. He was in an Ulster Defence Regiment uniform. He stopped me and made me get out of my car. He knew who I was but he didn’t let on that he knew. He asked me my name, then he searched me and he searched my car.’ Not long afterwards Martin became a volunteer in the IRA.

      Sometimes friends become enemies because the groups to which individuals belong demand that it be so. Sometimes individuals themselves decide to change from friend to enemy. Sometimes it is hard to know who is your friend and who your enemy. Mark Twain once observed that ‘It takes your enemy and your friend, working together, to hurt you to the heart: the one to slander you and the other to get the news to you.’⁵

      Irene spoke of the spite which can lurk in the heart of a friend. She said, ‘Spite is one of the things I dislike, probably because I have a spiteful reaction inside myself sometimes and I find it horrible. There’s that desire to hurt. I think envy’s different. You can envy someone for having a terrific relationship you’d like to have, or having freedom from financial worries. I think that’s fine because it doesn’t mean you want to do them down or make them feel unhappy. Whereas spite has a real sting. To take them down, make them feel unhappy with themselves and what they’ve got.’

      When we act out of spite and enmity we want to hurt other people and know that they are hurt, yet at the same time we do not want to know how the hurt feels to them. We have to refrain from empathizing with them. Empathy can bring us close to other people, but it can cause us much pain and that sense of helplessness when we know what another person is feeling and we can do nothing to ease that person’s pain. A mother told me how upset she was by the way her teenage son’s friends were also his enemies. They hurt him and they got him into trouble, but he still trailed after them, entranced by what he saw as their style and glamour, and proud to call them his friends. Friends can indeed be enemies.

      When I asked my workshop participants to list what they saw as the dangers of friendship they had no difficulty in doing so. Here are some of the dangers they described:

      • ‘The fear of the loss of the friend through death or separation.’ (Someone pointed out that people will commiserate with you when a relative dies but not when a friend dies.)

      • ‘It means trusting someone with very sensitive parts of myself, so I am vulnerable and can be hurt. If I become dependent on that friendship that person might let me down.’

      • ‘They can tell you things when they’re in difficulty and you want to make it all right and you can’t.’

      • ‘Being taken for granted is an abuse of a friendship.’

      • ‘There are dangers in becoming too familiar or involved in a situation in their lives, as with their spouse. It’s important to remain neutral in aspects of other relationships in their lives.’

      • ‘You have to trust them and sometimes this trust is broken. They may gossip and not keep a confidence – or you may let them down in some way.’

      • ‘To be a true friend you have to expose yourself, and this means you always risk being rejected.’

      The pain of losing a friend was often mentioned as one of the dangers of friendship, but for Andrew Sullivan the death of a friend meant something more. He wrote, ‘It is only, perhaps, when you absorb the notion that someone is truly your equal, truly interchangeable with you, that the death of another makes mortality real. It is as if only in the death of a friend that a true reckoning with mortality is ever fully made, before it is too late.’⁶

      Andrew Sullivan was writing about the death of a friend from Aids and describing how ‘homosexuals, by default as much as anything else, have managed to sustain a society of friendship that is, for the most part, unequalled by any other part of society.’⁷

      This is a major claim to make, though he did acknowledge that heterosexual women could sustain friendships if their familial responsibilities have not overwhelmed them. Heterosexual men have suffered ‘great spiritual and emotional impoverishment’ because ‘the fear of male intimacy, which is intrinsically connected to the fear of homosexuality, has too often denied straight men the bonds they need to sustain themselves through life’s difficulties. When they socialize they often demand the chaperone of sports or work to avoid the appearance of being gay.’⁸

      Tim Lott’s novel White City Blue concerns four men who call themselves close friends but whose friendships fail through lack of intimacy. Fear of homosexuality is certainly present in their relationships, but so is intense competition. In an article accompanying the publication of his novel Tim Lott commented on how women, unlike men, will talk to one another at length on the phone and even make conversation in a public washroom:

      This seems to me a fundamentally different approach to male friendship. For men, friendship is far more a performance art. You go out, and you try to entertain each other. You grandstand, you try and get attention, you aim for the loudest laugh. This need for competition – which is another way of saying this need for domination – is an increasingly thin shell, and I believe it is slowly cracking up. Men are showing all the signs of admitting to be humans rather than just men, and, in this case, this means admitting to being more like women.⁹

      I have not observed homosexual men being any less competitive than heterosexual men. Most hold the distinctly masculine view that competition is what life is about. I am not sure the homosexuality itself creates a special talent for friendship. Having sex with another person does not constitute a friendship, and, while some homosexual men form loving relationships with a long-term partner, many homosexual men spend an enormous amount of time and energy in promiscuous sex. I do not think that this is because homosexual men have a particular propensity for sex. If women were as interested in sex as men are, heterosexual men would be able to be as promiscuous as homosexual men.

      Having sex is an excellent way of avoiding СКАЧАТЬ