The Lost Art of Listening (47 page)

likely to consider his feelings in the final decision.

Whether it’s money, the kids, or mothers-in-law, there are unsafe sub-

jects in every family. A woman doesn’t talk to her Catholic relatives about

having an abortion. The same woman might not risk telling her husband

that she might be able to sleep better if they got separate beds if she was

afraid he’d be too offended even to entertain the possibility. He might not

tell her about a problem he’s having at work if he was afraid she’d respond

with unwanted advice. He might not want to burden her with financial

worries (or share the decision making). It’s not necessarily a question of

keeping secrets, though most family members have a few. Rather, it’s just

hard to tell the people you live with everything. With friends, few subjects

are off limits.

In conversations between friends, little misunderstandings can be

passed over or forgotten between breaks in contact. Disagreements between

people who live together are harder to forget.

The relationship between friends is voluntary; you can leave if you

want to, and therefore it’s safer to be honest. You can talk over painful or

embarrassing subjects, reveal self- doubts, try out different sides of yourself,

and be who you are.

People show caring and respect by the quality of their listening.

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Friends who listen make us feel interesting, and their interest inspires us to

say more interesting things. Their receptivity is transformative: by listen-

ing intently to us, our friends make us larger, more alive. That’s the glory

of friendship.

A Good Friend Is a Good Listener

When you want to talk to a friend, do you begin by asking how he or she

is doing before getting to what’s on your mind? This common courtesy

often results in perfunctory listening. You’ve asked, you’ve listened; now

it’s your turn.

Most people think more about what they want to say than about

what is being said to them. To be a good friend, learn to listen better.

Once in a while, try approaching a friend with the intention of finding out

what’s on his or her mind and listening for an extended period of time.

A friend is someone with whom you can talk about almost anything.

With such friends we take turns as selfobjects, willing for a time to submerge

ourselves and be there without strings for our friend. Friendship grows with

mutual disclosure. So do we. The compassion friends offer when they lis-

ten to our triumphs and worries deepens us; their understanding keeps us

from feeling alone—and helps us understand ourselves.

Friendship deepens us; it also broadens us. Friendships expand our

definition of ourselves and awaken unrealized possibilities, possibilities

that aren’t part of the scripted roles we play in our families. With many

friends we can express many sides of ourselves. The intimacy of friendship,

the selfobject function, strengthens us. Mutuality, the sharing function,

stretches us.

“I Wish I Had More Friends.”

Write down the five most important things on your agenda for the next

seven days.

Was spending time with a friend on the list? Was trying to strike up a

friendship with someone at work or the gym on the list? Was strengthen-

ing an already established friendship by expressing your affection on the

list?

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283

With friends we are easy, but, sadly, it isn’t easy to find time for friend-

ship. When I asked people what interfered most with talking to friends, by

far the most common response was “I’m too busy.” In crowded and hurried

lives, greedy obligations squeeze out anything optional, like spending time

with friends. But even though many of us are preoccupied these days, it’s

more than lack of time that undermines friendships.

When Friends Take Sides

After her divorce Maggie turned to her friends. They saw her through the

shock of separation and the months that followed. Though she felt adrift,

at least she wasn’t alone.

Maggie’s friend Liz was also divorced and disillusioned; she understood

what it was to be single again, having to start all over, the indignities and

misunderstandings. The two women had known each other for nine years,

ever since they met at a workshop (ever since, in fact, they both skipped

the afternoon session and ran into each other at a local art gallery).

Liz made friends easily. She embraced Maggie with her warmth and

held her with her intelligence and keen eye for the pretentious and fool-

ish. They met often for lunch or for a drink after work, enjoying conversa-

tions about their jobs, families, friends, what they were reading, how they

felt—if any subject was off limits, they hadn’t come to it yet.

Maggie met Dominic three years after her divorce. As chance would

have it, he lived in Liz’s building, and on several occasions she ran into

him in the downstairs lobby. She found him attractive but couldn’t imag-

ine speaking to him; he seemed so unapproachable. It came as a surprise,

therefore, when he started talking to her one Saturday afternoon and, after

no more than five minutes, asked her out. To her equal surprise, she found

herself accepting.

If opposites attract, they were a perfect match. Maggie had the ruddy

complexion and emotional reserve of her Scottish ancestors, while Dominic

was Greek, with dark hair and olive skin and an openly expressive nature.

She liked the way his mind worked, all intuition and confidence. What a

relief after all those pale, shadow men her friends had fixed her up with!

The passion Maggie felt with Dominic was thrilling. Unfortunately,

as she soon found out, the price to be paid was a series of equally passion-

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ate quarrels. Dominic was jealous of her time, her friends, and just about

everything else. Though he might sometimes be busy for days, he expected

her to be available whenever he wanted to see her. When she wasn’t, there

were storms of jealousy.

When Maggie told her friends about all the trouble she was having

with Dominic, they were sympathetic. Liz got angry. She considered Dom-

inic’s possessive jealousy abusive and thought Maggie was wrong to put up

with it. “I’d never let a man treat
me
that way,” she said.

After one particularly violent outburst, Maggie decided not to see

Dominic for a while. As long as they’d been going together, Liz had held

back the worst of her criticism, but now that Maggie was considering end-

ing the relationship, Liz spoke up. Maggie would be better off without him,

she said. In this opinion, Liz was not alone. All of Maggie’s friends felt the

same way: if Dominic was causing her so much unhappiness, she should

dump him.

Unfortunately, sympathy can get in the way of empathy. Unable to

suspend their own emotional impulse, which was to rescue Maggie from

the grief she shared with them, her friends urged her to put an end to what

was making her so unhappy. That’s what friends often do when we com-

plain about someone: they take our side and push us to retaliate.

It’s one thing to honor a friend’s right to happiness, but far more dif-

ficult to respect her right to put up with unhappiness if she decides to go

to war for love.

Maggie was buoyed by the sympathy of her friends but felt pressured

by their urging her to break up with Dominic. While it’s comforting to

have someone to share your feelings with, it’s not always comforting to be

told what to do about them.

After a while Maggie stopped talking to her friends about Dominic.

She wasn’t only angry at Dominic; she also loved him. While it’s okay for

us to criticize our own loved ones, it’s a mistake for friends to agree. Our

griping expresses one side of our ambivalence—and leaves us free to do

whatever we decide about the relationship. But a friend’s agreeing that

someone we’re close to is a terrible person is a boundary violation.

There is no formula for an empathic response, but it may help to

remember that there are two sides to every conflict. Understanding—

Being Able to Hear Friends and Colleagues
285

empathy—therefore often means acknowledging uncertainty. If a person

hasn’t acted to resolve a problem, there’s probably a reason.

Liz might have said something like “You sound pretty unhappy, but

I guess you’re not sure what to do.” Instead she said, “Dominic’s not good

enough for you. If you go back to him now, you’ll hate yourself for it.”

There are things that have no place in friendship,

and judgment is one of them.

Showing empathy to friends doesn’t mean just caring about them; it

means listening to their point of view, whether or not you agree with it.

Friendship doesn’t require neutrality or total acceptance; but before they

disagree or give advice, real friends listen.

Here is an example of a friend struggling to be empathic from Paul

Auster’s novel
Leviathan
. Peter’s friend Sachs is telling him about the acci-

dent in which he fell off a four-story fire escape, trying to explain that he

feels responsible because he wouldn’t have been out there if he hadn’t

been flirting with a woman.

There were questions I wanted to ask him then, but I didn’t interrupt. Sachs

was having trouble getting the story out, talking in a trance of hesitations

and awkward silences, and I was afraid that a sudden word from me would

throw him off course. To be honest, I didn’t quite understand what he was

trying to say. There was no question that the fall had been a ghastly experi-

ence, but I was confused by how much effort he put into describing the small

events that had preceded it. The business with Maria struck me as trivial, of

no genuine importance, a trite comedy of manners not worth talking about.

In Sachs’s mind, however, there was a direct connection. The one thing had

caused the other, which meant that he didn’t see the fall as an accident or a

piece of bad luck so much as some grotesque form of punishment. I wanted

to tell him that he was wrong, that he was being overly hard on himself—but

I didn’t. I just sat there and listened to him as he went on analyzing his own

behavior.1

It’s said that men and women bring different expectations to friend-

ship, that women have a basic commitment to attachment, men to inde-

pendence. Thus it may be difficult for men to listen to themes of depen-

1Paul Auster,
Leviathan
(New York: Viking, 1992).

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LISTENING IN CONTEXT

dence and attachment, while women may have trouble accepting a friend’s

choice to go her own way. This may be true in general, but relationships

don’t exist “in general.” Relationships take place between individuals.

While those individuals may have been brought up to have certain expec-

tations, the fate of our relationships doesn’t depend on conditioned traits

of character, but on how we choose to act toward one another.

To be with other people authentically—that is, to respond to them as

they are, not as we want them to be—is no easy feat. This ability depends on

an awareness of ourselves as self- contained individuals who relate by lis-

tening to and accepting other separate and autonomous individuals.

Maggie and Liz’s attachment was built on shared interests. When

Maggie began to feel differently, the friendship waned. The two friends

didn’t know how to tolerate the differences that were emerging between

them. Maggie felt she was betraying Liz whenever she was happy. Neither

of them knew how to talk about the feelings they were experiencing. Liz

felt abandoned by Maggie. Their differences and their inability to talk

about them formed a widening gulf. As in so many situations where differ-

ences between friends can’t be talked about, the friends drifted apart.

When Maggie eventually worked things out with Dominic, she

stopped seeing Liz altogether. Years later she would say to someone off-

handedly, “Oh, we just lost touch.”

Resolving Conflicts with Friends

Why, if Maggie was able to work things out with her jealous and demand-

ing boyfriend, wasn’t she able to resolve the conflict with her like- minded

and appreciative friend? Here’s the irony of listening in friendship:

The same elective quality of relationship that enables friends to speak

freely about so many subjects makes them less likely to speak openly about

problems between them.

The binding nature of family ties makes it more urgent to speak up

about our unhappiness in those relationships. While friends do sometimes

voice complaints to each other, they are less likely to talk about serious

problems between them, like envy, jealousy, or resentment. Because the

ties of friendship aren’t as obligatory as those of family, there’s a greater fear

that friends will abandon us if we voice complaints to them. Sadly, when

such feelings are strong, friends often drift apart.