Friends and Enemies
Our Need to Love and Hate

DOROTHY ROWE

DEDICATION

To the memory of my dear friend

Hilary Surman

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Preface

CHAPTER 1 Friends and Enemies

CHAPTER 2 Learning to Become Ourselves

The Meanings in Our Brain

Your Meaning Structure

Forms of Thought

Others – The Necessity and the Threat

CHAPTER 3 Belonging to a Group

Defining Yourself and Your Group

Owing Allegiance to Your Group

Is Your Group Your Friend or Your Enemy?

CHAPTER 4 Belonging to a Family

Becoming Part of the Family

What Are Family Values?

Family – The Tie That Must Bind Us All?

CHAPTER 5 Belonging to a Place

Losing Your Place

You Can’t Go Home Again

CHAPTER 6 Strangers and Enemies

The Necessity of Enemies

The Leaders We Deserve

The Meaning of Violence

The Pleasures of War

CHAPTER 7 The End of Enmity

The Satisfactions and Failures of Revenge

Who’s Responsible?

Becoming Reconciled

Is Forgiveness Possible?

CHAPTER 8 The Art of Friendship

Living in a Peaceful World

Can Your Lover Be Your Friend?

The Art of Friendship

Notes

Index

Acknowledgements

About the Author

By the Same Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

PREFACE

Friendship is our greatest invention. No technological construction, no work of art, can compare with the art and skill of friendship which takes us out of the lonely world of our own individual perceptions and puts us close to another person, linked by feelings of love, trust, tolerance, sympathy, generosity, kindness, joy and humour. We can set ourselves the greatest tasks and achieve them, we can become rich, famous and powerful, but all our achievements will be mere dust and ashes if we are friendless. We can have lovers, we can have family, but all these relationships will bring us nothing but misery if they are not imbued with the qualities of friendship.

Friendship has always been of supreme importance in our lives, but today it has taken on a new urgency. Changes in society and in our expectations mean that many people turn to friends to supply what in past years they would have looked for in marriage or family. A businesswoman in South Africa said to me, ‘If I had to choose between my husband and my friend I’d choose my friend. She and I talk every day. We tell each other everything. My husband is all right, but we don’t talk.’

Moreover, while nations no longer engage in huge wars which mobilize many thousands of troops, across the globe we see conflicts which, though they involve smaller numbers of people, inflict terrible violence and suffering on everyone caught up in them. It is essential to resolve these conflicts if we are to overcome the ecological threats to our planet. Enmity is as old as friendship, yet we seem unable to understand why, when friendship is so glorious and so precious, many people choose to be enemies rather than friends. Of course a friendship has to be reciprocal, two people in tune with one another, while you can hate someone without that person hating you. It is even easier to be hated. You do not have to do anything. You just have to exist. You are sure to have some characteristic which someone hates – the colour of your skin, the place you were born, your sexuality, your religious beliefs.

We seem unable to understand how to turn enmity into friendship. The existence of enmity seems to be taken for granted. We deplore revenge and praise forgiveness but we rarely ask, ‘How do we learn the art and skill of friendship?’ or ‘Why is friendship so hard to achieve?’ or ‘Why, when we have been wounded by an enemy, does revenge become an imperative?’ or ‘Can we live without enemies?’ or ‘How does reconciliation become possible?’ or ‘Can we choose to forgive, and, if we can, why don’t we?’

These and other questions about friendship and enmity I examined in discussions with friends, colleagues and workshop participants, and with people I met on my travels in Serbia, Lebanon, Northern Ireland, South Africa, Vietnam and Australia. Such discussions covered both intimate personal experiences and questions arising from national, racial, political, social and religious issues. As I wrote this book conflicts raged around me. NATO bombed Serbia; the United Nations fumbled their task of protecting the people of East Timor; Russia invaded Chechnya while the West did no more than chide. The Unionists in Northern Ireland continued in their refusal to speak to members of Sinn Fein until Senator George Mitchell demonstrated the skills needed to turn enmity into friendship, but unfortunately he could not reach everyone in Northern Ireland who needed to change. For many people their enemies are more precious than their friends.

Just as I finished writing this book a dear young friend, Hilary Surman, someone I had known for twenty years, died within a few weeks of being diagnosed with cancer. Hilary and I were members of a small group of long-time friends. I find that the pain of losing her is edged around by the sweetness of the closeness of friends.

My thanks to all my friends and to all the people who talked to me about the importance of friendship and the dangers of enmity.

Dorothy Rowe

London, November 1999

1 Friends and Enemies

‘You don’t make friends. You recognize them.’

This is what people told me, again and again. Somehow, when we meet someone for the first time, we usually know whether that person could become a friend.

For Tima in Beirut it was a matter of trust. She said, ‘They have to inspire a feeling of confidence in me, and with me it all has to do with feelings. I can be with one person once and know for sure if this person is trustworthy or not, and in the long run I am usually right about it. It’s an instinctive thing, so there’s no special criterion where I see shoe size, head size or whatever. It’s nothing like that – no measurements or anything, but inspiring a good feeling from within.’

For Jane in London it was a matter of sorting the wheat from the chaff. She said, ‘When I meet someone for the first time I know, instinctively almost, whether a person meets my criteria for becoming a friend. If they don’t I don’t let them through.’

Yet finding a friend is not like finding a diamond which you can put in your pocket and keep. The person you see as having the potential to be a friend has to see you as having the same potential. Only then will the friendship develop. You might like the other person so much that, even though you receive no encouragement, you continue to see the other person as a friend; if, however, the person does not return your feeling, opportunities for you to be together as friends are not created. You might continue to meet at work or in the course of some mutual interest, but invitations to lunch or for you to meet the family do not materialize. You might continue to feel warmly towards the person, but, as time goes by, with no encouragement your warm feelings soon dwindle and fade into what is really the opposite of friendship – a kind of vague interest which shows itself only when an opportunity to gossip about the person arises. You know that the person who did not become a friend feels the same about you because, when you meet, you each go through friend-like rituals, but the spark for friendship is not there.

Enmity is not the exact opposite of friendship. Friendship must be reciprocal, while enmity need not be. There are many mutual enemies, but the objects of enmity often know nothing of the hate they inspire and may even feel warmly towards the unrecognized enemy. The opposite of friendship – vague interest in the other person – tends to remain the same over time. I have a large number of such relationships, some of them going back thirty years. My feelings about these people has not changed in that time, though I do feel sorry when I learn that one of them has met with disaster or death. I am interested to learn about their progress through life from mutual acquaintances and to meet them occasionally, but I do not pine because I have not seen them.

In contrast, none of my friendships has remained the same over the years. Some friendships have followed the vagaries of each of our lives, some have dwindled and vanished, some have strengthened. None can be taken for granted. Indeed, as Samuel Butler once remarked, ‘Friendship is like money, easier made than kept.’¹

Like many people, in conversation I use the word ‘friend’ loosely and often apply it to people whom I have merely known for some time. For this study of friendship I have been asking people what words they use in making distinctions between the individuals they know. Some distinguish ‘real friends’ from ‘friends’, and some distinguish friends from acquaintances, colleagues, chums and team members.

Some people make very careful distinctions. I have been told that:

• ‘Friends know me and I know them. We are allies. The next layer are people I like and our paths cross. Then there are the people who cross my path and it’s OK and then those where it’s not OK.’

• ‘I have many acquaintances but few friends. I have people who get close to me – the ones who have the time and interest to listen and who, in return, feel that they can pour their hearts out to me. I feel that there has to be an exchange – give and take. Some only take, therefore they can never be classed as true friends.’

• ‘My categories are: close friends, people with whom I have intimate conversations: professional friends – people I come in contact through work and have special connection with: long-term friends – people I have known for years but don’t see very often; friends in Quakers – people I know and trust through the Society of Friends.’

• ‘I feel friends vary in degrees. I try to approach people as friends. There are always some who are more easy to relate to and they often become a different grade of friend, and over the years these people become more and more important as trust and shared experiences grow.’

Lesley had written to thank me for the help she had received from my books, and I asked her what discriminations she made about friends. She took great care with her reply.

Friends is the word for a relatively small group of people. It is not necessarily related to the length of time I have known them, as I tend to get a particular feeling upon meeting a potential friend. These people in almost every case have remained in my life, even when geography and circumstances dictate that we may not meet for many years, and contact has dwindled to Christmas-time contact.

Acquaintances is a term I reserve for people I have met once or twice with no special feeling. Then there are people I know. I have met them once or twice with no special feelings and know them rather better than acquaintances, I may have known them for years, perhaps coming across them often. There isn’t the degree of feeling or liking that would elevate them to friend category.

Finally there is family. This is a very diverse category. It encompasses people I like, dislike and occasionally hate. There are people in this category I love more than any others. They are my children who are also my friends. It includes my ex-husband, my ex-mother-in-law and sister-in-law. It includes people with whom I have a blood tie but nothing in common. It is the most complicated category.

Such words, as Lesley and the others quoted have shown, require definitions, so I have been asking people how they define friends and friendship.

Children acquire the concept of ‘friend’ early in their life. Alice, who was four, told me about Sarah, also four, who was her friend but who was not always friendly. Alice said, ‘Sometimes, when Sarah comes to my house, she doesn’t let me be the Mummy. We play Mummies and Daddies sometimes.’

I asked, ‘And do you think that’s not being very friendly?’

‘No, I think that’s not very nice.’

‘How many friends have you got?’

‘Loads. I’ve got so many friends I can’t count them. I’ve got Sarah, one, Chloe, two, James, three, Hayden, four, Elliot, five, Thomas, six, Kate, seven, Marcus, eight, Sam, nine.’

‘Do you always play with your friends?’

‘Not all the time. Sometimes they get a bit mardy, and they walk off and they say I don’t want to play with you.’

Alice’s brother Miles, at seven, could define a friend and understand that friendship meant reciprocity. He said, ‘A friend is somebody who would be kind to me and wouldn’t desert me if I hurt myself or was in trouble. It’s somebody who likes you. Sometimes you can like somebody but they don’t like you, but that’s not a real friend.’

Miles also understood that reciprocity did not mean that two friends had to have identical interests. He told me how pleased he was that his friend Arthur, who had gone to another school, was coming back to Miles’s school. I asked him why he was pleased. He said, ‘I’m pleased because he was a good friend. Although he wasn’t interested in all the things I was interested in he was still a very good friend.’

‘So when you were doing something he wasn’t interested in, he was still nice about it?’

‘Yes, but it was more the other way around. He likes sports and I wasn’t really interested.’

When I compared the definitions of friends and friendship which Alice and Miles had given me with the definitions which adults gave me it seemed that as we get older our definitions become more complex, and that many people expect much of their friends.

In a workshop on friends and enemies I asked the participants how they defined a friend. Their answers showed that they saw a friend as someone special.

• ‘A friend should be and do. Be: safe, trustworthy, honest, caring, open. Do: share their feelings with me, accept me, believe in me.’

• ‘A friend should share my sense of humour.’

• ‘A friend will have my welfare at heart and is prepared to accept me as I am and what I want from life, even though he/she may not understand why. A friend needs to be honest with me and open about feelings and opinions even though we differ.’

• ‘I need to feel that in dire circumstances that person would be there for me.’

• ‘I want a friend to hear what I say.’

• ‘A friend – I feel comfortable with and talk, talk, talk and do, do, do, and the time passes without thinking.’

• ‘Someone who will be honest with me but care about my feelings at the same time. Importantly, someone I feel comfortable with, easy with, have fun with.’

• ‘A friend is able to accept things you do for them.’

• ‘They need to tell me, show me, they care for me.’

• ‘We share a similar morality.’

I also asked some of my own friends how they defined a friend. Sometimes their answers surprised me.

I had always thought that Elizabeth and Catherine were close friends. They shared considerable work interests and an extensive social life. Yet Elizabeth said of Catherine, ‘I speak of her as a friend, we do the things friends do, but she is not simpatico.’ Elizabeth went on to point out that simpatico is an Italian term with no equivalent word in English. She contrasted her relationship with Catherine with her relationship with someone she has known since college. This is what she calls ‘eternal friendship’, even though she and her friend now see one another rarely.

I have been friends with Judy since 1954, and I regard this as one of my achievements. I love Judy dearly, but in my youth I was always afraid that I would not live up to the high standards Judy set for her friends. Now I am older and wiser I was able to ask her about how she saw friends and enemies. She told me she defined friends as ‘People who like me and are faithful to me. They have to be totally faithful.’

I asked her what was involved in being faithful.

‘They don’t cause trouble amongst other friends. They don’t bitch me up too much. They’re allowed to say a few things about me because I don’t think anybody could go through life not talking about their friends, but they should say positive things about me as well, so that if things come back to me I can say, “That’s fair. I can understand why they said that.”’

Judy’s demand that her friends be totally faithful to her is matched by the love and care she lavishes upon her friends. I have noticed that those people who feel that they have much to offer as a friend and who, like Judy, lavish much time and effort upon their friends are not always greatly surprised when their friends respond in kind, whereas those people whose top priorities include more than friendships can be surprised and entranced by what a friend might do for them.

I first met Irene when we were both in our twenties. Each of us had married the same kind of man – selfish, self-centred, someone who demanded that his wife give him her full attention and not fritter away any of her time with friends. In the 1950s this was a typical male attitude. However, Irene understood the importance of friendship better than I did, and she looked after her friends better than I did then. Now, forty years on, Irene has many friends acquired over many years. When I asked her whether she had a talent for friendship she said, ‘I do spend a lot of time socializing, but I’m also a disciplined sort of person time-wise, and so I’ve got my own programme that I follow, and if somebody says, “What about doing such and such?” I’ll say, “I can’t manage that until later in the day” – because I’m going swimming, or I’ve got calligraphy, or yoga.’

A few months after this conversation Irene had an accident and injured her hand most severely. She emerged from the casualty ward with her whole arm in plaster and strapped across her chest. This quite ruined her plans for the coming weekend, when her friend Amy was due to arrive for a short holiday. Now Irene knew that it would be a most uncomfortable time for Amy, so she rang her and explained the circumstances. She suggested that Amy should postpone her holiday until she, Irene, was capable of carrying out a hostess’s duties. She said, ‘Amy, if you come now you’ll just be my handmaiden for the whole of the time.’

Amy laughed and said, ‘It is better to be a handmaiden in the temple of the Lord than an honoured guest in the tents of the wicked.’ Amy arrived soon after and proved to be a most industrious handmaiden, though her attempt to remove some immovable spilt glue from the kitchen floor by scrubbing it with a nail brush was, Irene felt, one task too far. Amy is, Irene told me, ‘a dear lady and a very dear friend’, but words on paper cannot convey Irene’s astonishment and sense of blessedness.

Irene, like me, did not have a childhood where love and a sense of blessedness came as a birthright. I can see what effect such a childhood had on me. I know that there are people who demand much from their friends. I’ve often had to listen to a torrent of disappointment, anger and sadness from such a person who felt betrayed or let down by a friend. Intellectually I can understand the person’s point of view, but, in my heart, I am surprised that anyone can demand so much of a friend, and I get anxious lest to reproach a friend might drive that friend away. I do not expect anything of friends except that they will be nice to me when I am with them, and that behind my back they will speak about me with kindness. If they do not they are not friends. My expecting little of my friends arises not from some great wisdom but from growing up in a family where I found that to ask for anything was to risk refusal and ridicule. When I was a child many shops displayed a sign which read, ‘DO NOT ASK FOR CREDIT BECAUSE A REFUSAL MIGHT OFFEND’. That sign always seemed to epitomize all my relationships. ‘Don’t ask for anything because a refusal always hurts.’

This attitude has meant that I have probably missed out on a great deal, but it also means that anything friends do for me, the smallest gift, the simplest thoughtfulness, comes as a magnificent bonus.

Anthony is one of the warmest, friendliest, kindest people you could meet. When I was in Omagh, Northern Ireland, he took me around, and wherever we went there was someone who greeted him as a friend. Yet, when I asked him how he defined a friend he said, ‘I don’t think I have any friends. I think in your lifetime you’re going to be lucky to meet anyone – two, three at the most, people – whom you could define as friends, in the way that I would perceive friendship. I think friendship develops over years of trust and acceptance, I suppose. For me, I have no recollection of having friends who were unconditional. The friends that I have are friends because it suits them to be my friends, or vice versa. While I think a lot of them, they’re not friends in the sense I think you’re asking me about friendship – except for Anne, my wife, and that friendship took twenty-five years to come about. I’ve told Anne this: when we got married, I didn’t know what love was. I walked up the aisle in hope. She finds it a great source of pain when I say that to her, because she thinks of her wedding day as a day of such love and hope. She can’t believe that I didn’t. I’m totally honest with her. I say, “The experience I had with you is something very special, but I couldn’t really say I loved you until we had ten years of marriage through us, through our lives.” I realized then that I loved her.’

Anthony was the sixth of eleven children born to a bitterly unhappy couple. He said, ‘Friends weren’t encouraged in our family because there was enough of us in the family not to have friends around. God, you wouldn’t have brought your friend round for tea as well! There was already eleven children to feed. So I just keep comfortable distances with people, because of the mask I wear. I would be a person who has to wear a lot of different faces for different people, and I find that difficult in the long term. I feel almost insincere, because the face I would wear for you would be different from the face from the one at work, or home, or whatever. These faces sustain me and carry me through life. For a long time I felt insincere with that, but I’ve learned to make sense of it. I miss that relationship that could be there somewhere. I know I’m very well known and popular, but those people would be at a comfortable distance. Anne is the only person who really knows me. I think, too, I’ve found friendships in books. Certain books, they’re close friends. Books don’t betray you.’

Anthony, I guess, is like me in that I can usually detect in others the wariness that evolves as a defence when a child discovers that he cannot trust the people who should be caring for him. Adult life does little to diminish such wariness because once we discover the treachery of others unconditional trust can never be reborn.

I found this wariness in one of the most delightful people, someone I met in a jazz bar in Beirut, where he worked.

James was magnificently beautiful. Every evening when I was in Beirut I sat at the bar, where he gave out smiles, drinks, food, and listened to the regulars who, like me, were gathered around him. One evening when the bar was quiet James told me that he came from Freetown, Liberia, but as an adult he had lived in various places in Europe where, I gathered though he did not say, life had been hard. When he was young his parents had been Muslim but his aunt, who brought him up, was a Baptist. He’d helped her to look after the church, and he had learned to believe in God – one God for all of us, even though different people had different names for God. He knew that God saw us as being all the same, all sinners. The idea that the colour of a person’s skin or the beliefs that a person held made one person different from another was a human idea, not God’s, and very wrong.

When it came to friendship James waited to see how things turned out. He was very friendly. He bestowed his warm, gracious smile on everyone immediately on meeting and in every interaction and seemed so unlike many of the Beirutis, whom the war had left tense and wary. When I asked him about friends he told me that he might meet a person on one occasion and then on another, and each time all would be right no matter how long the time between meetings, and then, perhaps, they would meet and everything would not be right. So, with all his friends, he would just wait and see how things turned out.

He said, ‘When people say to me, “I love you, James,” or, “I’m your friend,” I wonder what it is they want. I wait, I wait and see what happens.’

I did not ask James what he did if ‘what happens’ was not to his liking. I felt that this would take us into issues of religion and of race, and these were not safe issues to discuss in a bar in Beirut.

However, in South Africa, the enemy is a common topic of conversation. Our guide to the prison where the enemies of the apartheid regime had been incarcerated on Robben Island had been imprisoned there from 1963 to 1978, when prison conditions were at their very worst. He told us, ‘The guards and security were my enemies. Robben Island was my first and last enemy.’

His last enemy has now lost power, and life in post-apartheid South Africa is full of ironies. Ex-political prisoners take visitors to a respectful viewing of cell number five, which once housed Nelson Mandela, while in Johannesburg my guide to another holy of holies, the Voortrekker Monument, was Simbo, a Zulu from Soweto, that south-western township established to separate the blacks from the whites.

The Afrikaner apartheid regime had been based on the belief that God had created blacks inferior to whites in order that they should work for the whites. Mamphela Ramphele, now Vice-Chancellor of Cape Town University, mentioned this in her autobiography. She began her professional education at Bethesda Teacher Training College, which had been started by Dutch Reformed Church missionaries in the 1930s. She described how the white teachers kept their distance from the black students and how the students were compelled to carry out huiswerk (Afrikaans for ‘housework’),

which was a form of forced labour intended to remind students that education was not an escape route from the inferior position blacks were ‘destined’ to occupy … The principal’s wife, Mrs Grütter, who was our music teacher, was the most unpleasant of all [the teachers]. She often reminded those students who seemed to her unenthusiastic in their tasks: ‘You were born to work for us.’²

Simbo, like Mamphela, found that his life changed markedly when apartheid came to an end. He obtained a most sought-after job, that of a tourist guide. Simbo drove me to the Voortrekker Monument, which looks like a huge, old-fashioned radio set upon a high hill. It was built to impress on all the implacable power and virtue of God’s own people, the Voortrekkers, who had fought and defeated the Zulu nation and established their own fair land, only to have it taken from them by the treacherous English. Inside the monument Simbo conducted me around the carved frieze on the four walls of the large interior room. Here the history of the Great Trek was depicted, and Simbo knew it well. He pointed out the different characters – the Boer men were all brave and handsome and the women all beautiful and true – and he showed me how the Boers had enslaved the blacks.

When we had finished our tour of Pretoria and set off back to Johannesburg I asked Simbo if he had any enemies. In answer he spoke of individuals who might know him personally but did not wish him well.

I asked him how he felt about the Afrikaners. I said, ‘When I was here last in 1991 you wouldn’t have been allowed anywhere near the Voortrekker Monument.’

He smiled and talked gently about the pass laws which restricted black and coloured people to certain areas. ‘See those women?’ he said, pointing to two African matrons walking home from work. ‘If they’d been there and didn’t have their pass book they’d be arrested and put in jail. Now I don’t mind the Afrikaners, provided they join with us and make this one country, all of us together.’

The Voortrekker Monument was for him a fine thing. It had given him what he wanted most – a job.

In Lebanon enemies still have power and so it was only in the privacy of a car that I was able to ask Samir, my driver, about friends and enemies as we spent three days together touring Lebanon. He was a large man in his late forties and knew Beirut and the roads in Lebanon and into Syria like the back of his hand.

One day I commented to Samir that wherever he stopped he got into conversation with someone. He seemed to have friends everywhere. He said, ‘I want to have friends everywhere and no enemies.’

I asked him if he had any enemies.

He shrugged. ‘How can you tell? You don’t know who your enemy is. Someone can come smiling, saying, “I am your friend,” and then, when you’re not looking, he hits you in the back.’

I asked a stupid question: ‘Are the Israelis your enemy?’

‘They are everyone’s enemy.’

Samir had good reason to regard the Israelis as enemies. In the war he had been a driver for foreign journalists, which meant he was often in danger of being killed by the Israelis or their allies. However, Samir’s interest in enemies went much wider. On our travels I discovered that he favoured the conspiracy theory of history. He was sure that Princess Diana had died as a result of a conspiracy by the Israelis and the royal family who, on discovering that the Diana-Dodi romance had resulted in her pregnancy, had had her killed. He was equally sure that Monica Lewinsky had been instructed by international Jewry to bring down President Clinton.

Over lunch in a garden in Balbek I gave Samir the benefit of my extensive knowledge of the royal family, garnered over the years that journalists have been asking me to comment on the latest events in the royal soap opera. I am a firm believer in the ‘cock-up’ theory of history rather than the conspiracy theory. I know that people conspire together, but I also know that stupidity usually triumphs. I assured Samir that Diana’s death was an accident, a result of the belief which many drinkers hold – that they drive better when they are drunk. Samir was completely unconvinced. He knew for certain that it was a conspiracy between the royal family and the Israelis to bring down not merely Diana but Dodi and thus strike at Dodi’s father, Mohammed al Fayed. I could see from his expression that he thought I was very naïve.

I should have remembered Robert Fisk and The Plot, and held my breath. Anyone who wants to try to understand why Lebanon, once a rich and flourishing country, is now in a state where a long, vicious war has ended but peace has not been made must read Robert Fisk’s Pity the Poor Nation. Of Lebanon after the war he wrote,

The events of the 1975–6 civil war have become a fixation for the Lebanese. Even today, the bookshops of Hamra Street and Sassine Square contain shelves of expensive photographic records of the fighting, coffee table books with colour plates in which readers can study at their leisure and in detail the last moments of a young Muslim militiaman before the firing squad, the anguished eyes of a Palestinian mother pleading for her family before a hooded gunman, a Christian family lying massacred inside their home. It is a kind of catharsis for both the Lebanese and the Palestinians who have long understood the way in which these terrible events should be interpreted. Victories were the result of courage, of patriotism or revolutionary conviction. Defeats were always caused by the plot: The Plot, the mo’amera, the complot, undefinable and ubiquitous, a conspiracy of treachery in which a foreign hand – Syrian, Palestinian, Israeli, American, French, Libyan, Iranian – was always involved. Edward Cody of the AP and I once came to the conclusion that in every interview we conducted in the Lebanon, a special chair should be set aside for The Plot – since The Plot invariably played a leading role in all discussions we ever had with politicians, diplomats or gunmen.³

Jean Said Makdisi, in her glossary of terms used in times of crisis, linked The Plot to The Plan and explained that ‘The reader should not expect proponents of conspiracy theories to show alarm at their pervasiveness. Rather, a certain perverse comfort is taken from the assurance that someone, at least, knows what is going on and why.’⁴

It is our human nature to create an explanation for everything that happens, even though such an explanation may be entirely speculative and, in many cases, quite far-fetched. We prefer an explanation which enhances our image of ourselves. The thought that someone somewhere is conspiring against us serves to boost our pride. It means that we are so important that other people have to take us into account. The explanation that the suffering of most people in Lebanon was brought about simply because they were in the way when different groups of men, who care nothing for their fellow human beings, were battling for supremacy, is too close to a truth which shows how helpless and insignificant we are in the whole scheme of things. For many people a conspiracy of enemies is preferable because it boosts their sense of personal identity. This is one of the reasons why enemies are necessary.

Asking someone about their enemies is a very intrusive question, and the answers can be surprising. At an Amnesty International party I asked a fellow guest, a strong supporter of Amnesty, whether he had an enemy. He answered immediately, ‘My ex-wife.’ People can talk about their friendships without revealing much about themselves, but talking about their enemies goes straight to the painful complexities of relationships, as the participants of a workshop showed in their definitions of an enemy. They said,

• ‘An enemy is someone who threatens my safety and leaves me feeling helpless.’

• ‘An enemy is someone who despises you, doesn’t respect you, wishes you were dead.’

• ‘Enemies are those who do not allow you to progress, to develop in your own way, but try to impose their own beliefs and opinions.’

• ‘An enemy is somebody who doesn’t give me respect or trust or openness, who has different values from me and expects me to conform to theirs, who makes life uncomfortable for me by their actions and words.’

• ‘I have loads of enemies. There’s family, people who have rigid lifestyles and who dictate to everyone. At work there’s the people who vie for power with me, and elsewhere, in politics.’

• ‘Looking carefully into my life I am aware that I have had, and probably still have, enemies, although I have a fantasy that I haven’t. An enemy is someone who wishes bad things for me and who, it seems, no amount of love or understanding will influence otherwise.’

• ‘I believe we need enemies to shift rage from family and community to outsiders or causes. Also it gives an illusion of superiority by condemning their beliefs.’

• ‘An enemy is a traitor. One who betrayed me. One who had let me down. Rejected me. An unaccepting, narrow-minded person who had not been willing to listen and who sees the truth only from their own view point. Probably envies me and therefore wishes to destroy me.’

• ‘As a child I had enemies – other children who bullied me at school and on the way home from school.’

• ‘An enemy is someone who is totally without morals. A traitor. Someone who thinks only of self-gain and themselves. Someone who has let me down.’

When I asked four-year-old Alice if she had any enemies she immediately identified the problem of how we can hate the people we love. She said, ‘Sometimes Miles is an enemy. With Christopher and Jake. Most of the time when they come to tea he doesn’t let me into his bedroom. He just wants to play with his friends.’

I asked her how that made her feel. She said, ‘A bit upset. I cry, because sometimes I am trying to get though his door and he slams it shut and I fall down the steps.’

Miles, as I discovered when he told me about his enemies, had encountered the Sex War, though he had not yet recognized it as such. He told me that most of his enemies were girls. There were those who, he said, are ‘always telling on you, and telling the teachers, “Miss, Miles did this, Miles did that.”’ Megan was the chief of his accusers, but she did much more. He said, ‘She makes me feel really bad. I say, “Look, Megan, I don’t want you playing with me because I can’t play with you all the time. I’ve got other friends.” And if I said, “I’m not your friend,” she’d go off crying. She’d go all red-faced and make me feel really bad. I just can’t leave her alone. And then when I approach her, she runs off.’

Yet at other times Megan would distract him from his work by talking to him. I suggested to Miles that Megan really liked him and did things to annoy him just to get his attention. Miles dismissed this entirely, so I let the subject drop. Time enough for him to discover that sexual attraction is not always mutual and that many miseries arise from that.

Lesley knew these miseries and others only too well. She also knew how important it is to recognize an enemy. She wrote,

An enemy is not only someone who wishes to hurt you personally but has the power, or is perceived as having the power, to do so. In the case of enemies within the family this creates difficulties, because, although a person may to all intents and purposes be your enemy, they in effect have a cloaking device. That is, because they are supposed to love you, you can fail to see them as an enemy and take action to protect yourself. Taking that a step further, you may very well fail to perceive that their words or actions are in fact a result of their malice and projections, and locate the fault in yourself. Unfortunately, this puts you in the usually unrecognized position of being your own enemy. You join the other side and fight against yourself.

If you are brought up to believe that hating or doing harm to others, even wishing it, is wrong you are left very vulnerable to enemies. You bury your own hate, and either cannot see, or feel unable to defend yourself against enemies, people who wish to harm you personally, or who wish to take something that is yours, or you see as vital to your survival.

At a time of great personal stress, a woman moved in on my marriage. I remember being sat on the rug with my two small children when she came to my home to collect my husband for a business meeting and making it as clear as day that she was after my husband by the way she behaved towards him. I didn’t feel threatened because I was still locked into the belief that marriage was for ever, but I was appalled by her lack of manners and general demeanour. I can smile in a kind way now at my innocence and naïveté. Things got worse and she was the person my husband moved on to. She would probably argue that it was nothing personal and she might refute the idea of being my enemy. But I saw her as an enemy because she was competition for the resources I needed for my children, personal as much as financial. Now my children have grown up the enmity I felt for her is fading. As the threat she poses diminishes my feelings are moving to the point where she has no importance.

Lesley’s last words echoed those of Irene when I asked her about enemies. She said, ‘I don’t think much about enemies at all. I think an enemy would be someone I disliked or hated, and again that belongs to youth. It doesn’t belong to this age.’

Of course, opportunities for making enemies abound while we are still involved in competitive work. A university professor, not English, spoke to me of his colleagues and said, ‘They smile at me and have a drink with me, and then they’ll go into committee and turn down all my applications for research money.’

When I asked Anthony if he had any enemies he said, ‘Not that I know of. There’s nobody that I could say that I couldn’t see their point of view. I don’t have enemies in the sense that they would like to hurt me or mine. I could be easily hurt, or offended, but no, I don’t have enemies as such. I don’t have friends and I don’t have enemies.’

Yet, as I discovered when he took me to Drumcree, where the Orange Order supporters manned the country lane, protesting their right to march down the Garvaghy Road through the Catholic estate in Portadown, Anthony, in his kindness, had taken me somewhere where, if it were known that he was a Catholic, he would have been in considerable physical danger.

Those of us who live in peaceful countries can still have enemies – friends who betray you. Judy told me about her enemies – a business partner who had stolen from her and some friends who had formed a clique and excluded her, and what she had done to them. She said, ‘My way of dealing with people who’ve been rotten to me is to pretend they’re dead. I feel angry for a long time and then I get to a stage where, when their names come up, I can say, “Who?” It takes about two years. We forget about them, people who’ve done really rotten things to us. Then they’re dead. They’ve gone over to the dark side.’

Sometimes Judy’s revenge was even greater. She said, ‘I have my own revenge. I put curses on them. I beam my energy out.’

I think Judy was so kind she did not beam her energy very far. None of the politicians she hated have dropped dead. But there is a certain satisfaction in hurling a curse, even if it is only at a television screen.

Enemies can certainly play an important part in our life but I had not thought of them as being useful until I met a Serbian Jungian analyst in Belgrade. I asked him whether he had any enemies. ‘Internal or external?’ he queried.

‘Both.’

‘I don’t think I can talk about my internal enemies where I am an enemy to myself. That’s where external enemies are necessary. They see you more clearly than you see yourself. They stop you from having too high an opinion of yourself.’

I would have called such a group of people ‘critics’ rather than ‘enemies’ but I did not think this was simply a confusion of terms. He spoke excellent English, so if he said ‘enemy” he meant ‘enemy”. But only a Jungian analyst would have beneficent enemies.

I asked him if he had any political enemies. ‘Of course,’ he said. ‘Americans.’

I 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 intimacy. You do not have to talk. Or you can talk but it is sex talk, which nowadays goes on in bed, out of bed, in entertainment and in selling things. The journalist Charlotte Raven, a very sharp-eyed observer, wrote,

This is what the sexual sell does. Far from revealing reality, it ends up concealing the truth. This may strike us as strange. We are used to reading sexual candour as evidence of openness. We tend to believe, as a culture, that the more we talk about sex, the more we are revealing of ourselves.

This may once have been true, but in the current over-stimulated climate sex talk is, perversely, becoming an excuse for not revealing anything important. All the usual rules have been inverted. Sex talk is small talk, a kind of background gibberish that covers up our inability to have real conversations. Therefore, the more we reveal about orgasms and erectile dysfunctions, the less we really know about ourselves.¹⁰

I agree with Charlotte, though I have to say that I have never known a time when talking about sex revealed the truth. When I discovered sex in the late forties women said nothing publicly about sex and many did not talk about it privately. My mother never mentioned menstruation or conception or childbirth to me, though she did, by implication, give me to understand that marriage entailed something unpleasant for a woman. In my teens I had to keep secret from her the fact that my sister, who was training to be a teacher, had given me a pamphlet to read on menstruation. I was in my thirties before I said the word ‘fuck’ publicly, and then only in the context of the punchline of a then very daring joke. I had had to learn the word, though not the joke, from my husband in bed.

In the sixties and seventies we thought we were being open and truthful about sex. But actually the same secrecy, misunderstanding and refusal to listen were still there, though the context might have changed. Men still operated on the old principle of propositioning every woman because, as my husband once explained to me, even though you got a lot of knock-backs, you get some acceptances, only now men expected every woman to be on the pill and so to have no reason to refuse their offer. Women were prepared to forgo the security of a marriage ring but they still wanted a relationship along with the sex.

Nothing of importance had changed because sex still posed the danger that it had always posed. Sex renders us vulnerable in the way we fear the most. We have to protect our sense of being a person for in failing to do so we risk being annihilated as a person. In orgasm our sense of self can dissipate in splendour, but we can also be wiped out as a person by the power of our partner, or, in the case of men, by failing to perform. So we lie about sex to one another and, sometimes, foolishly, we lie to ourselves.

During the seventies the Women’s Movement enabled many women to reveal that their sexual interest was in other women. After so many centuries in the shadows it was only human for them to claim that they were special. Having been less than nothing they needed to be more than most, as all disadvantaged groups do when they claim their birthright. So the myth was born that lesbians were able to combine the sensitivity, caring and empathy which all women possess with the passion of sex, and lesbian relationships would therefore not be torn apart by the jealousies, angers, hatreds and betrayals that turn heterosexual relationships into nightmares.

This myth completely ignored the fact that some women have all the sensitivity, caring and empathy of a pile of old bricks, and that sex and love, whatever the gender of the couple, are always accompanied by the passions of jealousy, anger, hatred and betrayal. A lot of women were hurt by this myth. I remember a young woman who came to talk to me about a book she was writing but who drifted off the subject to tell me about her partner’s faithlessness. What troubled her most was her guilt for failing to live up to the myth. She was jealous.

If you want an untroubled, utterly faithful relationship get a dog. Did you know that a survey by the British Veterinary Association revealed that 93 per cent of pet owners questioned bought their pet a Christmas present, and more than half the pets also received Christmas cards?¹¹

Friends as friends and lovers as friends might be difficult but what about family? Can family be friends?

Alice was very clear that people as friends were different from family as friends. When I asked her if Miles was a friend she immediately answered yes, but when I pointed out to her that she hadn’t included him in her list of friends she said, ‘Well, he’s my brother.’

‘And what’s the difference between being a friend friend and being a brother friend?’

‘Well, he’s living with you. Friends don’t live with you, and brothers do. Eli’s my friend too.’ Eli was then only a few weeks old but he was fascinated with Alice and no doubt regarded her as a friend.

I asked, ‘Is Mummy your friend?’

‘Sort of. In the middle, I think.’

‘In the middle of what?’

‘In the middle means a bit of my friend – half. Half of my friend.’

Her mother Jo looked stricken.

I asked, ‘Is Daddy your friend?’

‘Yes. Daddy’s my friend.’

We went on to talk about enemies and then Jo, who was cooking, asked Alice why she did not think Mummy was a friend. Alice went over to Jo and, smiling broadly, started thumping her. She said, ‘Mummy, sometimes you shout at me and say I’m horrible.’

I said, ‘You’re banging into Mummy now. Does that mean you’re not her friend? If you hit Mummy, are you being a friend to her?’

Alice went on smiling and thumping Jo. She said confidently, ‘She likes it.’

That’s the kind of logic which families use.

When I asked Miles if Alice was his friend he said, ‘Some of the time she is but some of the time she isn’t.’ However, when he went on to consider the matter he decided that Alice was his friend even though she did not always do what he wanted her to do.

I asked Miles if Mummy was a friend. He said most emphatically, ‘Yes,’ but went on, ‘Most of the time, except when she gets cross.’

‘Is Daddy a friend?’

Miles’s ‘Yes’ was more hesitant so I said, ‘You seemed like you weren’t too sure about that.’

‘Well, I was going to say that my dad’s a bit harsh on my mum because he makes her seem to be the baddie. He’s always threatening us with things like ‘Quick, get into the bath before your mum comes up.’

‘And what do you think of that?’

‘I don’t think it’s nice. I wouldn’t like it if I was made the baddie all the time.’

‘Do you think your mum and dad are friends with one another?’

‘Yes, or they wouldn’t have married and I wouldn’t probably be alive.’

Miles and Alice illustrate the perils parents face if they take their children’s point of view seriously and allow them to express their opinions. Such children do not hesitate to criticize their parents. But Miles and Alice also reveal the security which they take for granted like the air they breathe. They can criticize their parents, and everyone can get cross and shout at one another, but it is never more than a storm in a teacup, and the teacup is rock solid.

Not all families are like that. I asked my workshop participants, ‘Can family be friends?’ Here are some of their replies:

• ‘No. What prevents them being friends is trust. I cannot trust them with my emotions. My parents never respected my feelings and I could no more trust them now than I could as a child. We do not relate our feelings to each other.’

• ‘We have totally different value systems.’

• ‘I love my son but he is not my friend. The relationship is one-sided. I love my daughter and she is a friend. We have a supporting relationship.’

• ‘I can’t say that anyone in my family was a friend. My mother was particularly forbidding, full of repressed anger and without humour.’

• ‘I would like to think this is so but know that it is not because we come from the same situations with similar knowledge but different feelings.’

• ‘Many of my family will only accept me very conditionally and I am not willing to sacrifice myself in order to be accepted by them.’

• ‘Blood’s thicker than water because you share the same history and are used to familiar relationships. But it is harder to set yourself free.’

• ‘I have a sister I haven’t spoken to for several years because she hurt me many times. I feel it is safer for me not to have a friendship with her.’

• ‘I love my brothers but wouldn’t call them friends. There’s no one in my family I share myself with deeply.’

• ‘Sometimes it’s difficult for a relative to be a friend because they can’t stand back from the situation. They get too involved and emotional.’

• ‘I do not see all members of my family as friends but maybe members of the same tribe. Some are friends: all are friendly.’

• ‘Blood’s bloodier than water.’

Andrew Sullivan considered the question of friends and family:

Families and marriages fail too often because they are trying to answer too many human needs. A spouse is required to be a lover, a friend, a mother, a father, a soulmate, a co-worker, and so on. Few people can be all these things for one person. And when the demands are set too high, disappointment can only follow. If husbands and wives have deeper and stronger friendships outside the marital unit, the marriage has more space to breathe and fewer burdens to bear. Likewise, a lack of true family can, I think, impinge on friendship. If we have many friends and no real family, we tend to demand things of friends which are equally inappropriate. The two relationships, then, family and friendship, are surely rivals, but they are also complements to one another. There is no reason why most human lives should not have a deep experience of both.¹²

That is a wonderful aspiration, but many of us fail to achieve it. I used to think that some people have a talent for friendship but now I am not so sure. I have learned that when people speak of the wonders of universal love, or of spirituality, or of caring for others, or of friendship I should look at what these people actually do. I have worked as a visiting lecturer for far too many charity, psychotherapy and counselling groups where all the talk was of how much they care about other people but where that ‘other people’ did not include me. In their eyes I had no needs like being fed, being protected from importunate members of the audience, assisted with transport or simply given a glass of water. The world is full of people who believe that to say you do something is the same as doing it. St Paul did say that the thought is the same as the deed, which probably explains why I have found so many Christians prone to such oversights.

Even when someone does show all the behaviours we might associate with having a talent for friendship I have found it necessary to ask the person whether that is so.

My friend Una seemed to me to have a talent for friendship. She had retired from a long and distinguished academic career in psychology. I doubt that there would be many of her erstwhile students who did not consider her to be a friend, while in the often bitchy world of professional psychology in Australia she had no enemies and masses of friends.

Una remembered and kept up with the events in her friends’ lives. She always kept a photographic record of us, pictures which she kept in albums on the coffee table beside the couch where she read her beloved newspapers. Her passion was current affairs. She told me, ‘A lot of my friendship is carried on in my head. I think about you a lot, and I think about Patricia sitting in 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 other people are their top priority while for introverts the top priority is a sense of achievement. Of course, everyone wants both – good relationships and a sense of achievement – but often life forces us to choose between them. If we are wise we know what our top priority is and we make sure we fulfil it in some way. No matter how vast Fay’s work commitments are she always surrounds herself with family and friends. When Irene was diagnosed with lung cancer she chose not to go immediately into treatment. Instead she flew to Paris from Sydney to spend two weeks touring the art galleries. What mattered most to her was exploring ‘that marvellous, exciting world out there’.

Opposites, so they say, attract, and where love and sex are concerned a couple is always a pairing of an introvert and an extravert. We see in the other something we do not have. The central character in Tim Lott’s White City Blue is Frankie, an estate agent and an extravert. He says of himself,

I’ve always liked to be liked. Everyone does, I suppose. I’m just prepared to admit it. It’s more of a naked need than a desire for me. I hate it if someone doesn’t like me. And so a job which seemed to turn so much on making people like you, on making them trust you, appealed to me. And you don’t have the effort afterwards of maintaining a friendship. If you sell their flat at a good price, or find them a nice one, they love you. I get kissed, hugged, praised, thanked. It’s terrific for self-esteem. Then it’s goodbye and on to the next person to woo.¹³

Frankie’s affairs are as transient as his customers. Then he meets Veronica. He does not understand her, but he recognizes that she has something he does not have.

As I chatted to her, I realized with a certain amount of surprise that I actually did like her – not only her looks but the way she kept herself apart from herself. There was – how can I put this – a decent gap between when she thought and when she spoke, there was consideration. It was a mark of self-possession, something I find greatly attractive for that reason. Perhaps because it’s the quality I’ve always lacked. Events sweep me up, clean my clock, leave me gasping.¹⁴

We might not always be what we appear to be. A couple might appear to be two extraverts, but one of them is a socially skilled introvert; or two introverts, but one of them is a shy extravert. Where friendship is concerned, introverts can be friends with introverts and extraverts with extraverts, but often a lengthy friendship, one that withstands the changes that life brings, is between an extravert and an introvert. One of the reasons that the friendship John McCarthy and Brian Keenan formed when they were hostages together in Beirut was so strong was because John was the extravert and Brian the introvert, and each was prepared to supply what the other lacked.

However, misunderstandings and enmities can arise because one person does not understand or will not accept that the other has a different priority. Only now does Lesley see how she, the extravert, misunderstood her introvert husband. Often such misunderstandings turn into intolerance. To an extravert the introvert’s refusal to display emotion can seem to betray a complete lack of feeling, while an introvert can despise the way in which an extravert puts relationships above principle. When I was in Greece I met a designer, a woman in her fifties from New York, who told me how she had lost a friend.

She said, ‘I was invited to submit a design for a particular project. I was interested in doing this because it was something I hadn’t attempted before and it was a chance to try out some ideas, but I wasn’t passionately wedded to the design I developed. I’m too long in the tooth now to get overinvolved in the work I do, but it was interesting and I wanted feedback from the man who’d commissioned it. Well, this person was someone I’d known for years. I knew him socially as well as through work, and I thought of us as being friends, not close friends, but friends. One thing I knew about him was that he really liked to be liked. I never saw this as a problem because he’s a really likeable guy. Everybody likes him. I never thought this would take precedence over the work. Yet this is just what happened. He couldn’t bring himself to say he didn’t like my work because he thought that would mean I wouldn’t like him. That was just ridiculous. It never crossed my mind that his opinion about this piece of work would cause me to dislike him. I never think about whether I like or dislike people because on the whole I really like people. I can think of only one person I actually dislike, and that’s very personal. A lot of people I judge very harshly but I don’t dislike them. It mightn’t always be liking but I guess I feel sorry for people. Everyone gets a rotten deal one way or another. Anyway, what happened was that there was a big performance in which he talked to other people but he didn’t talk to me. The first I knew of it was when a mutual friend – you know the sort of friend who can’t get to you quick enough with bad news – rang me to say he’d spoken to her husband and of course her husband had told her. He should have just given me his opinion straight but he didn’t. It really wasn’t any big deal but at the time I thought it was important. I came to feel that he’d acted in bad faith. That’s a harsh judgement but that’s me. I think that worrying about whether people like you is a weakness.’

The lack of understanding and tolerance between an introvert and an extravert can become the basis for enmity.

Perhaps the greatest contrast between friendship and enmity is that friendships are often difficult to establish and always hard to maintain, while enmities are easy to establish and simple to maintain. Friendships always involve trying to understand another person and, in opening yourself to that person, making yourself vulnerable. Enmity always involves turning the enemy into an object which requires no understanding and, in closing yourself off from the other person, making yourself aggressive and strong. Enmity always makes us less of a human being and friendship makes us more. To achieve that more is not easy.

I have been asking people whether they find friendship easy. The consensus of opinion is that friendship is demanding and difficult.

When I asked Miles if he found it easy to make friends he said, ‘It is quite hard.’ I asked him what he found hard about it and he said, ‘Well, if there’s someone new the teachers want you to be nice to her and if you really don’t like her, or him, at all, it’s very difficult and she can’t be a real friend to you.’

‘When you meet somebody you think you might like, do you find it hard then to be friends?’

‘Sometimes, but sometimes it’s easy.’

‘What makes the difference?’

‘Well, if it’s someone you like but they’re not so keen on you, it’s quite hard. Or if you like one thing and the other person didn’t, and that person hated it and threw it away, then that would be quite hard because you’d be using it and the other person would be wrecking it.’

Miles has spent seven years of his life negotiating his friendships, first with family and family friends, and then with fellow pupils. He is a warm, outgoing boy, keenly interested in other people and in the world around him, he has the unwavering support of his parents, yet he finds friendship far from easy. How much more difficult is friendship for someone who, no matter how warm and friendly they might be, has no secure background.

Diyana was enjoying her life in Sarajevo when the war came and destroyed much of what she held dear. After enduring months of shelling and sniper fire from the Serbs she made a desperate and dangerous journey with her little daughter from Sarajevo to London, where she found asylum. I asked her, ‘How easy are you finding it to meet people here and really make friends?’

She said, ‘It’s easy to meet people, very easy, but it’s very difficult to make a friend and start a real friendship. First of all you don’t understand the people – it’s not just a matter of language, it’s a matter of a different mentality as well. Sometimes you don’t understand somebody who is maybe offering you help, maybe really wants to help you and to make a friendship with you, but you just can’t understand. It can take years and years to get used to English people. I don’t think they’re worse than my people, or that they are any worse than any people in the world, you just need time to get to know the English.’

How many times have I heard an Australian or an American say that about the English! I said, ‘Everyone who comes here says that.’

Diyana went on, ‘I find it very easy to communicate with them because they don’t ask you very much – maybe they don’t want to know much about you. In this situation it’s very good for me not to speak a lot about my past, so if they don’t ask me it’s good. But you can’t start a real relationship with somebody who doesn’t know anything about you and you don’t know anything about them. It’s maybe too idealistic to expect that. You have to ask somebody about their home town, their family, their parents.’

‘Do you feel they aren’t interested or do they feel they shouldn’t ask questions?’

‘I think they were brought up not to ask questions, to keep at a distance. I think maybe they could be much better, much closer to foreigners, but they don’t know how to approach. Maybe it’s better for me to think that. I don’t want to think they don’t want to approach.’

I talked about my experience as an Australian in England. I said, ‘Sometimes people don’t know how to frame a question because they don’t know enough about your background to frame a sensible question. I’ve met hundreds of English people – they know I’m Australian as soon as I speak – and the only thing they know about Australia is the weather. They say, “Don’t you miss the wonderful weather?” But they don’t ask other questions unless they’ve been to Australia, or they’ve got a relative there, when they’ll say, “Perhaps you’ve met my relative. She lives in New Zealand.” New Zealand is fifteen hundred miles away from Sydney.’

Diyana recognized what I was describing. ‘When I’m asked where I’m from – because after the first sentence they discover I’m not from here – and I say, “I’m from Europe.” “Which part of Europe?” they’ll say. “Is it Poland?” And I say, “Not Poland. It’s Bosnia, the former Yugoslavia.” And they say, “There was a terrible war down there. Is it still on?” or something like that. And I can’t go on with the conversation. It’s finished before it’s started. I just answer sometimes, “Fortunately not. It’s finished now.” But that’s all they can ask you. Not all of them, of course – I don’t want to insult them.’

After a year or so in London Diyana had met a few people who had a good knowledge of what went on in Bosnia, and who knew that in Bosnia, as in Lebanon, the war might be over but the peace has not been made. She had made friends, but friendship is not easy to maintain when one has little money and every day brings more problems to be overcome.

Indeed friendship is not easy for any of us. This is the consensus of opinion of the many people of whom I asked the question, ‘Is friendship easy?’ Here are some of the answers from the participants of my workshop:

• ‘I don’t think it possible to maintain the sort of relationship which I call friendship with any more than a small number of people because it requires me putting a lot of myself in. So for me the talent is recognizing someone who has the qualities for friendship with me. If you mean a talent for having lots of acquaintances – that’s not where I choose to invest a lot of my energy. That’s not important for me.’

• ‘I can easily strike up a conversation with perfect strangers and form a relationship leading to a friendship. I think if you can communicate and make an opening for the other person to interact you have the makings of a friendship. You then have to learn the skill of maintaining that friendship.’

• ‘I find it difficult to talk to and “read” people.’

• ‘I have a talent for getting along with people and so I think this helps in making friends. But I only have a few close friends.’

• ‘Once someone has become my friend I try always to be there for them and enjoy making a fuss of them on their birthdays. I feel I’ve got a lot of love to give.’

In two other workshops I asked the participants to answer the question: ‘How easy or difficult do you find the whole business of being friends with people?’ using a scale from 1 to 7, where 1 was ‘easy – like breathing – you don’t have to think about it – just natural, no problems’ and 7 ‘difficult – where everything in friendships is difficult, a hassle, a burden, painful, something you can’t manage, something always goes wrong no matter how much you try’. After they had answered this question I asked them if they would have answered the question differently when they were younger and, if so, why.

The people in both these workshops were not strangers to the experience of reflecting on what one does and why. The participants in one workshop were women, each of whom was, in her own way, pursuing enlightenment, while the other workshop was for an international group of high-flying managers who were well aware of the necessity of self-knowledge for a successful career. In both groups the ratings generally hovered about four. Friendship was both hard and easy. However, their comments were more revealing of how hard they found friendship to be.

The comments from the women included:

• ‘I find the initial art of making friends the most difficult. When it’s made it’s the problem of keeping in contact. I find this is often down to me.’

• ‘When I was younger I was much more judgemental of who was right to be a friend. Now I’m more expansive and relaxed.’

• ‘Friendship was easier when I was younger. I was more blithe, less enquiring. I felt life was full of opportunity to make friends. Now it seems more complex. Now I’m friendly but I’m more self-conscious, more inhibited.’

• ‘I never know if people feel the same about friendship and often get it wrong; thinking that people are closer than they are, or thinking that people don’t want to get close to me when they do.’

• ‘Friendship was easier when I was younger. I’ve had hurtful relationships. Now I’m more picky.’

• ‘Being friends is much more difficult than making friends. I am easier in friendships which are not too demanding. Then they become like relatives and I tend to draw back. I can give a lot to friends who don’t ask too much.’

• ‘I found friendships much harder when I was younger and more judgemental. For me the key is acceptance and trying to see the wider picture. If I rejected the people who behaved in a way I didn’t like I would be very lonely.’

• ‘I find as I get older it is harder to meet people and make friends. As people get older they become more inhibited, myself also.’

Here are some of the answers from the men:

• ‘It is difficult to have too many friends but often after the selection process is over I normally go to any length to maintain that friendship even if it means a lot of sacrifice.’

• ‘When I was younger I was less concerned with rejection. It did not register as an issue.’

• ‘I used to be able to find common interests much more easily as a child because children spend a lot of time with each other. They’ve pretty much no barriers. They’re open to each other to begin with. Whereas as an adult, I didn’t have much time or sufficient time to make friends. I must admit I have developed some barriers. Also I have to make commitment and effort to maintain it.’

• ‘I am a very social person who needs to feel needed and accepted. I think that I tried to work hard at developing and maintaining friendships when I was younger.’

• ‘As we grow in age experience catches up with us and we tend to be more suspecting, rather cautious of relationships. A friend in need is a friend indeed. The older you get the more relevant this adage gets.’

• ‘I would have answered a little differently when I was younger. I have forgotten so much about sharing, having become guarded by my experience and somewhat unable to give and receive trust on fresh ground.’

• ‘I grew up in many different places and tended to be careful about not being too friendly with too many people I knew I’d leave behind. The modern marriage makes it difficult for men to maintain friendships. Non-work time must be devoted to the family.’

• ‘As I get older I find it easier to make friends. I believe it’s the result of greater self-confidence and a reduced fear of rejection.’

• ‘When I was younger I was less flexible with family. There has to be certain coordination with my wife. She might not feel the same for a person. Female friends are less likely to happen now. There’s too little time for developing friendships. I stick to (prioritize) a few.’

Only one of the women had rated friendship as completely easy, but she had written, ‘I seem to offer and receive a very durable and rewarding level of friendship, but I do screen people out if I don’t take to them.’ Only one man had rated friendship completely easy, but in the two days I was with the workshop group I saw how he worked ceaselessly to make and to maintain friendships. I could see why when he told me of one of the worst experiences of his life when, in his last year at school, all his friends left and he was completely alone facing what he felt was his annihilation as a person. He now put a great deal of highly skilled work into making sure that that never happened again.

Creating and maintaining friendships and overcoming enmities are not easy tasks. Ed Cairns, a psychologist who had studied the effects the Troubles in Northern Ireland had had on the people there and who was an elder of the Presbyterian Church, told me, ‘I think that for us to move on, all that we have to do in Northern Ireland is to learn to tolerate each other at some level; we don’t actually have to learn to love each other; we don’t have to learn to forgive each other. It would be nice if these things come about, but I think in the first instance we just have to tolerate each other, which people are often not prepared to do at the moment.’

My friend Judy told me, ‘I’m prepared to put in the work it takes to become friends with people. It takes work, it takes a while, doesn’t it? You can’t just walk into a party and pick up four people, it takes a whole lot of work. You say, well, come over and have a coffee, and you find out if you’ve got anything in common or not, and vice versa, and maybe you never see them again. And if you’ve got something, great, and it goes on from there. It’s a sort of commitment.’

With her lifelong devotion to friends and friendship Judy would see much truth in what Andrew Sullivan said of that which is central to the experience of gay men: friendship. He wrote, ‘It is a form of union which is truer than love, stabler than sex, deeper than politics and more moral than the family.’¹⁵

However, friendship is always open to betrayal, and betrayal, real or imaginary, is always at the heart of enmity. Aaron Hass, writing about the betrayals experienced by Jews in the Holocaust, said, ‘Betrayal leaves one feeling exceedingly alone. The boundary between I and Other becomes impermeable, perhaps forever.’¹⁶

Friends and enemies, closeness and isolation. When friendship is so vital to us, why do we betray and are betrayed? Why is it that we find that most precious condition, friendship, so difficult?

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