loss of friendship

Bullying an Introvert and Probable NVLDer

I thought I had found a religious and spiritual mentor in my search for the True Church, and a best friend here in my own town instead of far away, one who would always be there for me throughout life.  But I believe this is what really happened:

I fell prey to a con man who eventually decided my husband and I were of no further use to him and his wife.  He used to be a Mafia thug, and was easily provoked to violence.  He hypnotized me without my knowledge.

They wanted to get political connections, but we were too “liberal” and not politically driven; he kept getting money and stuff from us, but the economy tanked and we had money trouble; I was his confidante of his wife’s abuses of him and the children, so she, who has a family history of personality disorders, smeared me to him to drive a wedge between us; and I spoke up against the way they both had been treating their kids.

So instead of addressing the real issues, they made me a scapegoat, made up offenses and kept me always jumping over hoops.  Then because we no longer had much money to give them, I started doubting Richard’s wild stories, and I had let them know they abused their kids, they started treating my husband and I both very badly.

They found an imaginary complaint to skewer me over, so we would break off the friendship in disgust, but they would still be able to claim that it was my fault and not theirs.

Richard threatened my husband with physical violence and intimidated him.  Then in 2010, I was proven correct about the abuse, when Richard choked his oldest daughter until she passed out.  He plea bargained and served a year of probation.

For two and a half years, I was bullied, gaslit and abused by a likely personality disordered person, “Tracy,” who saw me as a threat to her marriage because I was her husband’s confidante about her abuses of him and the children.

Though he, “Richard,” had been my friend for two years already, she made him her abuser-by-proxy, and insisted on forcing her friendship on me, or else I was not “respecting” her, was “moving in on” her husband, and was somehow violating society “norms” which I had never heard of before.

In my circles, friendship was allowed to happen naturally.  Nobody I knew complained about husbands making female friends, playful and innocent flirting, or going out to lunch with a female friend.  I had never encountered jealousy.

In fact, I was the most “jealous” person I knew, simply because I did not like my husband sharing a hotel room with a female friend for an SCA (like Ren-Faire) event, which that friend called having him on a “long leash.”

My husband and I trust each other and have no requirements whatsoever on our friends.  So Tracy’s behavior shocked and made no sense to me or to my husband, who felt she did not trust Richard.

If she had not been abusive to her husband and children, and if she had not begun snarking at me and telling falsehoods about me to her husband and mother, I would have had no trouble whatsoever being her friend.

But because of the abuses, I did not want her in my life.  However, I felt forced to let her be there, or I would lose a friend who was very dear to me.

I tried to get along with her–friended her on Facebook, gave her things she needed, gave her a flower, asked for recipes, chatted with her on occasion, joked with her on occasion, agreed with her on occasion on childcare, smiled at her during conversation, played games with her, changed her baby’s poopy diaper while she was in the shower, visited her in the hospital, held my tongue whenever she snarked at me, even gave her money and a place to stay–but nothing I did was enough.

My husband thought my behavior was fine.

I did not monopolize the conversation when she was in the room, mostly letting them carry it; if Richard and I sat next to each other, I might chat with him for a while, but usually my husband was there for her to talk to, or she was on the computer or doing some other thing.

She did not start conversations with me.  She did not even try with me, but instead expected me to come up with conversation when I have trouble with this in the best of social situations.  Most of the time there was something else going on in the room, or she was talking to everyone or to somebody else or screaming at a kid, so I didn’t see it as a time for starting conversation with her.

She criticized everything I did.  She refused to accept that I was a shy, quiet introvert with probable NVLD, who had always been that way and always would be, that making conversation with her–especially with someone who bullied me and whom I had maybe just witnessed verbally abusing her husband, kids or somebody else–was practically impossible for me until she stopped the abuse and accepted me for who I was.

I needed to be accepted as a quiet person who will not say much most of the time, even among my best friends.  I tried to explain all of this to Richard, hoping that he would explain it to her and they would help make it easier for me to relax around her.  But nothing ever changed, while I got blamed for everything and continuously punished for not being extroverted.

When we were roommates, I figured there was nothing wrong with spending 10 minutes talking with just Richard, when that evening we would all be together on the couch talking or watching TV for hours.

It’s not the same as visiting somebody, or they’re visiting you, because, well, we were roommates, and people who live together do this all the time.  And since she lived with me for six weeks and I spent every evening socializing with her and Richard for hours, I figured this was plenty to help her get to know me.

Also, in college my friends hated my fiancé Phil, whom they saw as controlling and possessive.  In turn, he tried to distance me from them, because he saw how they felt about them.  I did not see it until Pearl admitted it to me in a letter over the summer; he told me it was because he was Catholic, trying to make me see them as religiously bigoted.

To me, this was true friendship, and I saw his attempts to keep me from them as isolation and control.  This was my model for friendship, my model for what a controlling spouse acts like.  With Richard, I was now being like my friends, while Tracy behaved like Phil.

I am an introvert with probable NVLD (which socially is like Asperger’s), and cannot carry on conversations with the ease of extroverts.  Introverts must think before they speak, or they will say gibberish, and their brains use long-term rather than short-term memory to come up with something to say during group conversation.

But this takes longer, while extroverts think as they speak and use short-term memory during conversation.  So by the time an introvert comes up with a comment, or finds an opening to say it, the conversation has already moved on to some other topic.

I catch some social cues, but from the way this woman acted with me, I must have missed a whole slew of subtleties, because most of the time I thought our relationship was okay.

Tracy decided that until I turned into an extrovert (which researchers say is absolutely impossible) and someone without NVLD (which is also impossible), then she would treat me like I was trying to steal her husband away.

I had to court her favor before she would “approve” my friendship with Richard (even though he and I had already been friends for two years before I heard anything about this) and “allow” us to go out for coffee, have one-on-one conversations, or do anything at all that he could do with his other friends.

I do not believe in such restrictions put on a grown adult; I believe they are controlling and a red flag of abuse and isolation.

Because of the restrictions my brain put upon me since birth, it was maddening, an impossible requirement I was never able to fulfill, and extremely insulting, yet Richard and Tracy talked like I was making a “mountain out of a molehill,” and blamed me for not changing into an extrovert.

It was bullying and psychological abuse.

If I dealt with social situations with ease, it would have been different.  But I could not, so the motives for my behavior were all benign.

And they gave me none of the cues I asked for to tell me when she wanted to have a conversation with me, so I never noticed her doing it.

Also, I was extremely timid, scared by her aggressive personality, and felt it immoral to be friends with my best friend’s abuser.

But this was 2007, before the Internet exploded with information on how introverts are misunderstood and should be respected, so it was hard for me to explain–or to point to experts to back up my statements.

Every person I have ever known in my entire life has described me as “quiet.”  It’s the first adjective anyone uses to describe me, whether as someone they’ve just met or someone they remember from the past.

Second after that comes “nice,” “sweet,” “loyal.”  Richard called me “sweet, innocent and nice.”

So to me, Tracy’s behavior was like the mean girls and bullies from childhood, bullying me for being different, treating my quietness as if it were evidence of sneakiness and ulterior motives, laying into me with all sorts of horridly abusive, filthy words because I’m quiet–while my best friend let her do it, even talked as if she had every right to!

For two and a half years they tried to bully me into not being the way I’ve always been, treating me as if it were all my fault and Tracy had nothing to do with it, nothing to change in her own behavior.  I struggle to come up with conversation in the best of social situations; pressure like this constricted my throat and cut off my thoughts.

But it got worse: My NVLD has made me extremely gullible.  My classmates in middle school teased me for it; in college, boyfriends used it to manipulate me in ways that other people would see right through.

But my “best friend,” Richard, manipulated me also, getting comfort during a difficult time with his wife by convincing me that putting his head on my shoulder and giving me long, sweet hugs was an innocent expression of friendship and caring, NOT romance.  He told me Americans are too reserved.

So I thought Tracy did these things with friends, too–then he told me, “Don’t do them around Tracy.  She’s very jealous.”  But I was too naïve and trusting to see this as a huge red flag that he’d been lying to me.  (My best friend would never lie to me!)

And then he let Tracy flay me alive for these things, as if they’d been all my idea, as if he had nothing to do with them.

Meanwhile, he threatened my husband for sticking up for me, and wrote to him that he gets “physically violent easily if triggered.”

Just as obeying our parents is good except if they command us to do evil, the same is true with sticking up for our spouses.  While it is good and right to stick up for our spouses and stand by them, if our spouse is doing or saying something abusive or evil to anyone, then it would be evil for us to stick up for them and stand by them.

This means you, too, Richard: It was evil for you to allow your wife’s evil treatment of me, and you became its participant.

Digging out from the psychological damage–which some sources on the Net call Complex-PTSD as described here–has been long and difficult.  Though you might say I started trying to dig out from it soon after I met her, the worst of it wasn’t until a day when she finally spewed her poison, her venom, all over me.

(Fellow introverts, this will really burn you up: She actually accused me of needing to “grow up and talk“!  Talk about being bigoted against and refusing to understand introverts!  Talk about being mean and nasty to someone who’s different from you!  Doesn’t that just make you furious?  And that wasn’t all she said!  Some people need to “grow up” and learn how to treat others, to start being more accepting of other people’s differences!)

I’ve seen her do this to others, too, including a mutual friend, so I know it’s not just me.  Her mother is personality disordered, and has been officially diagnosed and hospitalized for it.  Even Richard noted some of the same traits in Tracy and all her sisters; these things can run in families, whether from some genetic trait or from the effects of being abused.  I am not a psychologist, but I believe Tracy has picked it up as well.

This disgraceful treatment by who I thought was my best friend, the best friend I’d ever had, caused me to build a wall around myself so that for a long time, I barely even went on Facebook anymore to communicate with my true friends.  I do still try to get out and among people, but it’s gotten even harder than it used to be to let people get inside that wall.

Especially during the first year of recovery, I would hide inside it as they chattered away, not revealing my inner life to them, all the pain and anguish and guilt, the things that Tracy said still revolving around in my mind almost a year later.

I got disgusted to see them go up to the Eucharist when they visited my church, how they acted as if I was the one with the problem, how Richard was able to manipulate me as he does others into thinking he’s this cool, loving person–when I have seen the dark side of them both.  How he manipulated me into thinking his wife was the abusive one, but little by little, he began to show that he is also abusive, violent and manipulative.

Then something happened that finally got the attention of the authorities, and proved to me that I did not imagine the abuse in their household:

According to the local newspaper and online public access court records, Richard choked his eldest daughter on September 21, 2010 until she passed out, because she was misbehaving.

Yet in his mug shot, which was posted on the website of the local paper for well over a year, he wears an expression of contempt rather than shame.  (Because of my NVLD, it took a while, and online research, but I finally identified the expression.)  And I’m told that once, when she was very small, he beat her mercilessly.

Also, I have an e-mail and record of a phone conversation which prove I’m telling the truth.  (I held onto them just in case Richard would need an ally in court.)

I also have my husband and Todd as witnesses/character witnesses, the printouts of Tracy on a game forum doing the same things to Todd that she did to me, several of her abusive e-mails to me, the abusive posts she made to Todd on that game forum, printouts of IRC conversations in which Richard claimed to have hypnotized me and been a thug for the Mafia, posts by Todd confirming the Mafia story, e-mails from Todd describing the things he himself witnessed, and a public blog post by Richard from 2007, all confirming my story as true and not the ravings of someone who is “not all there,” as Tracy called me in 2012 when she found my blog and this website.

I have copies of e-mails I sent to friends and family describing the situation from 2007-2010.  I have a file, started in mid-2010, in which I wrote everything I witnessed while I could still remember it well, just in case I would be needed as a character witness for Richard.  I am also witness of and privy to some things which I did not post online because of their sensitive nature.

These records give me confidence that I write the truth, that I was indeed bullied and abused, and that there was also abuse in Richard and Tracy’s household.  Though for legal reasons, I must note that my writings are all opinion based on my understanding of the facts, and others may disagree with my assessments.

The first thing is, you were born this way. It is in your nature, and thus cannot be wrong.  On average, one out of every three people is an introvert, if being quiet was wrong, that would make 1/3 of the total population born lesser. –serjicaladdict, Why are you so quiet?

My Trip to Oz and Back is much like my own blogs, an account of two years spent by the writer with her girlfriend, which was actually a 50-page letter sent by the author to her ex-girlfriend.

That was in the late 90s, when the author had never heard of borderline personality disorder, so there had been no official diagnosis for her to point to.  But the more she learned about BPD, the more she knew her ex-girlfriend had it, so she posted this letter to help others who are dealing with someone with BPD.

It has been on the Web since 2003, and by November 2006 had received 53,000 hits.  As the author wrote on the main page,

Writing this was cathartic. It doubled as a form of therapy. I actually did send the letter; however, I doubt that it had much effect.  The more I learned about BPD, the more I realized that the likelihood of this person ever really understanding, was probably close to zero….

Why would I want to put such a personal document online?  There are several reasons. First, I wanted to give an accurate portrayal of what it is like to be in a relationship with a person with BPD.  There are many books and websites on BPD, but relatively few from a significant other’s point of view.

Second, I am hoping that someone out there might read a bit and identify with it.  When one is in a difficult situation, sometimes just hearing about another person’s similar experience can be affirming–as in, “I’m not the only one.”

Finally, I consider myself a success story–see the final chapter, the epilogue.  My wish is to give hope to others.

Like me, the author changed names and identifying details.  This is to protect the guilty as well as the innocent.  Joyful Alive Woman also wrote about her abusive, narcissist, former female friend.

The narcissist blames others for his behaviour, accuses them of provoking him into his temper tantrums and believes firmly that “they” should be punished for their “misbehaviour”.

Apologies–unless accompanied by verbal or other humiliation–are not enough. The fuel of the narcissist’s rage is spent mainly on vitriolic verbal send-offs directed at the (often imaginary) perpetrator of the (oft innocuous) offence.

The narcissist–wittingly or not–utilises people to buttress his self-image and to regulate his sense of self-worth. As long and in as much as they are instrumental in achieving these goals, he holds them in high regard, they are valuable to him. He sees them only through this lens.

This is a result of his inability to love others: he lacks empathy, he thinks utility, and, thus, he reduces others to mere instruments.

If they cease to “function”, if, no matter how inadvertently, they cause him to doubt his illusory, half-baked, self-esteem–they are subjected to a reign of terror.

The narcissist then proceeds to hurt these “insubordinates”. He belittles and humiliates them. He displays aggression and violence in myriad forms.

His behaviour metamorphoses, kaleidoscopically, from over-valuing (idealising) the useful person–to a severe devaluation of same. The narcissist abhors, almost physiologically, people judged by him to be “useless”. —The Soul of a Narcissist by Sam Vaknin

Table of Contents 

1. Introduction

2. We share a house 

3. Tracy’s abuse turns on me 

4. More details about Tracy’s abuse of her husband and children 

5. My frustrations mount 

6. Sexual Harassment from some of Richard’s friends

7. Without warning or explanation, tensions build

 
8. The Incident

9. The fallout; a second chance?

10. Grief 

11. Struggle to regain normalcy

12. Musings on how Christians should treat each other

13. Conclusion 

13b. Thinking of celebrating the first anniversary

14. Updates on Richard’s Criminal Charges 

Sequel to this Story: Fighting the Darkness: Journey from Despair to Healing

 

Why not to let your spouse tell you to stop being friends with somebody: Rethinking the Importance of Friendship vs. Erotic Love in Our Society

Let’s not think that we should jettison even our closest platonic friends if our wife/husband says so.

Let’s not think of friendship as expendable, that if we fall in love, we can let our friendships wither and die and it doesn’t matter.

Friendship is also important: You need friends, not just a lover, in your life.

Also, let’s not think that for a marriage to endure, it must be full of passionate love all the time, or else it’s time to look elsewhere.  Simon May writes in Let’s Fall in Love Like the Ancients, published in the Washington Post on 2/8/13 (no longer available on the Web):

There is no holiday celebrating friendship, but only since the mid-19th century has romance been elevated above other types of love. For most ancient Greeks, for example, friendship was every bit as passionate and valuable as romantic-sexual love. Aristotle regarded friendship as a lifetime commitment to mutual welfare, in which two people become “second selves” to each other.

In the Bible, King Saul’s son Jonathan loves David, the young warrior who slays Goliath, “as his own soul” and swears eternal friendship with him, while David says their friendship surpasses romantic love. Ruth declares her friendship for her mother-in-law, Naomi, in terms equivalent to a marriage vow: “Where you go I will go, where you lodge I will lodge. . . . Where you die I will die.”

Today, friendship has been demoted beneath the ideal of romance, but they should be on an equal footing. We tend to regard our friendships as inferior to our romances in passion, intimacy and depth of commitment.

Often they’re little more than confessionals in which we seek a sympathetic ear to help us fix–or escape–our romances. When Harry met Sally, they progressed from friends to lovers.

And on Facebook we’re all “friends” now, further downgrading the meaning of what should be a selective and multifaceted bond……

But all human love is conditional. We love others because of something, whether their beauty, goodness or power; because they belong to our families; or because they protect and nurture us.

By recognizing that all we have is conditional love, we are less likely to give up on our loved ones as quickly as we often do, less likely to be worried if we occasionally fall in and out of love with them or they with us, and less likely to scare them off by expecting their love to be of superhuman strength….

And finally, let’s release romantic and marital love from the stranglehold of sexual expectation. Sure, sex is an unsurpassed pleasure–but you can have a tremendous erotic bond with a person and have sex only infrequently….

I’m not suggesting that we revive medieval courtship, but we should think of sex as just one of the bonds and delights of erotic love, rather than as its touchstone. If sex isn’t going so well, or if desire is no longer so urgent, this doesn’t necessarily mean that we love less urgently, let alone that it’s time for a change.

These days, it’s easy to get the impression that once you get married, your spouse is supposed to be your best friend and confidant, and your family and friends are to take a backseat while you greatly reduce time spent with others outside of your home.  But this is a modern concept which actually isolates us in unhealthy ways.

As a housewife, I can tell you this is true.  I love my husband, I love my child, I’m very close to my husband, yet when I don’t have social contact outside the home, I feel just as lonely as I did as a dateless teenager.

We must make more of an effort to stay connected with friends and family, or else we could find ourselves slowly becoming suicidal.  God made us to be social creatures, spending time with people outside our homes, not hermits who consider relationships with friends and relatives to be of secondary importance.

And when a marriage ends–as every marriage inevitably does–by death or divorce, the surviving spouse will now have to pick up the pieces with a diminished social network.

Also, we don’t want to smother each other.  If spending too much time with your boyfriend or girlfriend will slowly destroy your relationship, why not the same with a marriage?

[T]he current societal expectation that a spouse can provide all the emotional sustenance a person needs is bad not just for people’s ties with community, but for marriage itself. —The Marriage Penalty by Shankar Vedantam

 

Many people believe that marriage is the fundamental building block of society, an institution that broadens social ties and ensures that individuals will not grow old in isolation.  Perhaps that was true in the past, when marriage was a central unit of economic production and political organization.

But today, despite the benefits that a good marriage delivers to the couple and their children, marriage actually tends to isolate partners from other people in ways that pose potential long-term problems both for the couple and for society as a whole. —Marriage Reduces Social Ties by Naomi Gerstel & Natalia Sarkisian

Stephanie Coontz argues in Too Close For Comfort that we have found new joys in marriage because of the changes in how we view it, but at the same time we have “neglected our other relationships, placing too many burdens on a fragile institution and making social life poorer in the process.”

In the olden days, one’s spouse was not expected to be a “soulmate” or one’s closest confidant.  It was considered “dangerously antisocial, even pathologically self-absorbed, to elevate marital affection and nuclear-family ties above commitments to neighbors, extended kin, civic duty and religion.”

Victorian society had no problem with same-sex friends showing physical affection, even sleeping in the same bed; this was not assumed to include homosexual desire or activity, as it would today.

(For an example, note that Frodo and Sam’s relationship in Lord of the Rings would have been perfectly normal and acceptable.  But these days, Youtube is full of videos poking fun at Frodo and Sam’s supposed homosexual relationship.)

By the early 20th century, though, the sea change in the culture wrought by the industrial economy had loosened social obligations to neighbors and kin, giving rise to the idea that individuals could meet their deepest needs only through romantic love, culminating in marriage.

Under the influence of Freudianism, society began to view intense same-sex ties with suspicion and people were urged to reject the emotional claims of friends and relatives who might compete with a spouse for time and affection.

In the 1950s in American middle-class suburbia, this trend reached its peak as women were told fulfillment lay in marriage and motherhood, and men were told to “let their wives take care of their social lives.”

When these suburban women began going back to work in the 60s, they realized how wonderful it was to have contact and conversation with people outside of the home again.

So why do we seem to be slipping back in this regard?  It is not because most people have voluntarily embraced nuclear-family isolation.

Indeed, the spread of “virtual” communities on the Internet speaks to a deep hunger to reach out to others.  Instead, it’s the expansion of the post-industrial economy that seems to be driving us back to a new dependence on marriage.

According to the researchers Kathleen Gerson and Jerry Jacobs, 60 percent of American married couples have both partners in the work force, up from 36 percent in 1970, and the average two-earner couple now works 82 hours a week.

The more we lose the real-life ties we used to have, the more we depend on our romantic relationships for “intimacy and deep communication”–making us “more vulnerable to isolation if a relationship breaks down.”  Sometimes, these excessive expectations actually cause the marriage to break down.

To fix this, we should “raise our expectations for, and commitment to, other relationships, especially since so many people now live so much of their lives outside marriage.”  The way to strengthen our marriages is to

restructure both work and social life so we can reach out and build ties with others, including people who are single or divorced.  That indeed would be a return to marital tradition–not the 1950s model, but the pre-20th-century model that has a much more enduring pedigree.

In How to stay married, Coontz goes on to say,

Today, we expect much more intimacy and support from our partners than in the past, but much less from everyone else. This puts a huge strain on the institution of marriage.

When a couple’s relationship is strong, a marriage can be more fulfilling than ever. But we often overload marriage by asking our partner to satisfy more needs than any one individual can possibly meet, and if our marriage falters, we have few emotional support systems to fall back on.

Without “gratification and support” from others outside the marriage, spouses have “less to offer each other and fewer ways to replenish their relationship”–and the marriage falls apart from all that weight.  Nowadays, “almost half of all Americans now say that there is just one person, or no one at all, with whom they discuss important matters.”

We commonly find warnings in popular culture against spending too much time with friends or family, against letting these ties “interfere” with time spent with the spouse.  Psychologists tell us to rebuff those who might compete with our spouse and children for our attention.  “But trying to be everything to one another is part of the problem, not part of the solution, to the tensions of modern marriage.”

I just looked over a book written by fundamentalist author Wayne Mack, Sweethearts for a Lifetime; his ideas of a successful marriage seem more like becoming clones of each other: You have to have all the same friends, do all your recreation together, learn to enjoy each other’s activities, etc.

I’m sorry, but I just don’t want to do all the things my husband does for recreation, he doesn’t like everything I like, and I don’t want to force him to be with my friends, or have him force me to be with his friends if I don’t care for them.

Also, jettisoning friends because your spouse does not want to be with that friend, sounds like betrayal of the sacred bond of friendship, and can very easily lead to one spouse controlling the other by choosing which friends to like and not like.

One passage of the book says to learn to like whatever your spouse wants to do sexually, but what if what your spouse wants is painful, degrading or disgusts you?  Another passage says to not keep secrets but consider everything to be your right to share; does that mean it’s okay to snoop through my husband’s e-mails?

I don’t want to know every intimate detail of his work; I don’t want to know all his temptations.  I want to allow him space to be his own person, and I want the same courtesy.

Men and women have different ways of perceiving things and reacting to them.  We tend to expect our spouse to be our best friend.  But that may not always happen. For the simple reason that a best friend is–usually–of the same sex as we are and has similar ways of responding. —Three common problems in a marriage

[Myth #]1. THE RIGHT PERSON WILL MEET ALL MY NEEDS.  Even if you have found your “soul mate,” one person cannot be the sole source of your need satisfaction. That’s too big a burden, and impossible besides.

Your partner is a human being, not an all-knowing, all-compassionate, love machine. You’ll need multiple sources–God, friends, a strong sense of life purpose, healthy self esteem, and a willingness to take responsibility for your own happiness. —Love Myths

This article not only describes the problems with our tendency to retreat into our own little world after a child is born, but how we can combat it and the depression it causes.

What Happened to my Friends?

Lucky is the man or woman who has a friend like Samwise Gamgee. Some of us may have a spouse who comes close. I know of no one who has a living friend, other than a spouse, like Sam.

The reason is not that such friends exist only in fiction. Aristotle identified this category of friendship in his Nicomachean Ethics.

No, the truth is that 21st century people have lost the knowledge of how to be such a friend.  Such friendships are based upon good character. Very few people have characters that merit such friendships.

Part of the stupendous power of the Tolkien myth is that the myth taps into the incredible longing everyone has for this type of friendship. Few people know the reason such friendships are impossible in today’s world. Why? Most people do not have the high moral character necessary for such friendships….

Why is The Lord of the Rings such a powerful myth? Why did the final installment earn almost half a billion dollars in its first eighteen days?

Because all of us want the fellowship illustrated in the films. Because we want relationships that last. Because we want to feel super-glued to family and friends, like the glue that bound Sam and Frodo. Because we want involvement. Because we want shared creativity and wonder, because we want loyalty and commitment.

And yet we don’t have this feeling. Oh, if we are lucky we have it in one relationship, maybe a spouse. But in general we don’t have it. In general we tend to be atoms bouncing around the eternal void, occasionally bumping into another atom, exchanging a curse or a smile.

Ought we not create our own Fellowship of The Ring? Ought we not create relationships that will last a lifetime? Ought we not build delightful things, even at some risk to ourselves? Ought we not discover something with ourselves that demands eternal loyalty and commitment?

Having identified these aching needs in ourselves, perhaps we will make a mighty effort to secure fellowship in our own lives. —Friendship and loyalty in Lord of the Rings

It takes much time and sustained commitment to arrive at the third level of close friendship. From within the casual friends, a smaller group of close friends begins to gather. In an discussion of building friendships, it should be understood that although close friendship may be your goal, that level of commitment sharing and trust is harder to achieve.

Intimate friendship is the fourth category. Friends in this category are very special and rare. At this level of sharing, intimate friends feel comfortable sharing their innermost thoughts and feelings. This type of friendship is usually marked by a deep understanding of and appreciation for the view and values of those involved.

A desire for intimate friendship is a basic human quality that calls for a giving of self to others; it can result in a lasting love relationship.  A person would be fortunate to have 5 intimate friends in a lifetime. —Friendship in the 21st Century

While it’s hardly a bad thing to be close to your spouse, we must not treat marriage as if it must fulfill all our needs for social contact and support, while all other contacts outside the home are somehow secondary or even detrimental.  To do so is to seriously weaken not only our own social ties and support, but society at large.

As the above writers argue, widening our social circle and gaining confidants outside the marriage will actually strengthen our selves, society–and our marriages.

Also see this post.

This topic leads on to my write-up on jealousy.

–First written 2008/2009, and slightly modified in the years since.

 

Index to my Life Opinion pages:

Topics on Page 1

Technical Virginity–i.e., how far should a Christian single go? 

Are Spiritual Marriages “real”? 

Am I supposed to spend all of my free time at home with my spouse/kids now that I’m married?  Will that strengthen my marriage–or weaken it? 

Topics on Page 2

Is it okay to be jealous of the opposite-sex friends of my spouse/boyfriend/girlfriend? 

Topics on Page 3

Abuse in all its forms: Links to help 

My Personal Stories

 

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