Intimate Stranger: Boundaries in friendship Planting Dandelions

On the spectrum of friends and acquaintances, where are your boundaries?

I recently wrote about the different ways Patrick and I approach socializing, so of course, I loved this post on Chookooloonks today, where Karen reflects on her and her husband?s different approaches to making friends. I think our own tendencies probably run fairly parallel to theirs, and it sounds like a pretty classic extrovert/introvert split. As Asha wryly noted in her comment on my post, it can be hard not to judge or misunderstand personality differences. ?But why does he want to be that way?? a friend?s mother said, when my friend explained that her husband was an introvert.

Yes, introverts. WHY INDEED?

Anyway, it got me thinking about my own orientation to friendships.?Like Karen, I have a wide, revolving circle of people I warmly and sincerely consider friends, though the ties that bind us are long and loose. The word ?acquaintance? is synonymous with ?stranger? to me, but then, my definition of friend is broad. I am perfectly okay with not seeing or speaking to someone for months, because one or both of us got busy, and then picking up immediately where ever we last left off. I have also decided that I?m okay with having friendships that are specific to a particular context. We have ?couple? friends we never see individually, for example. And friendships that revolve mainly around our children?s affections. I have friends whose company I enjoy one on one, but who don?t do well in a group, and vice versa. I have friends whose personalities are like wasabi? delightful in small doses (I think I am also wasabi), and those I would happily take in as sister-wives. I suppose it sounds like a lot of walled ?compartments, but it?s more like velvet ropes?easily reconfigured. I like connecting with all kinds of people, and I don?t feel like every connection has to necessarily evolve into a major relationship. I guess I play the field, and I know it occasionally disappoints those who were hoping for more, or whose own disposition is more constant.

But then there are a very few people to whom I am deeply, actively committed. For whom I will even overcome my horror of talking on the telephone. And I mean, very few. Because the time and energy I can pour into those relationships has to come from the same well that I use to sustain my relationships with my husband and my children. So those tend to be the kind of friendships that replenish my reserves ? the person who gets me and loves me, come as you are, no translation required. My girlfriend Lennie is one of these. I would, to borrow Laura Mayes? great phrase, fight wild dogs for her. A pack of wild dogs riding a herd of wild boars. Holding ringing telephones in their terrible jaws.

You get the idea.

This is what I meant when I said that one of the cool things about getting older is self-knowledge.?Today I know my nature. For better or for worse, I inherited my father?s ability to connect deeply with others on a moment to moment basis. He could dive into the most casual encounter and come up with your true story, shining on its open shell. He was the intimate stranger.

Knowing this about myself?accepting it?helps me know what I can and can?t deliver. It allows me to set realistic boundaries, keep expectations in check, and guilt at bay. When I was younger, I lived in the binary. Things were on or off. No nuance, nothing in between. It was a rather exhausting way to live. Friendships burned out. I over-promised and under-delivered.?Today, I can love a whole lot of people without trying to be all things to all of them.

?

Source: http://www.plantingdandelions.com/an_intimate_stranger/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=an_intimate_stranger

jesse james pearl harbor day discovery channel lea michele michael buble michael buble teddy roosevelt