understanding

the limits of intimacy in friendship

Leon Dabo, Hudson River

I like to think of myself as a discreet person, but there have been times I’ve screwed up. These incidents are infrequent and fairly innocuous, but I file them away because it’s important that I exercise better judgment next time. Once, a coworker slacked a few of us in a private channel about how she almost went to war with K that morning for taking the desk she booked in the office. This was obviously not a big deal, and when I sat down next to K, I made an offhanded comment like, “I heard this desk was in heated contention.” Seeing his face, I immediately knew I made a mistake. I hadn’t considered that K would not have expected R to spread the word about what happened. He got defensive, and I realized I’d inadvertently made things awkward between them. I pinged R to let her know I’d messed up. Best case, she’d shrug it off. Spoiler: she did not. She was pissed. All I could do was apologize. No matter how trivial it was, I made a careless comment. I wasn’t thinking from each of their perspectives.

The last—and God be willing, last time—I got ruinously drunk was at a house party two years ago. I’d mixed too many drinks, and at the end of the night, blacked out, vomited, and passed out. I was very grateful that a friend called me an Uber and made sure I got home safe.

The next day, I was stunned to find out that this same friend had taken a photo of me passed out on the ground and sent it to the host of the party. We all have those embarrassing photos from nights out we wish never existed, except I wasn’t doing anything mildly funny or interesting. I was slumped on the ground, unwell, unconscious.

I tried to explain to her why I was upset. It’s possible she didn’t realize how bad the night was for me. She promised not to share the photo more widely and made a point of saying she decided not to post it to the event page. Looking back at our texts, I can see myself trying again and again to explain why I felt hurt, and it’s because she said I don’t think it matters if I don’t understand it personally, and I very much wanted her to understand. She said I didn’t need to explain myself and that she didn’t think any less of me. This felt off, but I couldn’t put my finger on why, so focused was I on moving past my grievance. I didn’t want anything to get in the way of our friendship. It was enough that she’d apologized. Maybe it didn’t matter that she couldn’t relate.

A few weeks ago, at a picnic, she brought up the incident out of the blue. Remember that time you vomited on a tree outside T’s apartment? I’ve always found her to be tactful, so it was surprising that she would remind me of a night she knew was upsetting to me—in part because of that photo—only to say she had passed by that tree and thought about it, and she was glad the tree was okay.

We can all appreciate a bit of comic relief in tense moments, and sometimes, laughing it off is the best thing to do. But I’m leery of comedians and their ability to make light of literally anything. Humor is a numbing agent. It desensitizes you to real emotions, to taking another person’s pain seriously.

I considered letting it go—writing it off as an off-color comment—but this friendship meant something to me, and it was now obvious that her inability to understand me in the first place was a problem. So I tried to explain that my issue with the photo wasn’t about being worried she or anyone else would think less of me, but about expecting my friends to protect my privacy and dignity. Her response was respectful, but again, she admitted, if our roles were reversed, I wouldn’t feel the way you do. She acknowledged that this doesn’t invalidate my feelings and promised she would try not to bring it up again.

I found it baffling that something I thought was simple was so hard for her to grasp. All I wanted was for her to put aside her memory of the night for a moment and take in the information I was giving her about my experience—information, I hoped, would allow her to see things differently. To her, I may have been a “sleepy drunk.” To her, it may have been a moment of levity. But I was in a bad place, physically, psychically. I wasn’t even conscious that a picture was being taken of me while I was at my lowest.

There are so many qualities I admire about her, including her total openness in sharing the details of her life. I can see how it’s possible for someone to share very candidly about themselves, yet treat another person’s vulnerability and privacy without the care they might expect. They’re using their own higher threshold for evaluating what’s embarrassing or humiliating. That, by itself, is not the issue. The issue is not being able to change your perspective in light of new information.

Imaginative empathy requires that we step outside our own frame of reference and fully inhabit someone else’s. It’s entirely possible to understand someone whose experience of an event differs from our own as long as we’re willing to go there. It may be uncomfortable. It may force us to confront the fact that we’ve caused someone pain or made an error in judgment. An apology without true understanding is just etiquette. The depth of intimacy in any friendship is measured by this capacity for understanding.