The Unremarked Days

No one becomes a person worth being on their own.

I want to put this plainly at the start of the chapter, because the surrounding culture will keep telling you the opposite, and the opposite is one of the more damaging things the surrounding culture will keep telling you. The story you have been given, from a thousand sources, is that becoming the person you want to be is a private project. You may have been told explicitly or implicitly that you must work out, in some interior space, who you mean to be, and you then go forth into the world to enact what you have worked out. The story flatters the self that is doing the imagined working out, which is part of why it has been so successful. It is also wrong about how the work actually gets done.

The work gets done in friendship.

I mean friendship in a particular sense. Not the sociable companionship of people who happen to enjoy each other's company, though that is a real and good thing; nor the affinity of those who share a hobby or a workplace or a stage of life, though those affinities can hold a great deal of weight; nor the warmth between people who have known each other a long time, though long acquaintance is one of the materials friendship is built out of. Friendship in the sense I am after is the relationship in which two people, over a long enough time, have come to be able to tell each other the truth about each other. It is a particular structural achievement, and not all the people you spend time with are part of it, and it is what most people who have done the work of becoming a person mean when they speak about who helped them do the work.

The achievement is structural because it requires conditions that are not automatic. Most relationships, however affectionate, do not satisfy the conditions. The two of you have to have known each other long enough that you have seen each other across a range of moods, in conditions of pressure as well as of ease, in moments of generosity and moments of small failure. You have to have arrived at the place where neither of you is performing for the other anymore, because the need to perform has been worn off by time and trust and earned mutual respect. You have to have established, by a long enough record of having done it before, that you can say something difficult to the other without the difficulty being received as an attack on the relationship itself. The other has to have established the same about themselves. The relationship has to have survived, more than once, the test of having said something hard and having had to live together with the saying afterward. By the time these conditions are met, you have built something that is not common, and that the surrounding world will not, in most cases, help you maintain.

I want to spend some time on the test that I just named — the test of having said something hard and having lived together with the saying afterward — because I think the test is where most relationships that could have become friendships fail to become them. The two of you are walking together along the path of an affection that has been deepening across a year or two or ten. The deepening has reached a point where the other person has done something, or said something, or settled into something, that you can see, with whatever clarity friendship has given you, is wrong for them — is going to cost them something, is incompatible with what they have said they want to be, and is the kind of thing they would not have done at an earlier moment of their lives. You know them well enough to see this. You are also old enough to know that saying so will cost something. The other person is invested in what they are doing, and they will not, in the first hour after you have said your piece, thank you for what you have said. They will, in some measure, resent the saying. The resentment may pass; it may also linger; it may, in the worst case, calcify into a quiet distance between the two of you that does not undo the friendship but takes some of the close air out of it.

Most relationships fail this test. The reason is not that one of the two does not see what needs to be said; the reason is that the cost of saying it has been calculated, more or less consciously, against the value of the relationship, and the value of the relationship has been judged not worth the risk of the saying. The judgement is rarely articulated in those terms. It is articulated, if at all, in evasions: it is not my place, they did not ask my opinion, they will work it out themselves, the timing is wrong, or I am probably reading the situation wrong. Each of the evasions has some weight. In many particular cases each of them is the right reading. But across enough such moments, in a relationship that could otherwise have grown into the deeper kind, the evasions accumulate into a pattern and it is the pattern of an affection that has settled into the kind of comfort that no longer risks anything for the other's sake. The two of you go on liking each other, sometimes for the rest of your lives. You have, however, lost the possibility of the deeper relationship, and the loss is not registered as a loss because the comfort is real and the absence is only of a possibility neither of you ever quite reached.

The friendship that does pass the test has, by passing it, become something different from what it was before. The two of you now know, of each other, that the saying-something hard happened, and was lived through, and that the friendship survived. That knowledge becomes a solid structural foundation on which the enduring demands of a friendship can be built. You can rely, after this, on each other's capacity to say what needs to be said, and on each other's capacity to receive what needs to be said. The reliance is one of the more valuable structural facts a life can contain. It is what makes it possible, going forward, for either of you to bring up difficult things without first having to renegotiate the relationship's tolerance for difficulty. The work of saying the hard thing has been done, and the result of having done it is that further hard things can be said with less effort.

I want to be honest about the rarity of this. In any given person's life, friendships of this kind are very rare. Most people are lucky to have even a single friend who would be willing to risk the comfort of a cordial association and commit to doing the difficult and dirty work of exchanging uncomfortable truths, not just once, but as frequently as is necessary. Having two or three such friends would be a mark of an exceptional life. But most people pass through whole stretches of life having none. The scarcity is not because most people are unwilling to be such friends to others. It is rather because the conditions take long durations to establish, and most people's adult lives have been arranged so that long durations of close contact with the same other person are difficult to come by. The pace of modern life and the patterns of modern career movement work against the conditions that this kind of friendship requires. The conditions can still be met, but they have to be sought with some deliberateness, and protected when they have been found.

There is a question worth pausing over here, because for many readers the person who most closely resembles what I have been describing — the one who has known you long enough and closely enough to say something difficult without the saying being received as an attack — is a spouse or a long-term partner. If you have such a person, the structural advantages of the position are real. They have watched you in more situations than any friend has. They have been with you in conditions where the performance most other people see has been worn off you. They have their own investment in your being the person you are trying to be, because your becoming that person shapes the shared life the two of you are conducting. In principle, no one is better placed than a spouse or partner to do the work of this chapter for you.

In practice, the position that gives the relationship these advantages also produces two difficulties that friendships outside the romantic frame do not encounter in the same form. The first is that in a marriage or a serious partnership, everything is received against the background of the relationship's overall stakes. A difficult truth from a friend can be received as difficult; the friendship carries it, but the friendship is not itself in question. A difficult truth from a spouse comes into the room with the whole weight of the marriage behind it. The partner receiving the truth may hear it against a background that the speaker did not intend to invoke — a background of accumulated grievances, of unfinished conversations, of the small compressions of daily life that make everything harder to receive with an open hand. The truth may land more powerfully than it should, or it may be batted away because letting it land would put too much else at risk. Either way, the compression works against the kind of hearing the truth requires.

The second difficulty is that friends, when they have said the difficult thing, can walk away from each other and give the saying time to settle. Spouses cannot. They will be in the same house that evening, sharing the same bed, needing to conduct the small daily work of the shared life while what has just been said is still being metabolised. The metabolising has to happen in place, without the interval of separation that friendships have as their natural resource. This is harder than it sounds. Some marriages have the depth to hold the difficult conversation and the ordinary evening together; many do not, and the recognition that the ordinary evening cannot be maintained is what makes the difficult conversation harder to begin in the first place.

These difficulties do not mean the marriage or the partnership cannot do the work. Some do, and where they do the doing is one of the finer things a shared life can contain. But the assumption that any close romantic relationship will automatically do the work of the friendship this chapter is describing is often mistaken, and the mistake produces a sharper and more visceral pain. A person who has counted on their partner for what the partner cannot in fact provide is left doubly short — without the friendship that could have done the work, and disappointed in the partnership that has not done it either.

We must also acknowledge the darker form of the difficulty, because it needs to be called out. The very features that make a partnership structurally suited for this kind of truth-telling — the long acquaintance, the shared stakes, the intimate access — are the features that, in a partnership that has gone wrong, allow one partner to inflict harm on the other under the appearance of offering difficult feedback. The words that sound, from outside, like the difficult truths a caring partner might offer can, from inside, be the instruments of a sustained diminishment that has nothing to do with truth and everything to do with the exercise of one partner's power over the other. The distinction from the outside is not always easy to see; from the inside it is often clearer than the person carrying the harm can afford to admit. If you are reading this and something has been stirring in you as you read it, I want to say only that what the chapter has been describing is not what an abusive partnership offers under the same name, and that the difference is not marginal. The friend who tells the truth leaves you more capable of the life you are trying to conduct; the partner who has been diminishing you under the language of honesty leaves you less capable of it, week by week, until the capacity itself has been eroded. If you have been on the receiving end of the second, please do not read what this chapter has been saying about difficult friendships as an argument that you should endure more of it. It is not. Getting away, when getting away is possible, is the honest response to that situation, and the finding of the friendships this chapter is describing — the friendships that build you up rather than tear you down — will be part of what recovery looks like on the far side of it.

No matter how or where you find such friends though, the role and value of cultivating such deep and committed friendships is the single most important structural support you will need to be able to do the work I will be most concerned with in the second half of this book. Because the work of becoming the kind of person who, when the moment comes, does not look away — the work of staying aligned in oneself while the world around one is coming apart — is work that cannot, in most cases, be done alone. The pressures on a person trying to do this work are too great. The accommodations the surrounding world is making, and demanding of you to make, are too intense. The doubts that arise in oneself — am I seeing what I think I am seeing? Am I making more of this than is warranted? Am I being self-righteous in resisting what everyone else is doing without resistance? — are too consistent. A person trying to do this work alone, with only their own consciousness as their company, will, in most cases, lose, because the pressure of being alone with the work for long enough produces the doubt that produces the small accommodation that produces, across years, the slow erosion of who they were trying to be.

What sustains the work, where the work has been sustained, is the company of others who are trying to do the same work, who can tell each other when they are seeing things accurately and when they are losing perspective, and who can give each other the small reinforcements of company that the surrounding world is withholding. The dense, small, slow ties through which a particular way of being is reinforced often enough to take hold within us, are the actual mechanism by which any new way of seeing has ever spread through a people.

The lone reformer at the front of a movement is a useful image, but the image is a catastrophically misleading one. The movement, when there is a movement, is the work of many people in small clusters reinforcing each other, and the lone reformer is the visible face of a larger and quieter network without which the lone reformer could not have sustained what they were doing.

This is a structural feature of how a new way of seeing has ever taken hold anywhere. The new way has to be repeated, by enough trusted voices, in enough places where trust has been built, to overcome the inertia of the settled household. The inertia of the settled household is not malicious; it is the working inertia of any place that has, by long use, arrived at how it does things. To dislodge it requires that the new way be presented not once, by one person, but many times, by people the household trusts, in the small intimate moments of daily life where the household's actual operating standards are reproduced or modified. The dislodging is done by the company. Without the company, the new way may be announced but it will not be taken up.

I want to bring this back to you. You have, in your life, a small number of relationships in which the truth could be told between you and the other person, if the work of telling it has been done. You also have, almost certainly, a small number of relationships in which the work of telling it has not yet been done, but in which the conditions are present — the duration, the trust accumulated in other matters, the affection that would survive the difficulty — for the work to begin. I do not want to make these explicit. The reader of this book is not always the right person to initiate the difficult conversation, because sometimes the right thing to do, in a relationship that has been long but not yet deep, is to wait until the other person opens the door, and to walk through it when they do. But there are, in your life, doors that you have been near and opened to you that you have not walked through, and the not-walking-through has, in some cases, been a small failure of friendship that you knew at the time you were committing it. I want to ask you to take stock of those. Not to act on them yet because sometimes the stock taking is itself enough work for a season. But to note them as part of your account of what you have been doing with the relationships you have.

There is one thing I want to say about the receiving side of all this, because the receiving is harder than the giving in a way that is not always acknowledged. To be the recipient of a hard truth from a friend is one of the more difficult experiences an adult can have, because the recipient has to hold open the possibility that the friend is right, even though the friend's being right means that the recipient has been wrong in some way they had not yet seen. The defences are quick. The first response is almost always not gratitude. The first response will be some version of self-protection such as the inward argument against what has just been said, the marshalling of the reasons it could not be true, and the small noticing of all the ways the friend's view might have been distorted by the friend's own limitations. These defences are not a moral failure; they are the human response to having one's settled picture of oneself disturbed. What matters is what you do after the first response has run its course. The friend has said the thing; the defences have been mounted; you have, now, the option of either letting the defences have the last word or letting the friend's statement sit, for long enough, that you can examine it without the heat of the first reception.

The work of letting the friend's statement sit is one of the more difficult interior practices an adult life can include. To be sure, that practice is not included in adult life automatically. It must be invited, cultivated and practiced. Counterintuitively, it requires a particular kind of holding back. The statement must be received and the immediate response will not only be defensive, but impatient and shouting to be heard. But the deferral of the response, for a day or two or a week, is the work the receiving demands of you most. Most people do not do this work. Most people respond, in the heat of having been told something difficult, with the response the heat produces, and the response, once delivered, closes off the possibility of the deeper hearing that the deferral would have produced. The friendship can recover from such a moment, but often what does not recover is the friend's willingness to say the next difficult thing, because the saying of the last difficult thing cost the friend more than the response repaid.

There is a particular version of this question that I want to raise, because it applies to a significant fraction of the readers of this book, and because the version is more pressing for them than they may have even thought to anticipate.

If you are the sort of person who has been rising, over the years of your adult life, in the arrangements you are part of — moving up in your profession, taking on larger responsibilities, being given authority over more people or larger resources or more consequential decisions — the friendships this chapter has been describing are becoming, in equal measure, both more important and more difficult for you to maintain, and the two increases are not accidents. They are structural features of what happens to a person as they move up.

The importance is increasing for reasons that ought to be sobering. As you rise, the ordinary corrective mechanisms that would once have caught your errors begin to fall away. The colleague who would have told you that your idea was half-formed no longer feels free to tell you; you are now the person whose ideas the colleague is expected to support. The subordinate who would have shown you what you missed no longer shows you; showing you would risk consequences that showing you did not risk when you were their peer. The client who would have walked away from a poor product now stays, because the relationship has become worth something beyond the product. The failures you make cost you less than they would have cost you before, because the arrangements around you have accumulated buffers between you and the consequences your judgements would otherwise have to face. All of these compounds over time. The person who has been at the top of an arrangement for ten years is operating with a supply of corrective information that is dramatically thinner than the supply they were operating with in the early years of their career, and the thinning has happened so gradually that they have rarely noticed it happening.

Meanwhile, the changes in you have been running in the opposite direction of what would compensate for the thinning. The person who has been rising has, in most cases, developed a heightened confidence in their own judgement, because their judgement has been treated by those around them as more trustworthy the higher, they have gone. The heightened confidence may be warranted in the domain in which it was earned but it also tends to spread into domains in which it is not warranted. Either way, the person no longer receives the kind of corrective information that would enable them to identify the boundaries of their judgement or its errors. So, eventually they will come to trust their own reactions in matters where their reactions are, in fact, not particularly reliable. They will come to expect a kind of deference in ordinary interactions that they would not have expected earlier in their lives, and the deference, when it is given, justifies their expectation, and the confirmation compounds.

This is where the difficulty enters. The friendships this chapter has been describing require two things that the rising person's condition works against. The first is that the person must be genuinely receptive to being told what they do not want to hear. The rising person's condition tends to make them, at best, resistant to such telling and, at worst, hostile to it. The people around them who might have been such friends learn quickly what kinds of telling produce what kinds of response, and they adjust. The adjustments are often not conscious. The friend who was once willing to say the difficult thing begins to soften it, not because they have stopped seeing what they saw, but because the cost of saying it in the older direct form has been rising, and softer forms are being received with less resistance and are therefore doing more of the work than the older direct forms would have done. The friend has, in other words, begun to calibrate what they offer to the demeanour they are now receiving, and the calibration is one of the things the kind of friendship this chapter has been advocating for does not survive.

The second thing the friendship requires is that the two parties be, in some meaningful sense, peers. Not peers in every dimension — the friendships this chapter has been describing can hold across differences in age, expertise, wealth, and public standing — but peers in the sense that neither is structurally dependent on the other's continuing favour for the material conditions of their life. When the rising person's advancement has produced a situation in which the people close to them are, in some measurable way, dependent on their continued favour, the peer condition has failed, and the friendship cannot be conducted in the form the chapter has been describing. The former friend may still be a friend, in the sociable sense. They cannot be the friend who tells the truth, because the cost of telling the truth is no longer bearable to them, and both parties know it.

The rising person's task, if they want to keep the kind of friendship this chapter has been describing, is therefore twofold and both parts of it are very difficult. The first part is to work against, in their own conduct, the changes that their rising has been producing in them — to receive difficult telling with the same openness they received it with earlier in their career, to notice when they are treating their own irritations as signals from the world, to hold their own judgements with the modesty they warrant rather than the confidence the arrangements around them are inviting. The second part is to protect, and where necessary to construct, relationships with people who are not dependent on their continued favour and who therefore retain the freedom to say what they see. These are usually people from earlier in the rising person's life, before the rising had progressed far enough to have altered the relational conditions. These are usually friends from school or from the early years of a career or from the family. If those relationships have not been maintained across the years of progression and accumulation of power and status, they have to be rebuilt, and the rebuilding may be much harder than the maintaining would have been. If they have been maintained, they are among the most valuable things the rising person still has, and the maintenance of them is one of the more important pieces of ongoing work an ambitious life should include.

This is the practical reason why the work of becoming a person worth being is so dependent on the small number of relationships in which the work can be done. Each such relationship is a slowly built mechanism for receiving the kinds of correction that you cannot reliably administer to yourself. Each such relationship that is lost or never built, leaves you to a degree impoverished and left only with the tools of self-correction that is, for most people, not sufficient. Deep and truth bearing friendships are not luxuries. They are part of the structural arrangement by which any person who has done the work of becoming a person worth being has done it.

The next chapter turns to one of the hardest patterns to see in any institution or country, and one of the most important to learn to recognise. It is the pattern in which the people and institutions that are tasked with the defence of what is good, has by long degradation, lost the capacity to tell what is good from what threatens it, and now strikes hardest at what it is most needed to protect.