11. No moment of unreflective interaction ever arises.
If you follow principles, rules, habits, they gotta fit the both of you, and prop the friendship up—otherwise they suck. This should lead to moments when you don't need to think much about the friendship, or about the other person as a separate, unknowable, potentially dangerous person. You can just have fun. Or be confidants. Especially when everything else in life is hard.
This pretty much a practical utopia.
wrote:Some of my warning signs for failing friendships—a thread. I happen to care a lot about friendships, so for me when they break it's quite salient. I spent a lot of time thinking about them, read academic articles of sociology and psychology on the topic, etc. What I'm going to talk about is typically reserved for romantic relationships, while friendships are comparatively disinvested and set aside (that's amatonormativity), so if it sounds like I care too much, that's why, don't @ me.