"The friendship breakup has become a feature of modern life: Online, advice abounds on "how to aggressively confront, or even abandon, friends who disappoint us," Olga noted. But what if another solution exists? Instead of firing your friends, psychologists told her, it helps to expand your circle, allowing more people to provide you with different types of support or camaraderie: "Rather than resting on one pillar, healthy friendship is better imagined as crowd-surfing-many hands holding you up," Olga writes."
"The magic of friendship is in its murkiness: We meet a new friend, make room for them in our lives, and sometimes come to rely on them more than we ever expected. But unlike in other relationships, communicating our needs isn't the norm in friendships-which gives our friends more opportunities to disappoint us. Today's newsletter explores what to do when your friends aren't giving you what you need."
One proposal encourages stopping abrupt friendship breakups and instead expanding social circles so multiple people provide different kinds of support. Online advice often promotes aggressively confronting or abandoning disappointing friends, while psychologists advise diversifying friendship networks to avoid overreliance on any single person. Friendship benefits from a crowd-surfing model in which many hands support an individual. Friendship commonly involves murky boundaries: new friends can become unexpectedly central, and explicit communication of needs is uncommon. Lack of clear communication creates opportunities for disappointment. Guidance is offered on managing unmet needs in friendships, alongside gentle reminders of sources of awe.
Read at The Atlantic
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