By Todd Ler (with contributions from Phil Ossefie and Pierce Ng)
TLDR: by thoughtfully reassessing their level of investment.
Friendship Simp
So much arguing to save one-sided friendships can seem like we support simping for our lousy friends:
- repeatedly giving them chances
- accepting their shortcomings
- letting them do what’s convenient for them while we accommodate and put in more effort
- they wouldn’t have thought about us if we never reached out
On the surface, it looks like there’s a distinct lack of self-respect, which was one of the initial theoretical reasons to cut ‘em off.
Let’s quickly re-examine what “simp” means:
simp (noun)
An individual who is excessively attentive, giving or submissive to someone who does not reciprocate the same feelings
Outside the original context of romantic interest and sexual attraction, unhealthy platonic relationships can also become like this. So based on two specifics in the definition,
“excessively” “does not reciprocate“
here’s how we’d suggest saving one-sided friendships while preserving enough self-respect to not be simping:
“Excessively”
Friendship always “costs” something from all parties involved, e.g. money, time, attention, energy to name a few. But we usually don’t feel the cost aspect because:
- The process (the journey) of putting in all these resources usually feels good
- Putting in is part of point, the point being the journey
- It shouldn’t cost ourselves that much to build or maintain a friendship
Therefore, if we’ve reached the state where we can actually feel the costs of the friendship, it’s usually statement 3 that’s false, i.e. we’re putting in “excessively” (if we felt that 1 or 2 was false, it would be very difficult to be friends with them in the first place). These costs to ourselves can look like (but aren’t limited to):
- Paying for the meal
- Meeting somewhere closer to them
- Texting them first + texting them more + our texts are longer
- Not being able to concentrate on work or life because we’re spending time ruminating on how our friend might not actually be our friend
Accommodating, or giving in, to their convenience is not inherently pathetic on our part, as there will always be situations where that is what a good friend in a healthy friendship would do.
But even in normal relationships, accommodating generally shouldn’t be that hard and it shouldn’t happen that often. There should also always be give and take in the relationship, and never “too much” giving or taking in a single direction, but only we get to decide how much is too much.
As we figure that out, one thing to consider is what’s really costing us.
Is it the resources we’re throwing at the friendship, or is it the pain of loneliness causing our existence crises?
Which is worse? Doing a little more to see them soon? Or not meet them for another 8 to infinite months? What’s the problem to solve? This might help us put things into perspective, better evaluate the cost-benefit of what we’re doing and give us a better idea of what we should do.
“Does not reciprocate”
There should be some investment from them to connect with us genuinely. Friendship, being conditional, necessitates that
friends invest in each other. There’s an unspoken exchange of value, most commonly known as “effort,”
but also could be money, time, attention, energy, etc. The amounts are supposed to be unclear and vague, so we assess them in feelings not numbers.
By the same token, friendships aren’t transactional. That’s why “investment” is different from “payoff,” “deliverables” or “goods and services rendered” seen in transactions. While the element of exchange, give and take, is a similarity between conditional and transactional, the differences that separates them are:
The Number
In scenarios where we trade favours or receive goods and services in exchange for handing over a number of dollars, that number makes it a transaction.
For example, when we:
- Pay $5-50 a month (as of 2023) for pictures of people and ego-boosting messages from them
- Pay $150 for 2 hours (as of 2021) of something that simulates participation, as in rental dates, Rent-a-girlfriend, schoolgirls, boyfriends, families,
- Ask someone to help us with 1x political favour, or get 1x project deals worth $100,000, etc. and we have to return the favour later down the road,
Would we call these people accepting favours for us, that we have later do favours for, our collaborators or friends? Are we’re paying our friends or vendors and associates? By extension, would our bosses refer to us as employees or friends?
“But if you said the bar is so low, and Tier D is good enough, can’t we be friends with all these people?” That’s indeed correct. It definitely helps to be on each other’s good side, which is very important in such business relationships– And that’s the key takeaway here:
- We can consider these people our friends if the recurring interaction condition is met, but they’ll never be purely a friend
- The number will always make them a business relationship
They can be both. There, that probably covers our industry network at large–people who are both friends and business relations, where we invest in it for a payoff sometimes.
The real question here is: which are they first? Would we refer to them as a business relationship first, or a friend? Conversely, that also means that people who started off as friends can turn more into business relationships. As always, nothing wrong with that, we find what works best for us to thrive without feeling a void in our heart.
The Act
“Ok, if the Number doesn’t clearly separate friendship and business by distinguishing investment from payoff, then what really does? What’s this elusive ‘investment’ that friendship is made of?”
Oh that’s simple, it’s:
going out to meet face to face, talking and listening to each other about what feels meaningful to us.
“Isn’t work meaningful?”
Yes, but the meaning side of work differs from the self-preservation side of work.
“Differs how?”
In the way that doing something we love and believe is good for the world feels different from doing something to be paid.
“So meeting in person to talk about something we enjoy and believe in is investment, that’s it?”
Yes, among other things like that. The bar is low, don’t get precious. This already answers that our friends would make time for us and that they actually like us.
”But can’t you pay for that?”
Not really, but let’s pretend that we can for a while to see where that takes us:
Investment would be them acting like a friend without us being able to tell that they don’t actually care about us, whereas payoff has zero doubt whatsoever that it’s all just an act.
Basically friendship, even fake ones, would still be about investment, not payoff. Investment would still be of higher value because the acting is better, and good acting requires more effort. Another way to put it is– if the con is that sophisticated, they earned it. It’s impressive, they can keep whatever they tricked us for.
The Harmony
From a business productivity standpoint, “synergy” is when the effect of combined action is greater than the sum of its parts.
Allow me to introduce “harmony” which is synergy but for friendships.
Yes I do see the irony having just talked about how friendships aren’t primarily instrumentalist because that would make it a business relationship, but let’s entertain this idea.
In House of Cards (S1E8), Frank uses this word “harmony” to describe the significance of his friends. He and his friends also happened to sing as a barbershop quartet so it was poetically referencing melodic harmony,
“It’s not about what’s lasting or permanent, it is about individual voices coming together, for a moment, and that moment lasts… the length of a breath.”
Francis J. Underwood
Yes I acknowledge it’s also ironic that Frank, the most manipulative and instrumentalist politician, can give legitimate wisdom on something organic like friendship, but it doesn’t mean there’s no truth to this.
Beyond just singing with our friends, harmony happens only when we’re in it together.
By interacting actively, effortfully, combining what we individually bring to the table, we affect each other in ways we couldn’t have developed on our own.
Personally, this distinction between investment and payoff is as good as it gets.
As we’ve said before, business-minded people have come up with ways to simulate and fake participation and effort (with rentals etc.). But if there is no harmony, no individual souls combining, resulting in no added value (the bar is low), then there is no friendship.
Recalling the movie trope where rich miserable men pay for escorts only to pour their hearts out, it’s what happens in that hour or so that separates just another transaction from genuine human connection. A one-sided sharing—just the man crying at the woman who looks bored—is miles apart from both opening up to share their problems and sincerely listening to each other. Only one scenario has individual voices coming together for the most fleeting of moments. That’s definitely investment.
Co-workers, not friends
We’d like to briefly come back to why people can interact often with each other and still never become friends, e.g. co-workers, classmates. It’s because of a lack of investment and harmony. In this case,
it’s not “we know each other,” it’s more like “we know of each other.”
(or of course it’s also possible someone’s being too snobby to realize the bar is low in front of our very eyes)
Some may have noticed by now that even though good quality friendships require investment, investment doesn’t always mean it’s a friendship. In the rich man-escort movie trope reference, meeting only once doesn’t fulfill even the first condition of a Tier D friend: recurring interaction.
(remember that this is also why people remain acquaintances that don’t graduate into friends—they don’t have enough interactions)
But such a scenario still contains the other conditions (openness, vulnerability) seen in better friendships, and those are good things to experience anyway.
Friends, not simping
Going back to being simps for our friends, we consider them friends in the first place because we’ve already had the recurring interactions over the course of our history. With Tier D already in place, by going out to meet face to face, talking and listening to each other about what feels meaningful to us, isn’t that a real friendship?
Focusing on the fact that they continue to show up and invest (time, attention, energy) every time we initiate is can be as much of a choice as feeling undermined and disrespected that they never initiate. We can examine if there’s still genuine human connection, and appreciate moments of harmony more with greater awareness.
Sure, one of us could be always initiating and the other never. Even if this friendship is still arguably “one-sided,” having both a shared history and continued investment in each other in the present proves that this friendship is not one-sided enough to meet the definition of “simping.” We’re actually friends.
— continued in What if we’ve lost faith in friendship? #9 —
For a friend,
Todd