Witnessing
Not everything in life needs to be explained with logic.
I started writing this 2 weeks ago when I was in Bali for a close friend's wedding. I was at the beach, adrift in saltwater, when a question surfaced in my mind: what is friendship for?
To talk about friendship and relationships in general is to try and make sense of the difference between allowing, accepting, and witnessing.
Parenting, as most of us likely know it (including our parents themselves), is a lot of allowing and accepting. Allowing always contains some degree of reluctance, and it begins when parents realise how little control they really have over what their children do or who they become. If we are lucky, this matures into acceptance—"Fine, this is who you are, and I accept that."
Acceptance approximates love because it implies an embracing of wholeness. For instance, you are rarely just accepting someone else's behaviour, you often have to concurrently accept your own part in it, that this person behaved in a way that you did not want them to.
Romantic love is a lot of early witnessing that gradually settles into an ongoing negotiation between accepting and allowing. We go from, "Wow you are amazing, I want to be around you all the time," to the back and forth between "I don't know why you're like this but I accept it because I love you," and "I would rather you not do that but we love each other/are married so fine, I'll allow it."
This is the arc of love that we don't talk about as much. I had a separate reflection on this recently: in love we seek safety and security, and in finding it we can begin to settle into a kind of self-forgetting, where there's no longer an urgency to strive, grow, impress, and in each other's eyes we become a little less radiant.
I'm not saying this happens all the time, but I do see it a lot, and I hear it a lot in the stories others share with me in confidence.
Romantic partnership, on the other hand, is mostly accepting and witnessing. To use some of today's popular parlance—if romantic love is the pursuit and/or failure of attachment, then partnership is what I like to think of as a more spiritual assignment.
Love is, by its very nature, self-referencing. Partnership, on the other hand, is other-referencing. And I don't just mean this in the sense of 'other people', but also that it looks outwards; beyond.
It aspires towards a future ideal, and is devoted to transformation as an enduring constant, recognising that our lives will change and we will likely become very different people, but it is better when we do it together. It is concerned only with the journey, and not necessarily with arriving.
Friendship, true friendship, in my opinion, is the purest form of this. It is pure witnessing—what the poet and activist Andrea Gibson describes as constantly seeing the people you know as mysteries, which to me means never assuming you know everything about them, being committed to the ever-ongoing process of their gradual unfolding, and therefore greeting every interaction with forgiveness and curiosity.
Witnessing then, must be a kind of letting go. It is saying, "I never expected anything of you to begin with. Wow, I never knew that about you. That is so interesting. Tell me more. Do you want to get coffee?"
It is saying and doing that over and over again until one of us dies.
"Because at some point, sooner than you would wish, life will turn into a catastrophe. People you love will die. You will get chronically ill. There will be violence. And at that point, you might not make it unless you can generate this kind of generous love that connects you to the world and gives it meaning."
— Henrik Karlsson, Escaping Flatland
Witnessing reminds me that so much of our lives can be lived in a state of tension. Where everything we do carries with it an unconscious fixation on optimal outcomes—is it going to be this or that? Will it work or not? Am I going to fail or succeed?
This is why parental and romantic relationships often feel so high stakes. There is always an underlying fear—if I do this/ask for this, will I be validated or rejected? Will I still be loved or will my significance in this person's life begin to diminish?
In friendship we hope we never have to ask or even contemplate these questions. We are safe in the knowledge that we can show up imperfectly.
So I am adrift in the ocean, and eventually I realise that to ask this question—what is friendship for?—is to assume that all things in life can be quantified in some way. As though all things can be isolated, assigned a value, and then judged on its merit of whether it is worth fighting for.
After all, if something cannot be quantified, why pursue it?
Yet I think this is precisely the point. It is not wrong for me to say that if I'm alone, I do not need to coordinate plans, and I do not need to account for the needs of others. This is good, and there are days when I will both want and need to live like this.
But friendship reminds me that I do not always need a good reason.
I just know that there are people with whom, like when I'm out at sea, I feel peaceful, honest, and connected; I feel fully human and alive. Is that not enough?
And the truth is, like my friends always say, "When we have more people, we can order more food."
Announcements
Coincidentally, my friend Ee Chien and I are running a paid event at the end of December, loosely themed around the topic of building and sustaining friendships in adulthood. This run is specifically catered to guys, so if you or someone you know might be interested, please don’t hesitate to drop me a note and I’ll reserve you a spot. We are finalising details and will be doing a public launch very soon.
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See you at the next one 👋🏻
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