Published on July 17, 2024 10:52 PM GMT
It feels a little icky to say, but we befriend people because we get something out of it. We enjoy the company, the conversation, the emotional support, the activities, the connection, etc. It's not a coincidence people don't befriend brick walls.
(The same is true in romantic relationships, except we expect even more.)
Granted, friendship is not an explicit transaction that's negotiated, quantified, legally enforceable, etc. It's fuzzy, which helps it work better for reasons I won't really get into here[1].
However it's crucial to recognize that if your friend (or partner) didn't provide or promise you some kind of value[2], you wouldn't have become friends in the first place.
And yet, people valorize the notion of loyalty in relationships: continuing to be there through thick and thin, good and bad, health and illness. "Unconditional friendship" and "unconditional love". Conversely "fair weather friendship" is denigrated.
People hope to be loved even if they were worms.
What gives? How do we reconcile friendships and relationships arising due to receiving some value with the aspiration or even expectation of unconditionality?
My model here is something akin functionally to mutual insurance. While I became your friend because we spent years playing basketball together, I stay by your side even when you're recovering from a broken leg, or even if you were injured so badly as to never play again. Someone initially enticed by their partner's beauty, stays with them even after a horrific burn to the face. I do this because I expect the same in return.
You might argue that in these cases, you're still receiving other benefits even when one of them is lost, but I argue back that we see ongoing care even where there's almost nothing left, e.g. people caring for their senile, bedridden partners. And more so, that we judge people who don't stick it out.
Friendship is standardly a straightforward exchange of value provided. It is also an exchange of insurance "if you're not able to provide value to me, I'll still provide value to you" and vice versa. Like the other stuff in friendship, it's fuzzy. The insurance exchange doesn't happen in a discrete moment and its strength is quantitative and expected to grow over time. People expect more "loyalty" from friends and partners of years than weeks.
In the limit, people reach "unconditional love", meaning something like from this point on, I will love you no matter what. However, reaching that willingness was very probably tied to specific conditional factors. It's notable that for many people love and security are connected. Sufficiently loving and supportive relationships provide security because they imply an unconditionality on circumstances – you'll have someone even if fortune befalls you and you lose what makes you appealing in the first place.
I think this makes sense. Seems like good game theoretic trade even with a willing partner. "Till death do us part." Possibly worth making a little more explicit though, just to be sure your friends and partners share whatever expectations of loyalty you have.
Note that I don't think this dynamic needs to be very conscious on anyone's part. I think that humans instinctively execute good game theory because evolution selected for it, even if the human executing just feels a wordless pull to that kind of behavior. In this context, "attachment to others" feels like a thing that humans and other animals experience. Parents, perhaps especially mothers, are very attached to their children (think of the mother bear), but we tend to form attachments to anyone (or thing) that we're persistently around. When I stick with my friend of many years through his illness, it might feel like, or actually be mediated, by my feelings of attachment.
My claim here is that forming unconditional attachments as a behavior makes sense for insurance-like game theoretic reasons, and that explains why us humans are so into them.
Here's wishing everyone lots of both strong relationships that'd pay out handsomely and also that they never need file a claim. ;)
- ^
One major reason is doing more precise accounting in relationships would be prohibitively effortful. Another is that such accounting is antithetical to the spirit of generosity and altruism we aim for in non-professional relationships. The vibe of counting value exchange precisely pushes against the vibe of unconditional, or less conditional, caring that we want friendship to tend towards. Lastly, I think there is something of a "polite pretending" that relationships aren't transcantional, since that makes them feel more secure, allows room for useful plausible deniability, and other fancy social games.
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The kinds of value provided by relationships are very diverse. Naturally you've got engaging in shared interests, emotional support, physical support, collaboration, physical intimacy; but there are also less overt forms of value gained from relationships like having a sense of being a good person because I take care of you, even though ostensibly I'm giving, or valuing the association with a person, or even misplaced feelings of security from the ongoing presence of an abusive partner.
Discuss
