There is a particular kind of adult, more common than the wider culture has registered, who is by every external measure pleasant, kind, and reliable, who has built a wide network of warm acquaintances across decades of adult life, and who, on close examination of who they would actually call in a crisis at three in the morning, would find the set considerably smaller than the wider network would suggest.
The cultural framing of this configuration tends to read it as a failure on the adult’s part. They have not, the framing suggests, done the work of building real friendships. They have prioritized breadth over depth. They have been, in some real way, socially lazy.
The framing misses, on close examination, what most of these adults have actually been doing. They have not been prioritizing breadth over depth. They have been, more accurately, the people other adults call during their own crises, across decades, without the calls ever reversing direction. The pattern is not, in most cases, a feature of choice. The pattern is, more accurately, a structural feature of having been a particular kind of available person for a long enough period that the wider environment has calibrated itself to using their availability without ever quite registering that the availability was not, on any honest accounting, reciprocal.
What the pattern actually looks like, across decades
The pattern begins, in most cases, in adolescence or early adulthood. The person displays, by some combination of temperament and accumulated childhood training, a particular kind of reliability under pressure. They are the friend who picks up at two in the morning when someone is in trouble. They are the colleague who stays late to help with the difficult project. They are the relative who flies to the funeral, the cousin who organizes the family arrangements, the friend who sits in the hospital waiting room with the spouse whose marriage is collapsing.
The displaying is, in their early years, often gratifying. Other people respond well to the displaying. The person receives, in exchange for the reliability, considerable warmth, gratitude, and the various small markers of being a valued presence in other people’s lives. The exchange seems, in the early years, balanced. The person does not, in most cases, particularly notice that the exchange has a structural asymmetry.
The asymmetry becomes visible slowly. Across the decades, the person continues to do the reliability work. They continue to receive the calls during the crises. They continue to provide whatever was being asked for. And then, in the various periods of their own lives when they have been the one in crisis, they have noticed something that took them, in most cases, considerable time to articulate. The calls have not reversed.
The reversal failure is rarely dramatic. The other people are not, in most cases, refusing to help. The other people are, more accurately, not appearing to notice that the person who has been carrying their crises has now developed a crisis of her own. The various friends and family members continue to interact with her in the warm, comfortable manner that the decades of her reliability have established as the default. The default does not, on close examination, include the structural availability she has been providing them. The default includes, more specifically, the assumption that she is fine, because she has been fine for so long that being fine has become part of the wider environment’s working model of who she is.
What has actually happened, structurally
It is worth being precise about what has happened, structurally, because the wider register has not, on the available evidence, developed particularly good language for it.
The reliability the person has been providing is, in some real way, a particular kind of one-way social capital. The capital flows from her to the other adults in her life. The capital does not, in most cases, generate any reciprocal flow that would be available to her in her own crises. The asymmetry is not the result of bad faith on anyone’s part. The asymmetry is, more accurately, the structural feature of how relationships of this kind develop over time.
The relationships develop with the reliable person occupying the structural role of the giver. The other adults develop, by long habit, the structural role of the receiver. The roles, once established, become difficult to reverse. The receiver does not have, by any accumulated practice, the structural capacity to register that the giver is now in a position of needing to receive. The receiver has been operating, for decades, on the implicit model that the giver is structurally fine and does not require the kind of attention the receiver has been receiving. The implicit model is durable. The implicit model survives, in most cases, even when the giver is visibly not fine.
The visibility, on close examination, is not the issue. The issue is that the wider environment has calibrated its attention to the giver’s structural role rather than to her actual state. The actual state, however bad it gets, does not, in most cases, override the calibration. The calibration is what produces the absence of calls in the reverse direction. The absence is not, in most cases, deliberate neglect. The absence is, more accurately, the structural product of relationships that have, across decades, been organized around an asymmetry that none of the participants has explicitly articulated.
The moment the reliable person actually notices
The moment of noticing tends to occur, in the cases I have observed and that the wider research literature has documented, somewhere in midlife. The person has had, by this point, enough of her own crises that the absence of reciprocal calls has accumulated into a pattern she can no longer fail to register. The noticing is, in most cases, not dramatic. The noticing is, more accurately, a particular kind of quiet recognition that the wider register has not yet given good language to.
The recognition is that the warmth she has been receiving from the wider environment is real but is not, in any structural sense, the same thing as the substantive friendship she has been providing. The warmth is calibrated to her continued occupation of the structural role of the giver. The warmth is not calibrated to her actual existence as a person who occasionally also has needs. The warmth is sufficient for the wider environment’s purposes. The warmth is not sufficient for her own.
This recognition is, in some real way, the source of the particular kind of loneliness the wider register has noticed in adults who are otherwise warmly connected to many people. The loneliness is not the loneliness of having no one to talk to. The loneliness is, more specifically, the loneliness of having many people to talk to about other people’s problems, and not having, in the same set of people, anyone particularly available to engage with one’s own. The structural absence of the second kind of engagement is what produces, across decades, the quiet exhaustion that the reliable person carries underneath her continued reliability.
Why the configuration is so hard to change
The honest acknowledgment is that the configuration is, once established, considerably harder to change than the standard self-help framing tends to imply. The reasons are worth examining.
The first reason is that the wider environment has, by long habit, organized its relationships with the reliable person around her structural role. Changing the configuration would require the wider environment to reorganize its relationships with her, which would require it to register the asymmetry that the configuration has been hiding. The reorganization is uncomfortable. The wider environment, in most cases, resists it.
The second reason is that the reliable person has, by the same long habit, developed considerable identity investment in being the kind of person who shows up for others. The identity is real. The identity is also, on close examination, part of what produces the continued reliability even when the reliability is no longer being reciprocated. Changing the configuration would require the reliable person to relax her commitment to the identity, at least partially, which would require her to live with the temporary social cost of no longer being, in every situation, the person other people can count on.
The third reason is that the alternative configuration, in which the reliable person becomes more selective about whose crises she shows up for, requires her to develop social skills that, in most cases, the decades of being the giver have not given her practice in. She has to learn how to ask for help. She has to learn how to say no to requests for her own help. She has to learn how to identify which of the people in her wider network are actually capable of reciprocal substantive relationship and which are not. The learning is not, on the available evidence, trivial. The learning takes, in most cases, several years.
What the work actually involves
The work, when it gets done, involves a particular kind of slow, deliberate recalibration of the reliable person’s social investments. The recalibration is not, in most cases, a wholesale rejection of the wider network. The recalibration is, more accurately, the slow process of identifying, within the wider network, the small number of relationships that have, by accident of temperament or circumstance, demonstrated some capacity for reciprocal engagement, and investing more deliberately in those.
The small number, in most cases, is genuinely small. Three or four people across an entire wider network is, on the available evidence, a typical result. The reliable person who has been pleasant to two hundred people over decades will find, in most cases, that three or four of them are actually capable of being the kind of friend she has been being to them. The three or four are, in some real way, who the reliable person should have been investing in all along. The other one hundred and ninety-six are, more accurately, warm acquaintances who have been benefiting from her reliability without ever quite developing the capacity to reciprocate.
The investing is small. The investing involves the various practices the reliable person has been performing for others for decades, now redirected toward the small number of people who can receive them as the contributions they actually are. The receiving is, in most cases, gratifying for both parties in a way the previous wider distribution had structurally prevented.
The acknowledgment this article wants to leave
The pleasant, kind, reliable adult who has, on close examination, no close friends despite a wide warm network is not, in most cases, the result of any personal failure to invest in relationships. The configuration is, more accurately, the structural product of having been a particular kind of available person for long enough that the wider environment has calibrated itself to her availability without ever developing the capacity to reciprocate.
The calls have not reversed. The not-reversing is not, in most cases, anyone’s deliberate choice. The not-reversing is the structural feature of relationships that have been organized, by long habit, around an asymmetry the wider environment has not registered.
The recognition of the asymmetry is, in some real way, the first piece of work the reliable person needs to do in order to begin building the kinds of substantive relationships she has been providing to other people for decades. The recognition is uncomfortable. The recognition is also, on the available evidence, the only honest starting point. The starting from there is what the rest of her adult life, lived more honestly, gets to be built around. The building is small. The building is, in some real way, what most of the visible relational substance of older adults who have done this work is structurally produced by. The doing of it is, modestly, available to anyone who has been carrying the asymmetry long enough to have, finally, noticed.
