Sans Fig Leaf

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"About the balance"

25 April, 2003

I don't remember how I met Dan. He just seemed to materialize among some of my acquaintences at community college one day. Soon he had grafted himself onto my primary social group, though he never fit in. He loved to play pinochle, but he played it extremely badly. No matter how bad the cards dealt to him were, he would always, always bid up to the exact same number. No matter how many dozens of times people would bid him to his limit and then dump it on him, he was be completely flabbergasted that you had dropped out, leaving him to shoot for a bid that he couldn't make. He never seemed to understand the balance between risk and caution.

He saw every conversation as a contest in one-upmanship. If you mentioned that you had a big test to study for, he suddenly had three to study for. If you said you read a really good book, he immediately had to tell you about two books that he thought were better. After I was run off the road on my bicycle by a guy in a pickup--getting battered, bruised, scraped, and chipping a couple of teeth--Dan had to tell me about the time he was nearly killed while on a hunting trip. While the story about an idiot who had modified a hunting rifle to fire fully automatic was amusing, I wasn't in the mood to be amused. Conversations with him were either annoying or tiring or both, because he never understood the balance between listening and sharing.

Eventually we all wandered out of Dan's life. We all moved on to other things. Some of us moved away. Some of us found new jobs.

One of our friends who still lived in that community several years later told me about running into Dan one day. The friend was going to the community college library to see if they had a book he hadn't been able to find at the public library. Dan was walking out of the library heading for the parking lot. My friend said that for a moment he felt like he was in a Twilight Zone episode. The whole world had changed, but not Dan. He was still taking odd classes at the community college, still driving the same old beat-up Travelall, still playing the conversational one-upmanship game. During the course of their short conversation, he apparently mentioned about five separate groups of friends he had met and spent a lot of time hanging out with since we had last seen him.

I felt a little odd when I heard the story. I was sad that Dan seemed to be frittering away his life. I was relieved that I had avoided his fate. I felt grateful for my many wonderful friends. I felt guilty for feeling all of those other things. I worried that I wasn't as different from him as I thought.

It's easy to focus on someone else's imperfections and ignore our own. We can stack up their failings against our successes and prove to ourselves that we're the better person. It's far more productive to look at our own negative and positive attributes and ask ourselves how we can make ourselves better tomorrow than we are today.

We also have to keep in mind that many annoying habits are just useful behaviors out of balance. For example: there's a fine line between commisseration and one-upmanship. When a friend tells us something, it may remind us of something similar that happened to us. It only seems natural, under some circumstances, to share the story for our friend's amusement. The problem is that sometimes what the friend needs isn't amusement. They may need sympathy, advice, or even validation, but we're too busy trying to entertain them to actually be a friend. Sometimes we aren't even trying to entertain them as much as entertain ourselves. We take their attention as validation of our coolness.

Nobody wants to be in the audience all the time. We want our friendships to be mutual, where each person gives and receives support and acceptance. That means being willing to give that support and acceptance to others, as well as being willing to accept it.

Sometimes that does mean sharing a similar experience to amuse our friend. Sometimes it means holding our tongues and listening with a sympathetic ear.

Knowing the difference requires caring more about what your friend feels than how he or she makes you feel.