we have forgotten how to be kind
postcard 19: on transactional friendships, therapy speak, and being a good person
And I love that about humanity, and in fact it's the very reason I root for us to survive—because we are so stupid about each other.
prelude
Anne always remembered the silvery, peaceful beauty and fragrant calm of that night. It was the last night before sorrow touched her life; and no life is ever quite the same again when once that cold, sanctifying touch has been laid upon it.
—Anne of Green Gables, L.M Montgomery
A few weeks ago, I came across a Tiktok of a woman explaining that she was ‘quiet quitting’ a friendship. Quiet quitting is a term that originally applied to jobs, about when employees check out mentally from their jobs and do the minimum amount of work. ‘Quiet quitting’ a friendship means that they are emotionally disengaging from their friend in hopes that the friendship will run its course without direct confrontation. In essence, quiet quitting is synonymous with ‘ghosting’, just packaged differently.
It is completely natural to slowly stop being friends with someone. A friendship does not have to implode horribly or have a heated confrontation for it to end. It can simply end because you don’t have many things in common anymore between the two of you. Once you are not in the same place anymore, both physically and also in life, it is sometimes difficult to maintain a friendship with someone. And that is fine, because such is the course of growing up.
Quiet quitting, on the other hand, feels like a calculated term. There are a million reasons why someone is justified in leaving a friendship or attempting to distance themselves from someone. Maybe they have already had this conversation time and again and don’t see that friend changing. Maybe they feel exhausted and mentally drained by their friend’s behavior.
However, these buzzwords often metastasize into something that it is not. It seems like many people are using the phrase as a copout to leave a friendship for an unexplained reason with no closure for the other person. Of course, if a friend is extremely toxic and is truly causing you distress, I think that you should not be obligated to confront them (unless you want to). But when the rift in friendship boils down to miscommunication or simply one or two elements of being upset, it is sometimes wholly worth having a mature discussion about it as well.