Competition on career and family goals can be fierce, especially among women.
In our society, women are more encouraged to compete than to care for one another. We come of age watching movies like Mean Girls, nodding along to the astutely written commentary on what it means to be women of integrity, intelligence, and intrigue while living in a world that says you can only can be one at a time.
So when my college friend laid out her carefully crafted plans one late night of studying, my first reaction was to become defensive.
I thought about how ridiculous it was for her to plan out the A, B, C, and even D of life. How could she count on getting into an Ivy League grad school (A), then marrying her college sweetheart (B), then having her husband toil in a lucrative career to pay back her loans (C), and finally having 5 kids while blazing ahead in her career (D)? Her only contingency plan was that maybe, just maybe and only if she really wanted to, would she cut back and write professionally on the side.
Even before Anne-Marie Slaughter’s article on “having it all” became the most read article in the history of The Atlantic, we were talking about what it means to achieve our goals as scholars, businesswomen, women, and potential future wives and mothers.
When I become defensive, I resort to critical reasoning.
In less favorable terms, that means rationalizing the pick-their-argument-to-pieces-apart method of feeling good about myself. I refer back to the logical fallacies they’ve included in their plan or how their vision isn’t viable because of reasons X, Y, and Z.
But who says that one person’s plan for A, B, and C in their life is less worthy of respect than my reasoned argument of X, Y, and Z?
After all, defensiveness almost never stops at critical reasoning or whatever other coping mechanism I choose. Defensiveness nearly instantly begins to seep into my soul, poisoning the other’s dreams – however naive they may be – into a wedge in the friendship. I drove more of a stake than a wedge into the heart of our friendship when I scoffed at my friend’s confident plans for her life, even though I still believe they are foolish.
As a friend, my job wasn’t to carefully critique my friend’s plans for life after college. My job was to listen.
To ask questions. To affirm her worth and purpose regardless of what curveballs life threw after college in her relationships and career. And most of all, my job was to allow her to make her own mistakes and learn from her own misfortunes, not for me to call them out presumptively for her.
I acted defensively to her life plans because I wanted many of the same things, but called them something else—dreams.
In my mind, plans are strategic guidelines for achieving concrete goals along a set timeline. As a strategist and planner, I think through all the possible outcomes and choose the optimal one to work toward. I sift through data and creative innovations to forsee potential barriers to moving these plans ahead. Plans are simply different from dreams from my perspective.
But I also acted defensively because I know the pain of unmet expectations in marriage and career, and I wanted to spare her from it.
I know the ache of the days passing away, each nightfall signaling another day of waiting with no sign of relief. I have heard the muzzled cry of unanswered prayers and untenable stress. I know the sense of your earth crumbling, of the walls you’ve constructed to support your dream life turning out to be nothing more than toothpicks snapping underneath a heavy concrete layer of disappointment.
In following the footsteps of Christ, we are taught to bear one another’s burdens. For too many years, I thought that meant carrying the weight of friends’ mistakes and pain on my shoulders. I treated it as my job to protect them from the suffering of life not working out how we think it would—and it never works out how we think it would.
Following the footsteps of Christ in our friendships is more about listening than telling.
It is about empathy, not answers to life’s hardest questions. It is about holding one another’s hands through disappointments, not reasoning why something did or didn’t happen. And it’s about a radical love that allows friends to be who they truly are, mistakes and misfortunes and milestones and all.
Photo Credit: Ansel Edwards Photography’s…, Creative Commons