thebrownjomarch

Klimt, Gustav. Women Friends (The Girlfriends). 1916–1917, oil on canvas. Originally held at Galerie Welz, Salzburg (Destroyed by fire in 1945)

Over the last few years, social media has developed a new topic to obsess over. And of course it is something to do with romantic partnerships. The topic? 

What is the “bare minimum” in romantic relationships? 

Almost every act of affection is now up for evaluation, Is this something a good partner should be expected to do as the “bare minimum” or is it an exceptional gesture worthy of being called “princess treatment”?

Unsurprisingly, no one seems to agree on where that line is. The conversation routinely spirals into debates and think-pieces bringing up other topics like feminism, gender wars, class, money, in the context of what people should reasonably expect from a partner. For some, “it’s the thought that counts” is enough to be considered more than the bare minimum. For others, good intentions are only the starting point.

But I’m not particularly interested in settling whether a man buying flowers or a woman baking banana bread qualifies as the bare minimum or princess treatment.

I’m interested in a version of this conversation that we seem to have far less often,

What is the bare minimum in our friendships?

Because somewhere along the way, while we became increasingly vigilant about what we should and should not tolerate from romantic partners, our standards for friendship seem to have been neglected or deemed less important.

The internet has fundamentally changed how we navigate relationships. We live in an age of uninterrupted access to one another, where practically anyone can reach us at any moment. Ironically, instant communication has not necessarily made us better communicators. If anything, being constantly accessible has made many of us fiercely protective of our time, energy, and attention.

While some of that is necessary, unfortunately it has also resulted in our friendships to become collateral damage.

There is a kind of “businessification” happening to our friendships, where even ordinary acts of care are increasingly being filtered through one question: Am I getting anything out of this?

Giving a friend a ride to the airport becomes a burden. Helping someone move becomes an unreasonable request. Showing up to a birthday when you would rather stay home becomes protecting your peace. Even one of the barest minimums of friendship, sitting with someone you care about and listening without immediately judging, fixing, or centering yourself has started to be seen as an unfair demand on your emotional health.

I started thinking about this after seeing this one conversation online about whether it is acceptable to tell your romantic partner a friend’s secrets. I was surprised by how overwhelmingly people seemed to defend it, usually with one of two explanations.

The first being: “My partner and I don’t keep secrets from each other.”

Except there is one fairly obvious problem with that argument: it isn’t your secret.

And this is where basic discernment should come in. We have lost the ability to critically think and separate which information is probably sensitive information irrelevant to your relationship vs which is sensitive still yet may have some impact on your relationship vs which information is something your friend wouldn’t mind being talked about. 

Your friend telling you about an embarrassing but harmless experience probably does not belong in the same category as your friend losing their job and asking you not to tell anyone. And neither is necessarily equivalent to discovering that your friend is actively betraying their partner. The last example could reasonably become relevant to your own relationship if, for instance, it raises questions about what your partner considers morally acceptable.

These situations are different. They require judgment, context, and emotional intelligence.

The increasing need to create one sweeping rule that can be applied to every uniquely complicated human situation, rather than developing the discernment necessary to tell those situations apart, might itself belong somewhere in the larger conversation about our literacy crisis.

But it is the second justification that bothers me far more:

“Keeping my friend’s secret is too overwhelming for my mental health, so I need to tell my partner.”

There is something deeply unsettling about watching the language of mental health be weaponized in such a selfish way to center ourselves during someone else’s crisis.

If your friend is going through something life-altering and chooses you as one of the few people they trust enough to tell, why is our first instinct increasingly to ask how carrying that knowledge affects us? At what point did being trusted become an emotional burden rather than one of the privileges of intimacy?

Sometimes friendship requires carrying something that is not about you.

Sometimes it means listening when you would rather talk. Sometimes it means being inconvenienced. Sometimes it means holding someone’s confidence even when the information is uncomfortable. Sometimes the most basic act of friendship is simply being there.

And this “businessification” extends far beyond secrets.

We increasingly cannot attend a friend’s birthday because we simply “don’t feel like it.” Cold-calling a friend has somehow become socially unacceptable because calling without warning is considered intrusive. Minor disagreements, not disagreements over human rights or fundamental moral values, but ordinary interpersonal differences, are quickly interpreted through the language of toxicity, narcissism, boundaries, red flags, or some variety of “-ism.”

We have also developed a strange tendency to interpret criticism from friends as jealousy. A friend questioning your relationship, your behavior, or a decision you are making is not necessarily bitter, projecting, or a secret desire to witness your downfall. Sometimes they simply think you are making a bad choice, and caring about someone occasionally means telling them things they do not want to hear.

Perhaps part of the problem is that we have become accustomed to seeing ourselves as the main character of a television show, with everyone else relegated to supporting roles. Friends are expected to validate our choices, celebrate us, take our side, and remain conveniently silent when they disagree. But our friends are not supporting characters in our lives. They are people with their own judgment and values, and friendship does not require them to surrender either.

Treating every disagreement as betrayal and every criticism as jealousy is not self-protection, sometimes it is simply being self-absorbed. A good friend does not owe you unconditional approval. Sometimes one of the most valuable things a friend can offer is the willingness to tell you that you might be wrong.

A friend annoys you, disappoints you, or misunderstands you, and instead of having an uncomfortable conversation, the response becomes a strategically vague Instagram story or a suspiciously well-timed repost about.

We spent years encouraging people to recognize genuinely harmful relationships and become comfortable walking away from them. That was necessary. But the pendulum has swung so far that we sometimes seem to be placing perfectly ordinary human relationships under the same guillotine. Expecting perfection from a notoriously fallible species is almost comically unrealistic.

And this is usually where the “bean soup” arguments arrive: the internet phenomenon where someone responds to a general point by inventing an increasingly specific exception to it.

What if my friend never listens?

What if I am constantly supporting someone who refuses to change their situation and it’s putting me in potential danger too?

What if I am always showing up for them and they never show up for me?

These are valid questions. But part of adulthood is learning to recognize the difference between sacrifice and exploitation. We should be able to notice when a friendship has become chronically one-sided. We should be able to recognize when supporting someone is destroying our own well-being. If a friend repeatedly chooses to remain in a dangerous or abusive situation and supporting them begins to place you in danger as well, removing yourself may become necessary.

There will always be exceptions. There will always be relationships that need to end.

But the existence of unhealthy friendships does not mean we need to dilute the covenant of healthy ones.

Yes, you owe your friends understanding.

You owe them grace.

You owe them the dignity of considering their advice and concerns, even when those concerns are uncomfortable or delivered more bluntly than you would prefer.

You owe them presence.

And perhaps most importantly, you owe yourself enough self-awareness to distinguish between protecting your mental health and simply being selfish. Unfortunately we have blurred the lines too far.

Of course, none of this means everyone is required to build their life around a large circle of friends. If you genuinely prefer living without a community or “village,” that is your choice. But human beings have relied on communities for most of our existence.

And for most people, a romantic partner, and even a partner and children, cannot entirely replace that community. Expecting one person to fulfill every emotional, intellectual, social, and relational need you have, sounds unsustainable even in theory.

Friendships are not content.

They do not exist to aestheticize your Instagram story highlights so everyone else can see how exciting and socially fulfilled your life is. They are not ammunition for frankly silly gender-war arguments about whether men or women have more authentic friendships.

Friendships do not need to prove a point.

In some ways, friendship is one of the strangest and purest relationships we have. Unlike family, it is not held together by blood. Unlike marriage, it is not formalized by a legal contract. There is often no external obligation keeping two friends in each other’s lives.

You simply keep choosing each other.

You show up because you care. You listen because you care. You keep their confidence because you care. You tolerate some inconvenience, forgive some mistakes, have some uncomfortable conversations, and occasionally do things you do not particularly feel like doing because this person matters to you.

There does not always need to be a grand return on investment.

Sometimes the return is simply that you have a friend, and they have one in you.

Social media has spent years encouraging us to examine our romantic relationships and ask whether we are settling for the bare minimum.

Maybe we should turn the question around once in a while,

Am I giving my friends the bare minimum?