My relationship to relationships: thoughts on friendship & justice

“You don’t have to like the person to support the movement."

At the risk of sounding overly confident, I like making friends and I’m good at it. I have two settings: best friend, see you at my wedding, tell you every detail of my life, or I don’t fuck with you. I don’t know how to be in relationship with people I’m not close with, but I’m working on it, especially when it comes to work around a particular struggle for justice. Over the years, my relationship to relationships has shifted as I’ve grown and learned that we all have different understandings of relationships, friendships, boundaries and authenticity.

In 2019, I had a colleague transition at work. As part of our queer caucus, and one of the most vocally out lesbians on staff at the time, they explicitly asked me to be there for emotional support. We spoke regularly about how they were doing, I came to the lunch where they came out to our shared supervisor, and the queer caucus compiled a list of resources for staff to educate themselves on trans rights.

As time went on, I realized that even though we spoke daily at the office and I cared about their wellbeing, I didn’t want to be friends with them. I hadn’t been particularly close to them prior, but being part of an emotionally vulnerable experience together created a false sense of closeness. Not being their friend didn’t mean I wasn’t going to be part of the support team, educate other colleagues on trans rights in the workforce, or do everything I could to support trans rights at work.

Supporting trans rights and fighting for gender justice makes the office a better place for everyone – this I know because I subscribe to Charlene Carruthers’ Black Queer Feminism. It dictates that if we center the needs of Black queer women, we’ll free everyone. In Disability rights/justice spaces, a related concept is called Universal Design. It wasn’t about my interpersonal relationship with this one person, and it wasn’t even just about them having access to a bathroom, for example. Workplaces shouldn’t have to have an out trans person on staff to create trans-friendly policies, and I can fight for this even when I'm not best friends with the one openly trans person on staff.

Maybe this sounds obvious to you. To me, it was a learning process, not around supporting trans rights (which you should do, and this letter is not meant to focus on) as much as giving myself permission to not be friends with this one individual while showing up for them fully.

I love people. I am curious, extroverted, and I’ve long said that my favorite trait about myself is my strength at keeping in touch with my people (last year notwithstanding - hi, friends, it’s been rough). I believe that when someone is on your mind, you should always let them know. I’m not picky and my base level is to try to befriend everyone.

When I moved to DC at 22, it was my first time leaving my hometown. When I went “away” to college, my zip code changed from 48104 to 48107. While I made lots of new friends, I always had friends from my hometown to fall back on. In DC, I had a handful of friends in the city already from previous lives, but between working a predominately remote job that was very easy (fundraising for an incumbent Democratic senator in a Democrat state running unopposed), and being in a new environment, I felt very lonely. I spent a lot of energy befriending roommates who were not a good fit for my friendship. It was very liberating once I let go of that desire for closeness.

I eventually built the community I have today - through a mix of friends of friends, a now-defunct women’s network, and finding an in-person office job. I’ve joked that I’m addicted to making friends, and there was a time through my 20s when I found myself making more friends than I could handle to compensate for the loneliness I felt when I first arrived in the city. Even when I found solid friendships, I still went overboard on the social engagements and new people.

There is a fine line between a desire to build genuine friendships and a fear of being disliked. I know I want people to like me. My fiancée frequently points out to me when she sees me struggling to get someone to like me who I don’t even particularly care for. I’m in a process of letting that go. I’ve heard you stop caring what people think in your 30s, but after starting therapy, I realized that how you get to the emotional freedom of your 30s is due to internal work you do in your 20s. What a scam!

As part of DEI and racial equity work, a lot of what we hear about is “bringing our full selves to work.” I’ve always felt that I could bring my full self to work, likely because in many ways, work was built for me. I’m college educated (as are my parents and grandparents), white, cis, ablebodied, Christian, the list goes on. While I’ve experienced my fair share of sexism in the form of underestimation of my ability and been on the receiving end of homophobic comments, they’ve been minimal. The worst experience was a colleague asking inappropriate and invasive questions of my partner at a work holiday party while I was not present. While it's not my story to tell, I can’t help but wonder if the white woman who made these remarks felt more empowered to be homophobic towards my partner given that she’s a Black woman. Intersectionality matters.

When I was 23, my then-girlfriend now-fiancée told me that she was raised not to make friends at work. The office culture I was in at the time was very social. She told me, “my mom always said she wouldn’t be friends with anyone at her office because they’d use their friendship against her.” It sounds obvious to me now, but at the time was a real shift in my understanding in terms of how I interacted with work “friend” culture as a white woman vs. how she and many of my colleagues of color, particularly Black Americans, interacted. This is why when I hear white people talking about their Black friend they know through work, I’ve learned that who a white person considers their friend may sometimes (not always!) just be a Black person trying to exist safely in a predominately white corporate environment.

What does it mean to bring your full self to work when you were raised not to? Some of our conversations at the office now talk about how part of bringing your full self to work means boundaries. It means that when people ask you why you’re not spending the holidays with your partner’s family, you don’t have to answer. It means people don’t owe you their hobbies at work. Remote office culture has made this even more challenging as we’re all in each other’s homes daily. Showing up with boundaries is showing up as you are, even if we don't know you as well because of it.

“You don’t have to like the person to support the movement” is something I said that started out as office gossip but tells an important truth: we can be in an authentic relationship with one another without friendship, and we can fight together for justice. This is definitely something I’ve learned from following movement organizers on social media. And I don’t yet know how to do that. Perhaps as I continuously let go of being likeable, I’ll be more comfortable. As I grow in my ability to set boundaries, I can let go of the fear of coming across rude when I’ve decided not to pursue a friendship.

Another part of DEI work is intentionally pushing back on white dominant norms like perfectionism. To be candid, I’m trying to do this by sending out this letter in such a messy state. I started the newsletter to improve my writing craft and I’m not happy with the flow or the there there in today’s letter. I’m afraid of coming across like I don’t want to be your friend. I’m a work in progress, and trying to avoid tying things up with a bow.  

P.S. The intention of this newsletter was to discuss friendship, not trans rights in the workplace, but I’d be remiss how trans people - specifically trans youth - and the LGBTQ community as a whole are facing serious legislative attacks. I recommend this post from Chase Strangio on actions you can take and you can donate to Trans Lifeline here.

P.P.S. Thank you to Ellen and Katie for your help shaping and copyediting today’s newsletter. All typos and thoughts my own