A FRIEND IN NEED
Real friendship a complex matter predicated on many factors
Friendship is about giving and receiving, but just how far would you go for a friend? A part of your liver? Would you give a kidney?
Selena Gomez’s longtime BFF gave her the gift of life — she received a kidney transplant this past summer from actress Francia Raisa. Gomez, who suffers from lupus, recently posted the two holding hands in side-by-side hospital beds and wrote: “She gave me the ultimate gift and sacrifice by donating her kidney to me. I am incredibly blessed. I love you so much sis.”
That’s what friends are for! Or is it? While this was an incredibly generous, caring act, “not everyone can do something like this, and the truth is, not everyone should,” says Diane Barth, psychotherapist and author of the upcoming book I Know How You Feel: The Joy and Heartbreak of Friendships in Women’s Lives.
“Donating a kidney or any organ is an extremely complex decision, and I worry that the media — and technology — are not addressing all of the complexity involved.”
Barth also worries that many people are coming away from this with the idea that real friendship involves what could be a potential sacrifice of one’s own health or well-being. “Real friendship seldom requires that kind of selfsacrifice.”
She recounts one story about a young mother pregnant with her second child and her best friend was seriously ill.
“She wanted to be with her friend during the illness, but there was a danger not only that she would contract the disease, but that there could be serious ramifications for both her toddler and her unborn baby if she did get ill. She decided she could not risk her children’s health.
“Should she have sacrificed them in order to be with her friend? Should her friend have expected it?”
Just how far would one go for their BFF depends on many factors, she says, including the mental and physical health of both friends, the life circumstances, and more.
University professor and author Deborah Tannen says she knows of a woman who went into debt to give her friend money she said she desperately needed for her baby. “It turned out the friend spent the money on clothes, so it was an example of friendship exploited.”
For her book You’re the Only One I Can Tell: Inside the Language of Women’s Friendships, Tannen was swamped with stories of how friends came through when they were in need, including friends who flew across the country to help following surgery or loss of a spouse, but none as dramatic as Gomez’s.
On the other hand, she heard about “foul-weather friends” — friends who suddenly were there when needed, but disappeared when the crisis ended. “Had they come through when needed and backed off when the need receded, or had they come through because they took pleasure in seeing themselves as knights in shining armour?” says Tannen, linguistics professor at Georgetown University.
So is a friend in need a friend indeed?
Barth has never particularly liked that phrase.
“Does it mean that friends are more valuable when they’re in trouble? That we’re supposed to give to friends who are particularly needy? The truth is friends come in all sorts of packages and with all sorts of needs, and part of friendship is the negotiation between our friends’ needs and our own.”
Good friendship involves an ongoing give-and-take that eventually balances itself out so both friends feel they are getting and giving fairly equally over time, adds Barth, of dianebarth.net.
Donating … any organ is an extremely complex decision. … Real friendship seldom requires that kind of self-sacrifice.