The Osmosis of Friendship

It wasn’t until my mid fifties that I discovered something really important about friendship. Until that point, and without realising it, I had surrounded myself with people who were most like me. Not exclusively though, just mostly. I didn’t give it much thought, probably because it’s the most natural thing to do. There is reassurance, security and validation in being with people who are most like you. It reinforces your worldview and the sense of who you are.

In my early fifties I had a big change in circumstances. Early retirement from a horrible job followed by a heart bypass led eventually to a whole new career at the age of 55 in the voluntary sector. The day I started is permanently locked into my memory because it was the day before 9/11.

But 9/11 wasn’t the main reason why the first day at my new job was unforgettable. From day one I was surrounded by people who were different from me in all the ways that people can be different; age, gender, sexuality, culture, social background, country of origin, beliefs. You name it; they were different. I quickly discovered that equality and diversity ran through the connective tissue of the Newcastle Council for Voluntary Service, and it was impossible to spend more than a few days among the people who worked there without absorbing that ethos.

The immediate acceptance of me and the completely unreserved expectation of friendship, made it easy to become a part of the organisation’s culture. Before the week was out I was meeting up with my new friends for lunch and for drinks before going home. I worked there for ten years before retiring and from that wonderful decade I learned two great things about friendship.

The first is important, just not as important as the second. It goes like this:

True friendship isn’t real or true unless it is unconditional. You take the other person just as they are, warts and all. After all we all have warts and we all want to be accepted, liked and even loved, for who we really are. The moment you want that person to change and act to make that happen, the friendship is tarnished. As we will see below, this doesn’t mean that you don’t influence your friends, or they you. It also doesn’t mean that you fail to help them change if they ask it of you. It’s only if the intention to change someone is an attached and often undeclared agenda, that friendship is compromised. It might still look and feel like friendship, but it really won’t be.

The second thing I learned requires me to pause long enough to explain osmosis.

In any situation where two different states have the ability to exchange part of their substance, both will be changed. Source - Me

Osmosis

Imagine a medium sized fish tank divided into two compartments by a vertical barrier. It is completely sealed where it meets the floor and walls of the tank. Now imagine that the barrier is made of a special material that will allow molecules of a certain maximum size to pass through from one side to the other. In other words the barrier is slightly porous. It is correctly called a semi-permeable membrane.

If we fill the tank with water we know that H2O molecules will be sneaking across in both directions, but we won’t be able to see it. So lets put some yellow dye in one side and some blue dye in the other. Lets also assume that the molecules for the dyes are roughly the same size and are small enough to pass through the barrier. So having done this we walk away for a while; eat lunch, watch a movie. When we return we should find either two green chambers or at least one is blue/green and the other yellow/green, depending on the rate of molecular exchange and the amount of time we have been away. The two chambers have shared what they are with each other and they have both been changed.

In the same way, there comes a point in a friendship when a sort of critical mass is reached and the two people start exchanging who they are with each other. If they are very different, then they will both learn and grow together. This is the osmosis of friendship.

But what if they are very similar? They will still share who they are but they are like the two chamber of water, sharing with each other what they’ve already got. This is the opposite of learning and growing. This is reinforcement and validation. Most of the time these exchanges will be fairly benign, but sometimes they’re not. We can see these contrasting effects in society.

I have worked in quite a few towns and cities in the North East over the years and delivered projects directly in some surprisingly insular communities. In these places I have been bemused to encounter pockets of prejudice surrounded by an otherwise tolerant society. It really does matter who your friends are.

At this point I was going to use a piece of research to illustrate another aspect of contact between people who are different. The research itself turned out to be fraudulent, but led to another piece of research with an even better conclusion. It goes like this. In December 2014 a political science graduate from UCLA and a professor from Columbia University published an article in Science magazine demonstrating that minds can be changed about marriage equality with just a few minutes talking to a gay canvasser, but not with straight canvassers. This could have been a great example of engagement with people who are different having a beneficial effect.

However, two political scientists from Stanford and Berkeley Universities, David Brockman and Joshua Kalla, discovered that the results were obtained using falsified data. The twist in the tale is that Brockman and Kalla decided to conduct their own research and found that the claims made by the falsified research were partially right. Their study, carried out in Florida concerned attitudes to transgender people. Households in the Miami area were sent a social attitudes survey, then 501 people were followed up using 56 canvassers some of whom were transgender A control group were interviewed about recycling. The individuals were then followed up three months later.

The results were compelling, with transgender prejudice virtually erased in 1 out of 10 people, but the most interesting result was that it made no difference whether the canvasser was transgender or not.

The bulk of this article is about friendship as a mechanism for learning and growing, but it is clear that something as simple as having an opposing point of view is powerful in a one-to-one encounter. If I were ruler of the universe for a day, I would make everyone find someone really different and make friends.

We live in a country where our freedoms underline the principle that people are different, and that it’s OK to be different. The protections that we are given by the state to enjoy those freedoms create an environment in which, if we wished to, we could live in harmony, mutual respect and empathy with each other, not despite our differences, but because of them. If we screw that opportunity up, as it seems we are, then we only have ourselves to blame.

It turns out that difference is not something to fear or despise, but an often untapped treasure. We just need the good sense to mine its seams.

Note:  Knowledge isn’t always about science. If there were no people, no society, there would be no science.