Part of the incentive package for Daniela to move to Baltimore was that her mother was going to buy her a house. Daniela felt it was an opportunity for herself and her children she couldn’t pass up. Although I understood intellectually her need to move and wanted to support her, I was devastated. I felt as badly as I had felt when I divorced or relatives had died. My husband tried to comfort me, but I was inconsolable. I could tell he though my reaction was extreme. “You can visit her.”, he said. “It won’t be the same.”, I replied. “We are together every day. And I know her. She is terrible at maintaining long-distance relationships. Everything is going to change.” “Life changes”, said my husband. “That is the one thing you can count on.”
Schaefer writes about a woman who loses her best friend, Julia, in an accident. She was “bothered by some people not understanding how important Julia was to her, as if you weren’t supposed to mourn best friends with the intensity you do family members. ‘I have gotten the sense with different people that they don’t really get it.’, she says. When she asked for time off from work to help her deal with her grief, she didn’t feel like the company was particularly supportive…’It’s easier for people to say ‘Oh my gosh, you lost your mother, you lost your sister’, she says. ‘It’s hard to communicate to people who don’t know or understand, ‘This was my best friend for my entire life. I think there is a need to justify why this is taking a toll on me. Because I want to make sure people don’t misunderstand. It doesn’t matter if they do or not, but it feels invalidating when they don’t.’” (Schaefer, 2018, p. 153)
As I had predicted, the intimacy of our friendship did not survive Daniela’s move and the geographic distance. It is rare in the United States to have enough time to sustain that kind of daily closeness with anyone other than a spouse or work colleague and even a friendly relationship with a colleague needs to have more built-in, protective boundaries. Furthermore, as psychotherapists, we spend so many hours with clients, where most of the sharing is one-sided, that most of our day is spent in a sort of lopsided intimacy. The work can be intense and draining. Often, when I come home from a long clinical day, I find it difficult to talk to or connect with another person. I often want to sit alone, quietly reading or watching mindless television shows. I also live in an area of the United States rooted in the Puritan work ethic, the Northeast. The culture here values long work hours and is highly individualistic, which makes it harder to form and sustain deep, intimate, emotional friendships and connections. Although our country runs efficiently (the phones and electricity usually work, the mail is often delivered on-time and many of us have heat and food) do we pay a high price for that efficiency? Since the pandemic, many more people work on-line and office communities are vanishing. While it can be convenient and time- efficient to work from home, what is the cost? Are we losing the opportunity to make deeper personal connections in the workplace? Are we becoming even more isolated and alienated from each other?
Carol Gilligan was an American researcher, writing about American men and women. As mentioned, she found women had a care-based morality that emphasizes interconnectedness and universality whereas men are socialized to emphasize individualism and separateness from others. Through that lens, one can view Northeastern culture as being male-dominant. Even within the United States, I have lived in areas such as Northern rural California, where there was less focus on long work hours and some value placed on recreational and family time. However, in general, American culture is individualistic and people work too much. I have observed that in other countries, while services are not as efficient, both men and women appear to be happier and more connected and caring of each other. As mentioned, my colleague Ly took time off from his busy life to introduce me, a virtual stranger, to his country. This decision seems more care-based than justice-based.
