In Part 2 of our interview with writer and historian Tiffany Watt Smith about her book Bad Friend, we talk about how males have long mansplained that women aren’t capable of true friendships – plus ghosting, secrets, and how workplace friendships can be empowering but complicated. (Read Part One here!)
Tiffany, this book is extremely engaging and accessible, but you’ve also done detailed academic research. Going back to Aristotle, you write how male thinkers in patriarchal societies have said that real friendships could only exist between men?
For almost 2000 years, male writers have been saying what friendship – and the ideal form of friendship – is. For Aristotle and thinkers after him, the ideal form of friendship was a kind of ‘soulmate’ [connection] between men based in deep intellectual discourse. Writers, like Montaigne in the 16th century, said women are too envious and emotionally unstable to forge the great bond of friendship.
Bloody patriarchy. You’ve really contributed to the historical record.
It’s original research. There has been a lot written about the history of men’s friendship. But information about the history of female friendship is much more scattered and diffuse, so I felt finding and bringing together sources was really important. Across centuries, women have been seen as bad friends – unreliable, envious or unstable. Then women’s friendship became more idealised. In the 19th century, there were extremely intense friendships between women. Bad Friend is the first book about the history of friendship in the 20th century. It was a century of glamorising female friendships, which became much more visible – in novels, film and TV. But also, there were so many more ways in which women were deemed to be a ‘bad friend’ like at work, in your neighbourhood, in other places. You could be too close, not close enough, overstepping, or demanding too much. There were just so many specific variations of the female ‘bad friend’ that perhaps hadn’t been there before. Women feared if they confessed reservations, failures or doubts [about friendships], they’d be condemned as envious or spiteful. There’s still fear now around being a bad friend.
You write that we need to reclaim the possibility of being a ‘bad friend’, as in an imperfect friend at times. A willingness to work through issues is important to friendships?
Willingness is crucial. Not giving up easily is so important. Allowing it to be imperfect. Allowing you both to make mistakes. Allowing it to be quite different from the fantasy of the ‘ideal friend’.
You write that secrets are the currency of friendships. It’s about who you trust, right?
Yeah, trust is essential to friendship and we become each other’s secret-keepers. That’s why it was critical to me to show friends what I was writing about them, because otherwise there could be a sense of betrayal. Many women I interviewed for the book felt at first that it was treacherous to talk badly of a friend at all, worried I would be judging them, worried they were breaking some sort of pact. After a while, the floodgates open because we don’t always get a chance to talk about those things.
When you’re ghosted, or your friend ends a friendship, that’s hard, right?
It’s similar to breaking up with someone [romantically]. We have to navigate these painful endings sometimes. You can take time to grieve. But you could also tell yourself that friendships end all the time. Not beating yourself up about it helps.
Should we be careful about deciding if someone is a ‘toxic friend’?
Definitely. The term’s massively overused. There are some toxic friends, but the term’s making us more intolerant of peaks and troughs in ordinary friendships. Friendships aren’t always seamless, and frictionless. So cutting out so-called ‘toxic friends’ is dangerous especially in our age of loneliness.
In the workplace, making friends is helpful?
Workplace friendships may be very valuable for women but they also come with distinct challenges. Women know that we need to cultivate networks of friends and contacts. But we are also taught to unlearn the conditioning that teaches us to prioritise other people’s needs over our own and to try to be likeable, both of which are deep within the practice of striking up friendships in the first place. I had ambition, and with that came rivalry and insecurity, and a new kind of watchfulness.
Did that surprise you?
It did. When I was much younger, especially when waitressing and working in bars, there was a lot of camaraderie. I didn’t have any ambition in that sphere. When I got older and started feeling a bit more ambitious, I was really surprised at how complicated it felt to make friends at work. I do still have a few friends from that period in my life. But at the time, I felt more competitive but I also wanted to be friends with them. I feared I might end up putting them first or feeling guilty about taking an opportunity that they otherwise might have got. I really found it confusing when I was younger. Now, I find making friends at work less confusing but sometimes I still find it complicated. The other day, I asked someone to be a referee for me, for a grant application. She’s been a colleague for a long time, and she’s a new friend. I felt weird about asking her ,because I thought is she going to think I’m using her? But she was delighted to do it and I would always be delighted to be someone’s referee.
You mention that polls show that having a best friend at work means we’re more engaged, more productive, less likely to experience burnout, and more likely to report harassment and to negotiate for better conditions. So having a work friend can really empower you?
Definitely. There’s also research that suggests that women who have a group of friends at work, or across adjacent workplaces, find it even more useful than having one work friend, because you’ve got a bigger pool of people you can ask for help or advice. I had a close, close friend when I was working in the university. And I have lots of friendly colleagues that I call friends and we help each other or give advice. I’ll help them in whatever way because I want to see them thrive, and I think they’re clever and deserve opportunities. I don’t really like the phrase ‘work wife’ because it seems kind of exclusive, and why does it have a romantic metaphor. Why is calling it ‘friendship’ not good enough?
You started writing the book because you’d lost your way in friendship and wanted to find a way to return. Have you returned?
Definitely. I’m so much more confident. I got to work through some stuff, almost like therapy. It was quite confessional which was important to me – if I was inviting other women to contemplate imperfections in their friendships, then I had to be willing to share my own. I think all books come out of a question you’re trying to solve. This took five years to research and write, part-time. I wrote it during the pandemic, I had kids at home, and I was teaching a bit at university and running research projects.
You wrote that the pandemic demonstrated that we’re more neighbourly than some people think?
Many people complain about a breakdown in neighbourly relationships. Research shows that even very small neighbourly interactions like nodding or smiling can be very powerful and create a ‘latent neighbourliness’, even if you’re not on chatting terms. I think during the pandemic, many of us experienced communities mobilising quite rapidly, around people who were elderly, ill or needed extra support. People were checking on their neighbours. So I think we’ve taken on new forms of being neighbourly and it could be through community events or Facebook. The rise in digital neighboring is interesting.
You write about making friends with a chatbot!
These AI friends are pretty awful. They’re very flattering, it’s too smooth an interaction, and doesn’t allow us to flex the muscles required for human interaction. There’s definitely danger – they’re telling us what we want to hear. But I do think we’ll be calling an AI friend a friend, in a few years’ time. I remember when people would tell others that having hundreds of ‘Facebook friends’ doesn’t mean you have hundreds of actual friends. In English this baggy word ‘friend’, is very ill-defined. Some languages have specific terms for different kinds of friendships. The Mossi of Burkina Faso talk of reementaaga, a specific sort of friendship that evolves between neighbours, and tudentaaga, the friendship you have with someone you grew up with who has since moved away but remains a trusted trading partner. Zoodo is a very intimate and long-standing friendship, akin to the English ‘best friend’. Russian speakers organise their friendships less by context than by levels of intimacy. There are so many ways to be friends.
Here’s where you can find a copy of Tiffany’s new book, Bad Friend, as well as her bestselling books, Schadenfreude and The Book Of Human Emotions.
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