“I never learned from a man who agreed with me.” – Robert A. Heinlein
It’s normal to want to surround yourself with people who think like you. People who like the same things you do, who get angered by the same things as you, and who care about you like you care about them. But there’s no challenge there. Even of the people who think similarly to you, I can assure you that there will be things that you guys find that you disagree about. Sometimes it may seem like the differences are deal breakers for a friendship, but don’t dismiss that as being too far from your train of thought to entertain. Some of my most precious relationships had to endure fights over our differences. Just give it a chance.
Junior year I had probably the biggest fight with a friend in my lifetime. My nature wasn’t the type to confront all of the issues that I faced. I normally let time heal and moved on, although sometimes not by choice. But this friend of mine was too important for me to not confront and it turned out to be a mutual confrontation.
Without going into details, I’ll summarize that both of our hurts were accumulated over time. Incidents that we tried to let go but built on top of the other. Incidents that we didn’t know were incidents because of how differently we took them. On my end, my goal for the conversation was to explain this is how you hurt me and I want you to really understand. I want you to understand and then I want you to side with me. I wanted her to think like me. But she couldn’t. I could see her trying to understand, but then not being able to cross the bridge to me. It was the first time I had felt so hopeless. After poring my heart out to her, what more could I say to make her understand?
My dad used to tell me when I was younger, “the minute you win an argument, you’ve lost.” That may sound rather paradoxical, but the context of his point was when you argue with someone incessantly to prove your point at the expense of their feelings. I may not have been trying to convince my friend of any fact, but essentially, I was trying to convince her that I was right in feeling hurt and that she should therefore acknowledge my perspective. I was at a loss in maneuvering a friendship unlike I’ve ever had. I thought I was normally the level-headed uninvolved third party, but here I was experiencing what felt like an attack on my character. I remember her telling me, “we’re just really different.” It rang through my mind over and over. And although we ended on what seemed to be a good note, I walked away feeling like our friendship could never go back to what it was before the issue had arisen.
The point of this story is to not ward off differences because challenges are the only way we grow. Stagnation and complacency will stifle that growth. And your relationships can be the source for that stifling. It’s easy to see racist groups, extremists, etc. and see the flaws in them, but we can become echoing chambers of our own biases if we only befriend those similar to our comforts and tastes. I learned the most from the friends who challenged me and didn’t agree with me. Sometimes I wanted to give up on friends, because being challenged isn’t always a fun activity, but that perseverance in a friendship makes it all the more rewarding.
"It's not our differences that divide us. It is our inability to recognize, accept and celebrate those differences." -Audre Lorde