Doing philosophy often means teasing things apart and making distinctions. This, however, is a connect-y post. A few things I’ve run into recently have felt vaguely connected, so this week I’m “thinking out loud” to articulate the inchoate connections I’m sensing.
1. Friendship
I’ve written a number of times about friendship. One of my philosophical interests over the past decade or more is the ethics of concrete relationships, the sort governed not just by ethics in general, but also by a set of norms internal to the relationship. What are those norms? How strong are they? Those are my general questions. On a high level, I think of it as working out what you could call the normativity (or prescriptivity) of love—of the “attitudes of the heart” that Steve Darwall wrote about in his most recent book.
Darwall claims there that although love comes with an implicit RSVP, we can’t demand of anyone that they love us. This seems right. But as I worked out a while back, once a relationship is established, it seems to make sense to expect—descriptively and prescriptively—that we treat each other in certain ways and take each other’s interests into account to whatever extent called for by the particular relationship (and this will vary, because relationships are varied). When those expectations aren’t being met regularly, that’s a signal that the relationship has changed or needs to change.
2. “You don’t owe anyone”
Because of this, I tend to meet with a little skepticism the frequently repeated self-care advice that “you don’t owe anyone” an apology or maybe even an explanation. I want to be clear here. It’s excellent advice in the context where I encounter it most: women taking on more than their share of the cognitive, emotional, and just plain labor in the context of paid work in particular, but also in the home and other contexts. We have the right to say no, and shouldn’t also bear the burden of fixing what we think we’re breaking by doing so. For someone like me who receives every question as a request for my time and wants to apologize every time I say no, this is hard. But as I like to say when discussing this with friends, we are not merely instruments for the well-being of everyone else. (See that Kantian streak in my thinking there?)
3: Emotional labor
I also firmly believe that we should opt out of emotional labor when it drains us too much, as
writes so lucidly. BUT. I don’t think that always means you owe no apology or explanation at all.4: Ghosting
I’ve become a fan of
’s Undividing newsletter. I greatly admire Karl’s ability to pause and get curious about his own reactions to what life throws at him. A couple of months ago, Karl wrote insightfully about ghosting:“Ghosting isn’t just a dating thing. It’s a modern thing. It happens in friendships, work relationships, even families. A slow fade. A sudden silence. A missing reply that turns into a permanent one.
And yes, it hurts. But ghosting isn’t a one-sided cruelty. When we all do it, it’s a collective behavior. A cultural symptom. A signal that something in how we relate to each other is breaking down.
We know it’s wrong too. I’ll tell a story about getting ghosted at the top of my lungs. But whisper another story when it’s me doing the ghosting.”
Karl goes on to analyze why he ghosts people, coming up with six different explanations. He boils it down to “the emotional coping strategies of a culture trained to avoid discomfort.” It’s not that we don’t care, he suggests, but that we’re tapped out: there’s just so much to care about that we can’t do it all. We need to maintain boundaries in order to hold onto ourselves. The world is making too many demands on us.
But it’s also isolating us. Karl is clear-eyed about the costs of maintaining boundaries by ghosting: those who are ghosted experience “a low-grade death without a funeral and closure. Self-doubt and lots of rumination. Not to mention the obsessive what-ifs which can be more damaging than just a simple rejection.” And those who do it experience dissociation from their own emotions. “We can call it emotional self-protection. But really, we’re just refusing to witness the results of our own decisions. So we’re actually ghosting our own emotions and abilities.”1
The best thing about Karl’s analysis is, I think, his suggestions about how to keep our boundaries but avoid ghosting. He offers several examples of very quick messages that can be adapted to many tempting ghosting situations. They essentially involve being up front about the fact that you haven’t had the capacity to respond, while explicitly recognizing that the relationship deserves better than simply disappearing.
This formula strikes me as a Goldilocks solution: just right. It honors our limited capacity to care about everyone and everything that could benefit from our attention, thus avoiding burning us all out. It also recognizes the humanity in one another and the hurt we can cause with disconnection. For me, at least, this simple recognition goes a long way. It’s an act of respect, and I think it’s often also an act of care.
So I think we do often2 owe an explanation of at least this minimal sort. It doesn’t have to be an elaborate apology or justification in most cases, though I think that relationships that have been deep typically call for more robust engagement than more casual ones do.
5: Dealing with the cracks
Don’t get me wrong, what I’m saying we should do is hard. But it’s human. Humane.
The really hard part is understanding where to draw the lines. Sometimes that means backing off a relationship that has meant a lot to you, and that’s its own kind of emotional labor. I connect this with a passage from Abby Jimenez’s Just for the Summer that grabbed my attention enough to copy into my commonplace book. The main female character, Emma, is talking to the main male character about why she still allows her emotionally abusive mother into her life:
“Being broken is not an excuse for bad behavior, you still have to make good choices and do the right thing. But it can be the reason. And sometimes understanding the reason can be what helps you heal.” (156)
—Explanatory reasons can go a long way, even when they don’t justify.3 Hence the appropriateness of the non-ghosting one-liners.—
“Nobody wants to be the villain, Justin. If you start there, it’s easier to get how people end up who they are and where they are. …You can still love someone that you’ve decided not to speak to anymore. Choosing a life without them doesn’t mean you stop caring about them. It just means that you can’t allow them to harm you anymore.” (156)
—Hence drawing boundaries.—
“But if you don’t think your life would be better without them in it, then accept that they have cracks. Try to understand how they got them and help them fill them with something that isn’t ice. …If you can choose anger or empathy, always choose empathy, Justin. It’s so much healthier than anger. For both of you” (157).4
This is the tricky one. How do we navigate the cracks? When should we accept them, loving anyway, and when should we let other people’s cracks break the relationship? A colleague of mine recently reminded me that love’s reputed “blindness” is often more a sort of “looking the other way”—which may or may not amount to acceptance—than it is a lack of seeing another wholly. It’s sometimes a tough line to walk between self-care and connection, and I think what I’m really wrestling with is when the very common (and frequently sound) individual advice about self-care starts to over-encourage disconnection from the relationships that give us meaning.
I’m not sure this is one that philosophy can answer in a general way. It will depend on the relationship. But sometimes just getting clear on the contours of the question is valuable, as it’s been for me in this case.
It’s worth noting, however, that sometimes ghosting isn’t exactly a choice: it’s the result of mental health problems like depression and anxiety, which can be paralyzing.
But not always, particularly not without an established relationship, as Diana Fox Tilson’s post makes clear.
I’m not certain that empathy is always healthier than anger. I think anger can be appropriately self-protective in the right circumstances. But that’s a question for another time.
I initially thought you meant "ghosting" in the context of Halloween. But this was way better;) Great read, Erica!
The last footnote about wondering if sometimes anger is healthier than empathy caught my attention. As someone who has been angry a LOT lately at/about my paid work, I've gotten curious why I, and so many women I know, react to anger by crying. What am I doing there? Do I feel ashamed for feeling anger? Am I suppressing and redirecting inward what would otherwise be an outward, more "typical" expression of anger?
I'm curious whether there's something about empathy that's different from "emotional labor" as you mentioned especially about women in paid work positions.