Friends

Went to AA this morning and the topic was friendship in AA. It seemed like I might be called upon as a matter of course (due to this meeting's specific format), so I thought about it for a while.

First off, it must be owned that despite its intentional and admirable quasi-anarchical amorphousness, there is a strong institutional pressure within AA for people to say nice things about it. It makes sense. People are there for the most part because they want to be there -- certainly that's true for an earlyish Saturday morning meeting -- and they want to support one another and be positive. So there's a tendency to say nice things about all aspects of the Program (as we say).

So is there something qualitatively distinct about friendships in AA? To an extent, maybe. Certainly one's early relationships in the Program are forged in flame, everybody is to some extent in crisis and in need when they come in. The people who are there for them and get them through the difficult early years become special.

But as time rolls on, I'm not sure there's a meaningfully deep distinction between friendships in AA and out of it, in my life at least. Everybody has some kind of issues with which they struggle and needs some kind of support that calls for moments of radical honesty and vulnerability of the type one sees in AA. AA relationships maybe distinguish themselves by the amount of cant and dogma upon which one may rely in supporting another, but I'm not sure that's necessarily a good thing in all cases.

It's a good question, though I'm not sure of the answer. Ultimately we are all constrained by the 24/7 problem and have to figure out how to allocate and load balance attention over these constraints.