Ask Philippa: A question about friendships
Friendship is often built on mutual projection
I have been with my partner since we were teenagers, so romantic love isn't where I struggle with this most, it is friendships. I have had friendships for years, only to find the idea of me they had in their head isn't the real me. I've had friends believe that I come from a different country or socioeconomic class than the one I actually grew up in, despite me explicitly saying otherwise over the years. Instead of listening to the literal words that have come out of my mouth, they've made all kinds of assumptions about me. I've not had a single friendship that's made me feel seen. I'd love to know how you'd adapt the advice you've given in this column for people feeling lost in platonic love, not romantic love.
My answer
Friendship, unlike romantic love, rarely comes with rituals of declaration or clarity. It grows in shared time and mutual attention, which the researcher Robin Dunbar quantifies in layers: five close friends, fifteen good ones, fifty meaningful connections. The difference between these tiers isn’t so much feeling, it’s more like frequency. If people misremember your background despite corrections, it suggests they aren’t in the close layers. They’ve slotted you somewhere else, perhaps as a character in their narrative rather than a subject in your own.
This isn’t rare, friendship is often built not on accurate data but on mutual projection. When the real you disrupts the version someone built, the friendship becomes unstable, not out of malice, but because their frame can't adjust.
Platonic love that feels nourishing requires being seen in context. That means proximity, time, and effort. If your friendships don’t reflect who you are, the problem isn’t you being unclear. It’s likely a lack of cognitive investment from the other side. Most people don’t maintain bandwidth for more than a handful of deep connections. That’s Dunbar again, our brains can’t do more.
You’re not asking for too much. You’re asking for friendship that exists in the upper layers of attention and mutual recognition. To find it, you may need to withdraw energy from relationships where being known isn't possible and invest it where someone’s curiosity is strong enough to update their story about you. That may be fewer people than you’d hoped. But those are the only friendships that ever become real.
Thanks for the question
I don’t know if I’m alone in thinking the writer might be giving up too soon. The writer is asking if their friends really GET them but it’s worth asking, aside from how they apparently see you: Do you still like them? What drew you to them? Misunderstandings come up in all kinds of relationships and can sometimes be corrected. Thinking ‘oh, they just don’t get me’ and withdrawing with hurt feelings, may stop the writer from developing the deeper friendships they want. People are often inattentive or get things wrong. That doesn’t necessarily mean they don’t like you or don’t see you in other ways. They might have their own shit going on. In short projection can go both ways, so it is worth asking if you’re expecting to be understood without offering understanding in return, or assuming the worst. If you meet their errors with forgiveness the friendship might deepen. Or, of course, maybe they are bad friends and you might need to look elsewhere to be fully seen. But if you really like them, try giving them grace. Forget about how they see you. Try enjoying their company without expectations, which might actually make these friendships feel like harder work? Of course it’s annoying when people forget core details about us and our lives. But if you want to persist with making a friend it might be worth trying to take everything as lightly as you can and assume the best rather than the worst about the other person. Just a thought
"Platonic love that feels nourishing requires being seen in context. That means proximity, time, and effort." This feels key. In today's world proximity is harder - working remotely means fewer opportunities to connect with both old contacts and new.
Finding mutually convenient times is a challenge when as well as jobs we are managing dependents and chronic illness.So the effort needed is perhaps greater than ever before.
But the positive here is that the OP has noticed this gap between expectations and reality (and I get thats it's a shock, I've had a similar experience). As PP says, it's time to invest the effort where it will flourish. Good luck.