What makes one a confidant?
I have a friend I’ll call Daniel. For years, I thought I knew him rather well. We had shared meals, exchanged jokes, complained about our jobs, and occasionally discussed the sort of things men discuss when they don't want to appear too sentimental. But one evening, Daniel told me something that changed the way I understood him. We were sitting in his car outside a pharmacy. He had just bought some medicines for his mother, who was recovering from an illness. Out of nowhere, he said, “Bob, sometimes I sit in my car for ten minutes before going inside. I just need a little time before I become the person everybody expects me to be.” I looked at him. Daniel was the dependable one. The man who answered calls, solved problems, remembered birthdays, and never seemed to fall apart. His family relied on him. His colleagues respected him. His friends called him when life became difficult. I had never imagined that he might sit alone in a parked car, gathering himself before walking through his own front door. “What do you mean?” I asked. He stared through the windscreen. “I'm tired, Bob. Not physically. I'm tired of everybody thinking I'm fine because I'm the one who usually makes everything fine.” Then he laughed, almost apologetically. “Forget it. I don't know why I'm telling you this.” But I didn't tell him to cheer up. I didn't remind him how lucky he was. I didn't offer him a five-point plan to improve his life. I simply said, “That sounds lonely, Daniel.” He stopped laughing. And then he began to talk. He told me about the fear he carried for his mother. About the financial decisions he was afraid he had got wrong. About how he sometimes resented being needed so much, and then felt ashamed for resenting the very people he loved. There were things he had never told his wife. Things he had never told his closest friends. Not because he didn't trust them, necessarily. But because, with them, he felt he had to remain Daniel: the strong one, the sensible one, the person who could be counted on. For a little while, in that car, he didn't have to be any of those things. He could simply be a tired man who loved his family and didn't always know how to carry the weight of that love. I drove home that evening thinking about our conversation. Why did he feel comfortable opening up to me? I hadn't known the right questions to ask. I hadn't said anything particularly wise. I hadn't solved a single problem. Perhaps that was precisely the point. Some people make it easy to confide in them because they don't make us work to earn the right to be human. We don't have to arrange our feelings into a neat story before telling them. We don't have to remove the jealousy, the embarrassment, the resentment, or the fear that might make us look less admirable. We can say, “I'm happy for my sister, but I'm also a little jealous of her.” We can confess, “I know I should be enjoying this stage of my life. Why am I so unhappy?” And the other person doesn't immediately rush to correct us. I have also noticed something else about people we confide in. They don't seem frightened by silence. When we finish speaking, they don't immediately fill the space with their own story. They don't turn our confession into a competition over who has suffered more. They don't make us regret having opened a door by walking through it uninvited. And, perhaps most importantly, they don't use what we tell them as currency. Our secrets don't reappear in an argument six months later. Our vulnerabilities don't become amusing anecdotes at dinner parties. Our worst moments don't become the permanent definition of who we are. We discover, slowly, that we can trust them with the parts of ourselves we are still trying to understand. Before that evening, I thought being a good friend meant being available when someone needed help. Now I wonder whether it sometimes means being the one person around whom they don't have to pretend. There is a difference between being loved for what we do for people and feeling safe enough to show them who we are when we have nothing left to give at that moment. Perhaps the people we confide in most easily are not the ones who understand us perfectly; they are the ones who don't require us to be perfectly understandable. Who is the person that you confide in? And what is it in them that makes you do so? Until tomorrow, Bob
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