I was reading an article in the paper this morning. There was a sentence:
“I was reading ‘Sylvia,’ an account by the late short-story master Leonard Michaels of his unstable first wife.”
I’ve never read Leonard Michaels, but the sentence made me wonder… what do we owe our friends? Presumably the people we marry are our ultimate best friends (and we’ve signed a semi-binding, long-term contract with them.)
So let’s jump in from there.
What if we marry an unstable friend, do we have a responsibility to them?
What if they are just moderately irritating?
Or even just irritate us because they acknowledge or draw out our own worst traits?
Is that grounds for discarding them?
If they are in some sort of trouble, what is our responsibility to help a friend crawl out of their hole?
Is our own perceived future happiness more important than helping those we love(d)?
Or is our own self-interest sometimes more important? Where is the line?
How do we tell the difference between throwing a rope to a drowning man and having an anchor that’s caught around our ankle pulling us under with it?