Sleeping with the enemy

One of the most beautiful features of life is its ever-changing variety. The timescales vary, some things change over a few days, others take years or centuries to change, but everything ends up changing over a long enough period of time. Now we know that even something as seemingly immutable as the universe has changed and keeps changing, that the Sun that rises every morning and sets every evening will eventually grow to engulf the Earth and the planet will be no more.

In this background of constant change, living things change even faster: their constant need to consume energy to keep a modicum of internal order in a universe that tends to increase the overall disorder causes all plants and animals to undergo changes in time spans that range from seconds to a few hours. Of course, most of those changes do not add up, but instead they get reverted by the action of life itself: when we breathe in we can hold the air for some seconds, but in the end we have to expire to take another breath. However, other change add up over time, growth and aging are always progressing or, at best, stay still, but, with the possible exception of some jellyfish, it is very rare to see them reverted.

Photo: Michal Renčo on Pixabay

People are no exceptions to this trend. We grow and we age as every other living been, but also our mind, our self changes over time. We tend to think that "we are are who we are and will always be" as if there were an immutable essence that persists over time in spite of all the evidence of change around us, but the fact is that we are not more persistent than the ship of Theseus: our body is ours for the whole extent of our life, but most of our cells die and get replaced by new ones, and a similar phenomenon applies to our minds. We have a sense of continuity from one day to the next, but every event that happens in our life exerts some effect on us, potentially changing the way we think too.

The constant change contains the beautiful possibility of rediscovering people you already know and seeing how they have changed. The ominous possibility is that the change can be for the worse, turning them into people impossible to live with or, even worse, dangerous to yourself. A frequent literary trope revolves about the idea of a lovely relationship that gets soured when one of the partners reveals a hidden facet, as in the 1991 American movie "Sleeping with the enemy", where Laura Burney is forced to fake her own death to escape her abusive husband. The daily toll of domestic violence tells the sad story of how hard it is to give up your family, your neighborhood, your work even when your life is at obvious risk: how can you take off after you have spent ten, twenty, thirty years with someone? Who are you going to be on your own, when it has always been "the two of you"?

A few months ago I ran into an article in The Economist telling the story of a North Carolina woman in her early 30s who had been forced by the economic downturn to move back with her mom only to find that she was a completely different person, completely overrun by conspiracy theories and the QAnon movement. By her own account, it was unbearable to live in the house, with the media constantly blaring out infamous lies that her mother ingested dutifully, only to repeat them to her whenever the TV was not on. If this happens to a friend, you can always sever the ties. With a partner, divorce can be an option. But what do you do when it is your own parent (or a sibling or a child) who has become so alien that you cannot relate to them anymore?

I had a similar (but certainly not as grueling) experience myself with my own mom. As I was growing up, she was always very open minded. In spite of being raised Christian, she was never a devout person and she had a vivid interests in oriental philosophy, particularly the non-theist currents of Buddhism and Taoism. However, after an encounter with a sufi some twenty years ago she realized that she did not need to learn foreign religions, that she could find solace in the one she had grown up, because in the end most religions are equivalent: appreciating your luck when it happens, admitting your distress when you are in need of help and trying to overcome your own shortcomings. I was pleased with the conclusion not because I was particularly fond of Catholic church but because it gave her comfort without implying that her religion was the right one. But I was wrong.

Over the course of the last twenty years she as become more and more a fervent believer, leaving behind a lot of former inclusive views to embrace divisive positions that make some of my conversations with her really hard. The obvious (but sad) solution, is to avoid certain topics when talking to her or, if they pop up, let the matter slip by without discussion even if that means refraining from contesting opinions that are simply outrageous.

With some of my childhood friends I have also had similar disagreements. I attended a fairly liberal school (or at least I thought so), so I expected finding progressive attitudes in most of my schoolmates when we grew up. However, in the WhatsApp group that someone put together to celebrate the 25th anniversary of our high school graduation I found a whole bunch of ardent conservatives with whom I have little in common. There is probably a silent majority that, like myself, rarely dares to venture in any politically tinted conversation to avoid direct confrontation, but my natural reaction is asking "are these the people I grew up with?". Twenty five years is a long time of accumulated changes, so they are obviously not the same, and neither am I. Thinking more deeply I am probably wondering if these attitudes were already present back then, and I just oversaw them, or they are just new developments.

Whatever the path that took them there, it is always worth to devote some mental effort to evaluating the friendship. My general rule is that, if it is not too intrusive, I am ready to give them a chance and put up with a lot of nonsense for the benefit of the occasional interesting conversation. However, the definition of what "too intrusive" means varies a lot from one person to another. Something that is clearly acceptable for you might seem to me tantamount to sleeping with the enemy. Have a nice evening.