Embracing Friction: The Key to Building Strong Relationships

By Dr. Andrew Smith, Clinical Psychologist, Professor, and Pat Tillman Scholar. To start the process of transforming your relationships now, download our free guide and checkout the REWIRE app

The technology boom over the past 10 years has improved our lives in so many ways. Want to avoid the tedium of grocery shopping? Order online for delivery by 4pm. Want to avoid the misery of picking through plumbing parts or types of caulk at The Home Depot? Don’t bother waiting in line, pick up curbside.  Need some googly eyes to finish your Halloween costume? If you order in the next 23 minutes, Amazon will have it to your house tomorrow. Need entertainment on a rainy day? TikTok and Youtube have you covered.  

The sales pitch of all this life improving technology is for a frictionless existence. In many ways, these technologies have significantly improved my life.

But what I have seen over and over in my clinical practice, relationships, and within my own heart is that this promise of frictionlessness leads to a dangerous generalization: That my life and relationships could be frictionless too. That the problem of suffering can be resolved when I get into the right college, job, location, marriage, house, school district, salary, community, church, friendships…and on and on in an exhausting loop.

There is a problem inherent to this obsession with a life without suffering and friction: it’s unavoidable.  Ironically, my suffering is magnified by expectations that perfect circumstances and frictionlessness are even possible, and that they will make my heart change. To quote Bob Dylan, “that he not busy being born is busy dying,” from the second that we arrive on this planet. Suffering is a guarantee.

When I expect not to have these experiences of friction and suffering, they come as a surprise, and bleed out of me in ways that are harmful to myself and the people around me. A conflict with a best friend becomes grounds for ending the relationship, because it made me unhappy or pissed me off. A child with emotional self-control difficulty becomes ‘labeled’ as a real problem, because he intrudes on my peace and happiness. A valley phase of a marriage characterized by low satisfaction and low fulfillment becomes grounds for divorce, because its preventing me from living my best life now.  

I have a choice to make in my worldview.

• Choice 1: sanitize my life of the people and aspects that produce friction and negative energy.
• Choice 2: suffering and friction are a part of the design, and they are grounds for shared experience and healing.

By embracing and accepting the truth about suffering, we can begin to change our relationship to it when inevitable suffering and friction arises. Friction, in choice 2, becomes a signal for an opportunity for deeper connection. Times or experiences of suffering give meaning and color to times of joy. When we are saturated with excess and obsessed with stress free existence, we begin to lose the perspective and need for one another, and begin to sanitize our communities of relationships that produce anything uncomfortable.

Day to day, this suffering comes in the form of negative thoughts, emotions, and behaviors that cause us to feel and inflict pain on ourselves and others. It drives us to isolation and loneliness where at least we can avoid pain. This provides short term relief at the cost of long term health in relationships.

When we begin to accept that there are inherent biases and dangers within our own thoughts, emotions, and behaviors, we can learn to begin to see them clearly when they arise. For example, when I understand and accept that when I am stressed out about work, that I have a tendency to respond to my children or spouse in irritated ways (this is how my biology works!), I can improve my ability to begin noticing and taking responsibility for that behavior that is producing suffering in the lives of me and my family.

Through this, I begin to reduce my suffering (from misalignment with who I want to be as a father) by aligning with my own values (my aspirational self) as a father and husband. And I begin to improve the suffering of the people around me. Imperfectly and friction filled as it may be.