Venting Feels Like Friendship Because It Is
Beneath the Surface · By Ali Daudji ·
Scroll back far enough in the thread with your closest friend and notice how much of it is the same message. The names barely rotate. The boss who never changed, the mother who never will. If a stranger read six months of that thread, she would conclude the two of you are coworkers, and that the problem is the company where you both work.
You have a version of this thread, and the one worth watching is with the good friend. The one who answers at 11pm and remembers the middle name of everyone who has ever wronged you. The friendship works. That part is not in dispute. What I have started to doubt is what the two of you are building in there.
Venting sells itself as release. Past a certain dose, I think it is upkeep. Not for you. For the problem.
There is a name for the pattern, and once I learned it I started seeing it in half my catch-ups. In 2002, the psychologist Amanda Rose studied 608 students in the third, fifth, seventh, and ninth grades and gave the pattern its name: co-rumination. Going back over the same problem long after the facts stop changing. Speculating about causes. Staying inside the bad feeling together, as if feeling better would end the conversation.
Her result reads like a misprint. The kids who co-ruminated most had the closest, highest-quality friendships. The same kids carried more anxiety and more depressive symptoms. One habit, both outcomes.
Correlation invites the obvious objection, so in 2007 she and two colleagues followed kids' friendships for six months to watch which way the arrows ran. For girls, they ran both ways at once. Co-rumination predicted friendships growing closer and moods growing worse, and the closeness and the low mood each predicted more co-rumination in turn. A loop with no loose end. One implication, in the authors' own words: at-risk girls "may go undetected because they have seemingly supportive friendships." Which leaves the trouble hiding in the one place nobody thinks to check, inside the friendship itself. (For boys, at those ages, co-rumination came with the closeness and without the symptoms. Nobody fully knows why.)
This is not a childhood phase you age out of. In 2008, a team that included Rose watched it happen in young women. Pairs of friends talked through their problems, cortisol measured before and after, and the more the conversation slid into co-rumination, the higher the stress hormone climbed. Co-rumination, they concluded, can "amplify, rather than mitigate, the hormonal stress response." Support was the mood in the room. Another round with the stressor was what the body got.
You would expect the catch to be that the closeness is somehow false. The studies say the opposite, which is why the loop holds. Every session delivers exactly what it promises. You leave the coffee feeling understood and less alone, and you are not wrong. Someone just spent ninety minutes on the inner weather of your life. Speculating about causes feels like analysis. Staying with the feeling feels like being taken seriously. From inside, being helped and being kept company inside the problem are nearly indistinguishable, because the words are identical and only the direction differs.
Give it enough months and the problem stops being something the friendship discusses and becomes something the friendship is made of. "Any updates?" turns into a way of saying hello. You catch yourself saving a screenshot purely because it will be good at the table. The friendship acquires a third member, and it is the problem.
I can name which of my friendships run partly on this fuel, and which topic belongs to which friend the way regulars know their order. More than once I have caught, in myself, a flicker of something close to disappointment when a situation resolves and I arrive with nothing to report. Some part of me wanted the update more than I wanted the ending. Not because I love these friends less than I claim to. Because the problem had become one of the places we live, and nobody likes losing a room.
Silence is its own slow damage, and the people who love you get to hear about your life at its worst. The line I watch now runs somewhere else, between talking to move and talking to stay. A problem brought to a friend once or twice, with an honest question about what to do, is support doing its job. The same problem on its ninth telling, polished and updated, is a loop the two of you could run from memory, and a loop run from memory is not asking to be solved.
So lately, in the friendships I have no intention of shrinking, I have been changing what I bring. Past the first retelling I try the question that points forward, what do you want to happen, instead of the one that points backward, what did they say next. Or I bring the walk with no agenda and let us find out what we sound like off the clock of a crisis. The first few minutes feel like withholding. It passes. What surfaces after, most of the time, is the actual friend: funnier than the sessions let them be, more curious, less tired.
There is a question I did not want to ask and now cannot stop asking. Could the friendship survive good news? If every open problem between you closed for good tomorrow, what would be left at the table? The friendships I trust most have an answer. At some point, without anyone deciding to, we practiced being together with nothing wrong. The others I am not leaving. I am just trying, one changed question at a time, to give us something to live on besides the news.