I've mentioned once before my old friend, who I refer to as my "proggie buddy." This is a guy who has been one of my best friends for 15 years. He is, candidly, an east coast urban progressive, who criticized Barack Obama as being too far to the right. He's a big fan of Rachel Maddow. He watches "The View." (On that last bit, I'm fond of twitting him that, whenever he tunes in, he's doubling their viewership.)
But he has a characteristic that is vanishingly rare these days; he doesn't think someone is a bad person because they disagree with him on political issues. Neither do I. My proggie buddy and I agree on many other things - good beer, good food, and we both love Japan (he grew up in Tokyo). Because of these things, we have maintained a kind of Oscar Madison/Felix Unger friendship for a long time now, and have argued politics late into the night over beers and both enjoyed the discussion.
This brings up the question: Is it better to have friends who are more like you, or less like you?
In a recent study based in Germany, Robert Körner at the University of Bamberg and Tobias Altmann at the University of Duisburg-Essen wanted to find out whether having certain personality traits was related to how people perceived their friendships and to how they were perceived as friends. The researchers also wanted to explore whether the chemistry between two friends’ traits made a difference.
Studying this sort of thing is more complicated than it might first appear. Imagine a friendship between Al and Bob. The way that Al experiences the friendship might be affected not only by her own personality traits, but also by Bob’s traits (as Bob judges them), and, crucially, also by how Al perceives Bob’s traits. ‘We wanted to study all these effects simultaneously,’ says Körner.
This kind of thing would be complicated, sure - because people are complicated. While here at RedState we focus on the political, there's just so much more to life than that, and friendships can be based on many things.
But the conclusion of this study doesn't come as any surprise.
Körner and Altmann’s finding that personality similarity was not relevant to satisfaction in established friendships suggests that this is a factor that wanes in importance over time. In many cases, a correspondence in certain personality traits might draw people together initially. But when a bond is well established, having similar traits might not matter much for how satisfied two friends are with their friendship – whether they have stayed quite similar, have drifted apart personality-wise, or were never very similar to begin with. With a lasting friendship may come acceptance, whatever the level of personality resemblance, says Körner. ‘You have a broader basis – all that time you’ve spent together – on which to base a successful friendship.’
To my thinking, this seems pretty obvious. Whatever draws people together in a friendship - admiration of a certain trait, being thrown together on a complicated project, or surviving some event together - slowly gives way to months and years of shared experiences, of learning of each other's personalities and characters, of just hanging out together. My proggie friend and I met on a months-long consulting gig in Japan, and since he spoke Japanese and understood the culture, I started tagging along with him on evening and weekend outings.
We knew we had some pretty drastic differences in politics, but that didn't matter; neither of us took it personally. We worked together well, on that project and several others, because we learned to respect each other's skills and experience, and more to the point, we listened to each other and would both admit when we were wrong. (Or, at least, I would have admitted it, if I ever was wrong.)
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We are social creatures. Our personal relationships are a big part of what brings meaning to our lives. And, yes, we can maintain long-term friendships with people with whom we don't necessarily agree on every single issue.
Friendships are odd sometimes. It's not always possible to determine just how or why a friendship pops up; I've seen too many "Odd Couple" friendships develop to doubt that. Yes, shared experiences are important; history is important. I've known my oldest friend, who still lives back in that small community in eastern Iowa where we grew up since we were five. There's no substitute for a background like that, and there's no substitute for friendships. There's no substitute for those relationships.
Of course, I'm doubly fortunate here - I'm married to my very best friend. We don't always agree on everything. But it works, nevertheless.
This seems appropriate.
