Iris and I met in the waiting room of a doctor’s office. I noticed that she was reading a book about a dog rescue. I knew the book, and we began talking about rescuing animals—one of my greatest passions. Soon, we were eagerly exchanging stories about the dogs we had known, the cats we had loved, and the rescues we had participated in.
When the doctor’s emergency forced us to reschedule our appointments, we continued our conversation in a nearby coffee shop. We soon realized we had had similar experiences: We each had a child we were worried about and a marriage we were struggling with. Additionally, we were both trying to make sense of the world’s turmoil—the end of the Vietnam War, the Watergate scandal, and the dawning of computers. We connected in the way people (in particular, women) do during such moments, exclaiming the familiar phrase, “I know JUST what you mean!” We became each other’s confidante, adviser, and supporter.
We met at least once a month before she moved to another town. By this time, social media had opened a new way to stay connected. Although our friendship took a back seat over time, we nevertheless celebrated each other’s new animal stories, vacations, and adventure online.
Our initial friendship had rested on many similarities. We had been raised in religiously and politically conservative homes. In our thirties, we had sought our own paths through life’s thorny questions, venturing far outside the rigid parameters of our upbringings. While I continued to explore different ways to understand life’s meaning, her posts became ever more conservative, expressing views that leaned continuously further in a direction I now define as rigid. Occasionally, a dog rescue photo still appeared, but often, she fired off a biblical quote celebrating the approaching “end times”—a belief in some Christian doctrines that the righteous will be taken to heaven at the Second Coming of Christ, leaving the unsaved on the burning and ravaged Earth to suffer and disappear. She urged her online friends to seek salvation.
Then, one day, I shared a story about the current administration “disappearing” people and my distress over its implications. This triggered a letter from her challenging me to reconsider my stance on both politics and religion. She warned again that we are entering the end times, expressing her deep fear that I would be left behind when the Rapture came. She was not only concerned about my soul but also my political path—a path she deemed not merely misguided but outright wrong.
I found myself grappling with righteous indignation and resisting the urge to respond with a defensive and angry letter.
I came of age during the 60s in San Francisco and went to “love-ins,” “be-ins,” and singalongs, believing that “all you need is love”—a sentiment popularized by The Beatles. Later in my career as a therapist, I had studied nonviolent communication, the power of mirroring, and how two people having a difference of opinion didn’t make either wrong.
So, I tried harder. I read everything I could about overcoming political divides, including eight tips for navigating political differences, three essential skills for managing religious differences, and overcoming the spiritual divide with people you love. I wrote her back, acknowledging her concern and thanking her for all we had shared, reminding her that love is all we need.
She posted a fire and brimstone symbol of the Second Coming on my social media page, sent me a final email stating that she would always pray for me, and disappeared. She dumped me on all social media, and that was that—except it wasn’t. I flew into a rage. I began spying on her other social media accounts and collecting evidence of her religious and political extremism. By the time I was able to observe what I had done, I had created a construct that made her dangerous—a threat to my beliefs—and that diminished all the good years between us.
The seduction of righteous indignation had swallowed me, and I had demonstrated all the things I had accused her of—narrowmindedness, closed-mindedness, and self-righteousness.
Like many idealists, I had stopped seeing my beliefs objectively, and she had done the same. They had become “the right way to think.” My anger had helped mask my grief over the loss of our friendship; I had to acknowledge that the ties bonding us were not strong enough to overcome the beliefs dividing us. As difficult as it was, I made peace with appreciating the things I loved about her and accepting the things I could not change; it was too difficult to find a way back into the relationship. And as I so often do, I found comfort in the words of poet Mary Oliver in her poem “Blackwater Woods”:
to live in this world
you must be able
to do three things
to love what is mortal;
to hold it
against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go
