Can I be friends with someone who has different views than me?
The closeness of a friendship may determine how open minded we are to another's views. Here is my opinion and insight from University of Toronto Professor, Steve Joordens.
I have many friends and many who hold different opinions than me on fundamental topics like war, love, education, and money. For better or for worse, I’m usually not one to get into contentious conversations on such subjects, not due to indifference but rather because I feel that everyone is entitled to their views as long as they are not harmful.
Can I be friends with someone who has different views than me? Personally, it depends on the closeness of the friendship. I would want to feel accepted by a close friend for thinking a certain way and have the opportunity to express my thoughts. However, I typically feel a greater sense of security when the people closest to me support my line of thinking.
This is what Steve Joordens Professor of Psychology at the University of Toronto has to say.
It depends on what it is. If your friend says Rihanna is the best singer in the world and you disagree then no big deal. But on some of the sociopolitical issues that we run into like whether vaccines are a good idea or not, there is often a lot of emotionality invested in positions.
I’ve run into this in a couple of places—within my family and with a police officer who is a friend and we had very different positions on vaccine mandates. So, we asked ourselves, “How important is our friendship? Is it more important than the issues? Are we going to fight about this every time or are we going to find a way around it?”
What I recommend is finding common ground but also to explicitly tell the person, “Hey, we know we’re on different sides of this issue and we know that if we go down that road, it’s just going to lead to a whole bunch of angst and anxiety. I value our friendship a lot, could we try something like sticking to common ground because there are many things that we agree on? Let’s stay on that ground when we’re with each other and if either one of us feels the other one leaving that common ground, we can say, ‘ah, ah, ah.’”
Get away from those issues. It works but it needs to be explicit. You need to have that discussion ahead of time and communicate to that person that you don’t want to lose them as a friend. Say, “This issue is not important enough to me to lose you as a friend.”
One other thing I’ll add is that when you’re family is gathering and you know there are family members who have different views, what I suggest to people is before that gathering acknowledge that they have different views on certain topics but they have one thing in common, they all love their mom. The last thing their mom wants to see is her children fighting or bickering over something.
Once we establish a common ground, it helps heal some of the wounds that are there.
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