This Bookworm Method Might Help You Recognise the Quality of Your Relationships

After spending 10 years in a co-dependent friendship that eventually fell apart half a year ago, I’m back in business.

I’m officially on the lookout for new friends, optimistic and determined that this time, I’ll extend my inner social circle beyond three people in total. Turns out, when you lose one of your three closest people, you’re only left with two. Who knew?

Putting all my expectations of social fulfilment on my boyfriend’s shoulders has proved to be a very ineffective strategy, while my long-distance best friend is slowly going crazy from all my WhatsApp spamming.

Yes, I am that friend that will send you a 60-message rant before you wake up. Any volunteers?

While I’m trying to make friendships in lockdown — saying that’s hard doesn’t quite cut it — I find myself subconsciously comparing everyone to my former best friend. I can’t shake off the feeling that what we had was extraordinarily special, by no means replaceable and 100% fulfilling.

Well, if our friendship was so great, it probably wouldn’t have ended with a furious fight that stretched on for hours… coincidentally, on a national friendship day. The universe sure loves irony.

The unhealthy habit of looking for a new version of my ex-friend has led me to analyse relationships from many new angles. One angle in particular has helped me a great deal.

Thanks to it, I’ve realised where my friendship excelled and where it seriously failed — which has made me more aware of what I want my future friendships as well as my current romantic relationship to look like.

The Bookworm Method

I’m a bookworm. A huge one. I’m that person that read all compulsory literature at school three years in advance. Twice.

Luckily, I’m also in sync with reality (most of the time), so I’ve decided to apply a common novel analysis method to my relationships in order to dissect what went wrong in those that failed.

In my literature classes at high school, we always focused on two different aspects of a novel — the content and the structure. The content is the written story itself, while the structure focuses on how the story is presented to you. It’s what binds the whole thing together, from the distribution of chapters to the language that’s used to what kind of a narrator the author is using.

These are both equally important and have so much to bring to the table. A book without some sort of structure wouldn’t make sense (in fact, it probably wouldn’t even exist because a book does need some structure to even be bound together), and if you don’t give it any content, well, it’s not a novel. It’s a notebook. Or a journal. A sketchbook if you will.

When I looked at my ruined friendship from this new angle, I suddenly saw with perfect clarity that while our content was pretty much amazing, the structure was threatening to fall apart for years. And then it did.

So, what’s the difference between these two when applied to human relationships?

The Content

When my friend and I started building our friendship in our early teens, we felt like we found each other’s soulmate. We were so similar.

We had the same hobbies, aspirations, passions, opinions, feelings of not belonging. We were weird outcasts with our heads in the clouds, and that’s what brought us together.

What’s more, we never ran out of interesting things to talk about. We spent hours upon hours discussing the most intricate and intellectually challenging topics, and because we refused to end the conversation, we often walked from room to room — to boil a cup of tea, to use the toilet, to shower, to eat — together, deeply immersed in each other’s thoughts.

We did this for ten years, and even when we had some periods of silence in the initial stages of the friendship, we always felt like we were the best friends on planet Earth once we met up again and got talking. It was pretty amazing, and as fulfilling as my other friendships are, this felt special.

It felt like the universe granted us with a blessing when we were both born in the same small town in the north of the Czech Republic because we were sure that our friendship didn’t happen randomly — no, it was so extraordinary that we believed it was meant to be.

And that’s your content. What connects you, what brings you together, what you talk about for hours, what makes you feel like you’ve found something beautiful simply because of how much you understand each other’s minds.

It’s the energy you share when you’re exploring their thoughts while opening yourself up to their friendly examining eye, it’s the thrill and satisfaction when you know you’ve been socially fulfilled by spending time with them.

The content is what brings you together in the first place, and what allows you to build something that will eventually move within the constraints of a specific structure.

The Structure

This is where toxicity can easily creep in, poisoning the pillars you’ve built together. This is where relationships might fail — the participants haven’t bound the book together well enough, so it eventually wears off and falls apart.

Just like my friendship did. There have been toxic undertones to it for years, maybe even since the very beginning, only we were too young to notice. We built our structure naturally, without much analytical thought or teamwork, which means that certain dynamics was established early on and we only kept adding to it as we grew older.

Your structure is how the relationship works. It’s the relationship itself, a bond you have created together instead of two individuals sharing things in common. The relationship takes on a life of its own and it binds you two together through past experience, present hard work and future aspirations.

Except when you don’t know that hard work is urgently needed, you let it crumble away, bit by bit.

The individual traits of the two of you combine together to create a certain space where you can share and enjoy the content of your connection. This includes things such as keeping your promises, showing up on time, not flaking, being loyal and trustworthy, helping out.

It also contains jealousy, competitiveness, feelings of inferiority, fear of abandonment or tip-toeing around important things instead of solving them productively, all of which were subconsciously present in my friendship but rarely addressed and worked through.

As the content of our discussions grew more detailed and focused on exploring our deepest motives and the way we inherently perceived the world, we noticed many differences between us.

We went from feeling like we were basically the same person to realising that there’s, in fact, a huge difference between us — and the structure of our relationship was too weak to hold us together when this bubbled to the surface.

That’s why you always need to invest in the structure just as much as you do in the content.

The Takeaway

A healthy and meaningful relationship has to be in alignment with your needs both in the content and the structure. Can you have a good friendship with someone who you have mind-blowing discussions with, while also being jealous of each other at the same time? I don’t think so.

In the same way, being loyal to someone who doesn’t engage with you in a fulfilling manner is a waste of time. Combining these two aspects together is essential.

While what I had with my friend was special, it was also incredibly toxic. Thanks to The Bookworm Method, I know what to look out for in my new friendships with more self-awareness.

Not only am I looking for a good friend — I also aspire to be one. In all the ways possible.

Wonderful relationships thrive because all aspects are taken care of with great care. So communicate effectively and build strong pillars with love, trust and enriching thoughts.

Plant some trees and flowers. And then watch yourselves bloom.