Unpaid Therapist Friend Quotes

A friend is by definition an unpaid therapist.

Even what passes as heterosexual intimacy is often resented by straight women who find themselves doing the emotional heavy lifting for men who have no close friends and won’t go to therapy. Men are less likely than women to discuss mental health with friends and family, to seek out psychotherapy, or to recognize they are depressed—a pattern so common as to be termed “normative male alexithymia” by psychologists.51 For straight men in relationships, all of these needs get aimed at women partners. In 2016, the writer Erin Rodgers coined the term “emotional gold digger” to describe straight men’s reliance on women partners to “play best friend, lover, career advisor, stylist, social secretary, emotional cheerleader, mom.”52 Elaborating on this dynamic and the emotional burnout it produces in straight women, Melanie Hamlett further explains that the concept of the emotional gold digger “has gained more traction recently as women, feeling increasingly burdened by unpaid emotional labor, have wised up to the toll of toxic masculinity, which keeps men isolated and incapable of leaning on each other. . . . While [women] read countless self-help books, listen to podcasts, seek out career advisors, turn to female friends for advice and support, or spend a small fortune on therapists to deal with old wounds and current problems, the men in their lives simply rely on them.

Your smartphone caters to your every whim, which seems great, but then it’s made it so much harder to adjust to the unclickable world. Everything real is also disappointing. No friend is as funny as a video you can pull up on your phone. No girl as hot as the endless catwalk in your pocket. You could meet someone for pizza, but with a swipe it arrives at your door; “contact-free delivery” means you don’t even need to talk to the pizza guy. Sometimes with a classmate you let your guard down and trade messages you shouldn’t. It was only a joke, but it’s never only a joke. Friends preserve everything you say in screenshots. You do the same, so that the deterrence of mutual assured destruction applies, enforced by teachers and administrators and college admissions committees. You’ve rarely spent a whole afternoon with a friend who lent you her full attention. You don’t know most of her secrets, and she doesn’t know yours; she’s already divulged her most intimate worries to a therapist. Rehashing it all again seems so pointless. You don’t really have time for friends, anyway. Your full-time, unpaid internship consumes every extra minute: five, six, eight hours a day—the settings don’t lie—staring at your phone. “My mental health sucks,” you tell the group chat. The others say theirs does, too. You can’t believe your dad had an actual job at your age. You don’t feel ready for anything like that. You’ve only ever known this overmanaged, veal-calf life. Occasionally it occurs to you to wonder: What if taking the risk is the only way to feel ready? What if the solution to adolescent mental health problems is to outgrow adolescence? That may explain why the unending parade of accommodation and intervention, which stretch childhood out like taffy, has only prolonged your torture.