Finding Relational Harmony

A Review of Fierce Tenderness by Mary E Hunt

I’m excited to continue my review of Fierce Tenderness: A Feminist Theology of Friendship by Mary E Hunt. Hunt’s friendship ethic is wrapped up in the phrase “fierce tenderness.”

“[Hunt] call[s] friendships "fierce" because of the intensity of attention. It

can be hard to be known so well, to be understood and transparent to friends who pay attention. Likewise, we all crave the tenderness that only those who love us can offer. Tenderness does not affect the ferocity, but it is the quality of care and nurture that only friends share. Of course a caregiver can be tender in touch, but only friends are tender in feeling.”¹

Hunt captures how a friendship can embody fierce tenderness through her model of friendship (pictured here).²

The model, based on Hunt’s research of women’s friendships, describes four different elements: love, power, embodiment, and spirituality. Each element is present in every friendship and “when all are present in harmony we see a friendship that works well.”³ For a detailed description of each element, you can read my first piece here.

Hunt’s model sheds light on why certain friendship dynamics work and others do not. In order to explore the model more fully, I will use it to dissect three different friendship dynamics from my own life. (A note that I changed the names of my friends)

Friendship A - Roomies

Andrea and I have lived together for 5 years in various different roommate configurations. She started off as just a friend of a friend but our connection has grown over the years. Our early relationship was forged through conflict. We lived with a roommate who struggled with mental health issues and other issues that impacted the functionality of the household. I really got to know Andrea by battling through the hard times together as we fought to both respect our roommate but also respect ourselves.

After that messy year, Andrea and I ended up finding an apartment together. Over the next 3 years, we grew to have a deep friendship. We have thrown parties together. We serve at church together and support one another in our walk with the Lord. We know each other deeply and know what we need in order to feel seen. We have had bumps in the road but have learned to navigate them as we understand each more fully. When I had a crushing moment of despair last fall, Andrea was one of the few people I knew I could trust to hold me as I cried.

A harmony of love, power, embodiment, and spirituality shows up in our friendship. As Andrea and I got to know each other better over the years, our love for each other grew. Going through the hard roommate situation grew our love for one another. Hunt describes love as “an orientation toward the world as if my friend and I were more united than separated, more at one among the many than separate and alone.”⁴ We had something to unite around and in that we saw the unique goodness in each other. Hunt offers that love also is the “commitment to deepen in unity without losing the uniqueness of the individuals at hand.”⁵ In my friendship with Andrea, I learned that to love someone is to love them as they are. Out of our love we built a home full of coziness and care. We’ve jam packed many people into our little space for parties and also had intimate dinners where we supported and cared for a mutual friend. Love has been a critical element of our friendship.

Power has been a driving force for changes in our friendship. I’ve learned the importance of proactively sharing power with another person in building a real connection. Andrea is white so holds certain privileges that I do not. At the same time, I naturally am more outgoing and opinionated while Andrea grew up in a family where expressing her needs wasn’t always welcome. As I reflect back, I realize that our friendship works because we actively work to share power with one another. We support each other in making decisions and eagerly seek each other’s opinions. It is through empowering each other that we are able to trust the love that we share.

One reason I find that my friendship with Andrea is healthy is that embodiment has grown as other elements in our friendship have grown. When we touch that touch is in the context of the love, power, and spirituality we share. I don’t know if I would have trusted Andrea to hold me at a vulnerable time if I did not have those other elements as strongly in our friendship. We also have found that we are compatible in our quality time needs which helps us to not feel smothered or overlooked. Hunt explains that embodiment takes into account “how one feels about some ways of being together.”⁶ Friends need to be in agreement on how they want to exist in the friendship for it to work.

Finally, the spirituality of our friendship is hard to describe but is definitely an element. We attend to our friendship by intentionally setting time aside to talk about our dynamic. I’ve seen the way that intentionality and creating traditions has helped our friendship grow.

Is Andrea my best friend? A question I used to grapple with a lot. In some ways, yes. I share an intimacy with her that I don’t with others. She’s seen me when I am most happy and held me when I cried. She knows my particular feelings around socks and what it means when I start lighting a bunch of candles. But, I have other friends who I’ve shared heartbreak with. Who I text or call first when my mind feels out of control. Friends who know my inner motivations better than Andrea.

The promise of the model is that the label of best friend with its allusion to a hierarchy isn’t needed to understand the depth of our relationship. As Hunt writes “whether friends are good, better, or best is not the issue. The point is that women friends, lots of them, are necessary for women’s survival in an often unfriendly environment.”⁷ The model “allows for best friends but does not make them the essence of the experience.”⁸

I have hurt relationships in the past in a quest to place them on an unhelpful scale. Hunt’s model helps me to see that what I have with Andrea is special because of the unique mix of love, power, embodiment and spirituality we have. I don’t need to compare it. As Side B people, we can often try to fit our friendships into patriarchal ideas of marriage and friendship in which there is a pinnacle relationship. A relationship that is better than every other in all aspects. Stepping out of this frame frees me to “focus on the quality of each relationship and its place in the whole picture” instead of trying to make a friendship into a patriarchal heterosexual marriage.⁹ I’m queer! And thank God for that. I don’t need to fit my life and my relationships into the categories of patriarchy.

Friendship B - Green Queens

One reason Hunt’s model is such a helpful tool is because it can be applied to relationships involving more than two people. My field hockey team is a friendship that works well. We became an official team in 2022. We’ve added and lost players over the years since but there continues to be good chemistry. We play in an adult recreational league so there are people of various skill levels. We work hard to make sure that everyone has fun and that we all have an opportunity to grow in our skill set.

Last summer, we had some conflict on the team. It’s normal for us to need subs for games. Because people often travel over the summer and miss games, we often need extra people to round out the team. This became an issue because folks were inviting friends to be subs when we already had enough people for a full team. In an effort to be nice, the unneeded subs got playing time but this caused some resentment to grow. It took addressing the issue directly and coming up with a clear plan for us to get past the conflict. The harmony of our friendship was restored and we went on to enjoy playing together the rest of the summer.

All of the four elements of the model are present in our friendship. Power was the element that caused the conflict. Hunt argues that “differences in power are the most prevalent reason for the breakup of friendships.”¹⁰ Both social/structural power and personal/individual power came into play in our friendship. It costs money to play on the team. When people invite subs to fill in, they play for free. So when the same people came to sub week after week when we didn’t actually need extra people it came across to some that people were trying to take advantage. The thought process was “I paid my money to play but I’m playing for less time because someone who didn’t pay showed up.” We have people of various different socioeconomic backgrounds on the team so the loss of value was felt more strongly by different people.

Personal/individual power takes into account personal charisma and people with strong personalities. This played a role in the conflict because women are socialized to be nice. We are told that it’s better to be agreeable than voice our concerns directly. So when the woman who was more outgoing and had a strong personality was the one inviting her friends to play as subs the initial response was to just let it happen. As it almost always happens, niceness leads to passive aggressiveness. It took someone on the team directly naming the bad vibe of the group for the conflict to be addressed. Team members were able to feel heard and we created a sub policy so that no one felt they didn’t get the playing time they paid for. If that conversation had not happened, the team likely would not have lasted through the summer. Power had to be shared again in an equitable way for the team’s harmony to come back.

Friendship C - the SBF™

I met Callie in freshman Spanish and we became friends almost instantly. We spent almost every day together that year. We studied together, we went on 9pm coffee runs, we made our own inside jokes, we told each other our secrets, and we cried together. Our connection grew over our four years together in college. And by graduation, I had never had a friendship as close as I had with Callie. I felt like she understood me in every way and that I understood her. I had more joy doing anything if I was doing it with her. I truly thought we’d be friends for the rest of my life. I loved her.

I graduated and moved a few hours away. Our relationship shifted but I still felt like we had a deep connection. Whenever we visited each other or chatted, it felt like we picked up exactly where we left off. Our friendship changed significantly when Callie started dating her boyfriend. Callie didn’t reach out as much and I felt out of the loop of her life. I felt like I was being replaced as her best friend. I was in the process of coming out and I felt like I couldn’t lean on her during this important life transition.

Conflict defined our relationship for over a year. I tried to share how I was feeling. We made promises for things to be different but things stayed the same. Instead of being excited to hear from her, I started to dread it. I cried after every time we spoke. It no longer was a life-giving relationship. And then finally, we broke up. There isn’t a better way to phrase it and I’m grateful that Hunt also uses that phrase when talking about friendship. Hunt acknowledges that break ups are painful and “loss of a friend can be as dramatic as a divorce.”¹¹

Hunt’s model truly helped me to better understand why our friendship ended. One of the main elements that changed was our embodiment. I left the physical context that made our relationship work. We no longer lived in the same city so we no longer did the things that built our connection. Adding onto that, in our new context, we couldn’t agree on what we wanted from our friendship. Hunt writes about embodiment saying that

“One friend may wish more time than the other. She may say: let’s go to the movies, take a vacation, talk on the phone everyday, work together. All of these possibilities are subject to different needs, interpretations, indeed different whims. How one feels about some ways of being together, how long, how often, and other quantitative measures, can have an impact on the qualitative experiences of friendship. When the differences are simply more than the friendship can stand the friendship falls apart. If one feels too much or too little pressure, feels too constrained or not enough attention, lack of breathing room or a loss of self, hard decisions about distance usually portend the disintegration of the relationship.”¹²

It’s weird that this point from Hunt sums up so much of what happened to Callie and I’s friendship. A lot of my hurt came from broken promises about the type of embodiment we would share. We went from talking every day when we were in college to talking once a week when I first moved away to maybe getting a text response from her every other week. We talked about this change but nothing actually changed to make it better. I think the reason for that connects with another aspect of the model - love.

“She loved me and I don’t know why she doesn’t love me any more.”¹³ This quote is one that Hunt offers as one she heard from many people she interviewed. I know for sure that I said this exact phrase, through tears, to a friend. Ultimately, we broke up because we lost the love that held our friendship together. Hunt argues, and I agree, that it’s hard to explain why love gets lost in relationships.¹⁴ She also writes that “friendships can break up because one of the friends is incapable of sustaining the degree of intimacy wanted by the other in order to push the friendship to new depths.”¹⁵ I find this to be true when reflecting back on the break up. Callie was finding new intimacy with her partner which changed the intimacy we had shared. This changed the love that we shared with one another in a way that wasn’t fixable. Like Hunt, I don’t think this fully captures the mystery of why love was lost but it accounts for some of the reason.¹⁶ We loved each other and then we didn’t.

Hunt has a lot of insights about friendship loss that helped me process this friendship break up. I don’t have space to get into that here but I highly recommend her book if you’ve gone through a similar experience. I don’t think we have enough queer voices talking about the pains of friendship loss and she offers a beautiful resource.

---

I hope this reflection of three relationships in my life illuminates the fierce tenderness model. I hope you are able to better use the model to understand the friendships in your life. This review is only a taste of Hunt’s ideas. Hunt’s book contains so many more nuggets of insight that I couldn’t describe fully in this review. If any of these ideas resonate with you, I hope you pick up her book.

1. Mary Hunt, Fierce Tenderness: A Feminist Theology of Friendship (New York: The Crossroad Publishing Company, 1991), 90.

2. Ibid, 99.

3. Ibid.

4. Ibid, 100.

5. Ibid.

6. Ibid, 127.

7. Ibid, 95.

8. Ibid, 106.

9. Ibid, 96.

10. Ibid, 126.

11. Ibid, 127.

12. Ibid.

13. Ibid, 128.

14. Ibid.

15. Ibid.

16. Ibid.