Getting to know someone can be visualized as counting icks. In other words, it is about balancing the things we like and dislike about a person and drawing the friendship circle accordingly.
It’s inevitable that everyone will give us an ick sometime –– it’s a disagreement between two people’s views and behaviors. Think of someone with a lovely personality that impresses us as giving us “brownies” and people who throw us off with disturbing traits (by our standards) as giving us “icks.” A person may give us many delicious brownies before they give us an ick. Or they may give us so many icks upon meeting that we simply do not entertain the idea of becoming friends with this person. So much of building a connection with someone is about the frequency and timing of the brownie-ick interval. Sometimes one gives us a brownie that is followed by a bombardment of icks, then they try to fix the problem with a cheesecake, and we just know it’s not going to work.
With some people, we are just so happy that we forget to count the icks: not because there is none –– nobody is perfect and no two individuals think exactly alike –– but because we like this person for who they are that we start to find the icks cute and embrace the fact that everybody, including ourselves, gives icks. This is when icks that exist in some people become attractive quirks in others, and being graceful to others helps us become less harsh with ourselves, too.
But maybe it’s also important to know that sometimes, we should stop counting icks altogether. It’s not about anticipating what could “go wrong” in a person and when the cup of differences overflows, downright canceling this person. People are too complex for a series of add and subtract, and we could never place humans under narrow constraints of agreement and disagreement. If we are only surrounded by people that are exactly like us, we can never grow or know why this world is full of differences.
Maybe, as long as we are still laughing and learning from each other, it’s a friendship worth having.
