How Power Ruins Friendship

(Or deepens it)

One of the biggest fights my wife and I have gotten into started as a joke between the two of us. We were just bebopping around our house on an uneventful Sunday afternoon, when I saw a meme about an alpha wolf that I thought was funny.

I jokingly asked my wife Gabrielle who she thought was the alpha in our relationship.

What began as a playful back and forth quickly turned into a tense, and even heated conversation once it became clear that both of us (with some level of seriousness) considered ourselves to be the alpha while the other was the beta.

Neither of us would have come to this naturally or said it outside of this joking context, but both of us had somehow arrived at that conclusion by forcing ourselves to answer it honestly.

It then devolved into the typical blaming, defensive, aggravated type of conversation that most unhelpful marital conversations look like. I was hurt because I felt like I did so much to lead us, make decisions and protect her. She was hurt because she felt she was typically the one that would take responsibility for logistical matters in our lives, and had a better memory than me (I have ADHD) so she had to take charge more often.

Truthfully, all of this was good insight, but in the context of an overly emotional fight, it was not moving us in a good direction.

A few days later, we were able to find resolution and chart a path towards loving each other better in the future, but one thing was abundantly clear from our conversation: we had struck a very deep nerve accidentally by bringing up the topic of power dynamics in our relationship.

The truth is, every single relationship in our lives, especially in relationships with those closest to us, there are power dynamics and power imbalances. You can always tell who the alpha is in a wolf pack. You can usually reason your way to deciding who the alpha is in a friend group. If you were able to poll your closest friends and family to ask them to share with brutal honesty who they believed to be the “alpha” in your relationship with a spouse, I’d be willing to bet you would get a response with statistical significance indicating one or the other.

What fascinates me about this is how little people seem to acknowledge these dynamics. I suppose nobody wants to acknowledge that someone might have power over them, especially in close relationships. But to me, I believe that these dynamics and having open conversations about them can be a pathway to stronger, richer, more honest relationships with the people in our lives.

So let’s dive into the ways power shows up in our relationships, and what we can do about it. Ultimately, I’ll share a vision of power that has helped me chart a path towards healthier, more living relationships.

What does power imbalance look like?

To start out, there are 5 main categories of power imbalances that exist in every relationship. Obviously, each relationship is complex and unique, and I would not expect one person to have the edge in every one of these categories, but its a really helpful exercise to ask yourself who might have the trump card for each one. It makes having these conversations with people much more nuanced and helpful.

Social Capital & Influence

Typically one person will have more “people” power in the relationship. This is simply the ability to influence people, both in depth and quantity. This relates to social status, network strength, and charisma. It’s not always the strongest wolf in a wolf pack that gets to be the alpha, but the one with the most social pull.

This can show up in small ways like how likely it is that a person will text you back when you text them, to bigger things like how many people someone can rally to show up to an event they are hosting or how many people would vote for them in an election.

Who Leads, Who Follows?

This question can be asked in a few different categories. Who typically comes up with ideas of what to spend time doing? Who typically initiates trips, dates, hangouts, sex? Who is more likely in the relationship to go with the flow or even chooses to defer to the other person’s ideas?

Although followers often hold power in “leader-follower” dynamics, the leader typically leads from a position of power.

Gabs and I experience this one in our relationship every time the conversation of “where should we live” comes up, which I think is one of the biggest spaces that power dynamics show up in relationships.

This leader/ follower dynamic is closely related to the third dynamic:

Decision-Making Power

One of the hardest parts of marital fights is that after you’ve done the work to really understand one another, empathize with one another and connect emotionally during a fight, a decision often still looms. Many of our biggest fights as a married couple have related to binary decisions we had to make. Who bends the knee to whom?

This is where power comes into play. It’s helpful to ask yourself “who gets their way more often when there’s difference in opinion?”.

Most couples and friends do their best to balance this factor out since it is one of the more glaringly obvious places a power imbalance can stand out, but despite most peoples best efforts, there will almost always be someone with more power in this area.

Emotional Power

While this is definitely one of the more subtle dynamics in the power equation, it is still incredibly powerful. Emotional power looks like one person typically finding themselves in an emotional support role, and the other finding themselves on the receiving end of the support. In very emotionally unbalanced relationships, the supporter will end up feeling invisible and resentful.

Emotional intelligence is usually a reflection of a person’s ability to see this mechanism at play and seek equilibrium. Strong imbalances here are often the most destructive to a relationship in the short term, and sadly are pretty common.

I see relationships like this absolutely everywhere in my life. From my observation, it usually stems from a lack of self awareness and conversational skill rather than an intention to “use” people as emotional crutches.

Relational Availability

Scarcity and availability are a constant dance in every relationship. When one person is consistently harder to reach, slower to respond, or more elusive, the other person often adjusts their behavior around that — waiting, wondering, or chasing. This is often a reflection of a persons attachment style, which is a whole other rabbit trail of relational dynamics one can go down.

Avoidant types can often hold the power in relationships because they are less available, resulting in a pursuer, pursuant dynamic. Having healthy boundaries in relationship is massively important, but often a strongly held boundary can also become a power lever.

Two Kinds of Power

Why do I bring these power dynamic categories up?

Because I truly believe they are always at play in each relationship in our lives, whether we like it or not. The question then becomes, what can be done to affect each of these so that we create the healthiest possible relationships with the people in our lives?

For me, the most significant breakthrough came not from trying to balance these power dynamics on a knifes edge, but rather from shifting my perspective on power as a whole.

I’ve long been a fan of a South African philosopher/ theologian named

Andre Rabe

.

He’s relatively unknown and undiscovered (at least in my small corner of the world), but some of his thoughts about power completely flipped my paradigm of power on its head a few years ago.

He asserts that there are actually two kinds of power: unilateral power (the ability to enforce your will on others while remaining invincible to will of others) and sustaining power (essentially - love.)

While unilateral power resembles that of the ultra wealthy, those with physical prowess, and military advantage, sustaining power is an enabling force.

It’s the power of a woman creating life in her womb, or the power of the sun making life on earth possible. Sustaining power gives life and energy to everything it encounters.

The existence of this kind of power doesn’t negate the dynamics that unilateral power create in our relationships, but I believe that ultimately, learning to become powerful in this way is the path to building life giving relationships.

But here’s the hard part: being powerful in this way often means appearing weak from a unilateral power perspective.

I often think of Jesus’ words “Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.”

Even Jesus’ own life, death and resurrection radiate this very principle — how odd that the most powerful person in the universe demonstrates his power by dying for those he loves.

Andre says beautifully in his teaching on these two kinds of power “Love is a relational power that both effects, and opens itself up to be affected. Those who have loved most know that love transforms us.”

Bumping into these ideas from Andre brought me back to a quote from C.S. Lewis’ Children’s book The Lion The Witch and The Wardrobe I remembered my mom reading to me as a child.

In the book, after Aslan is murdered by the “deep magic” of the White Witch, and miraculously returns to life, he is asked about what power brought him back. He responds by saying:

“though the Witch knew the Deep Magic, there is a magic deeper still which she did not know. Her knowledge goes back only to the dawn of time. But if she could have looked a little further back, into the stillness and the darkness before Time dawned, she would have read there a different incantation.”

I believe this deeper power, this deeper magic is the power of sacrificial, self-giving love.

And I truly believe that this kind of love is at the center of the most life giving relationships in our lives. Since we can only ever choose our behaviors and actions and not those of others, it is up to us to demonstrate this love first. Yes we can seek others who radiate this same kind of power, but the real secret is that every relationship in our life becomes more precious to us when this love takes root in our own hearts.

We no longer need to be so picky about who we do and don’t love, who we do and don’t allow into our lives. I often find that my assumptions about who will make a great friend in my life are wrong, so I’ve resolved to just show up with love to anyone who comes into my life with an open mind as to who will be the ones that will truly endure.

Being more than an alpha

So what do we do with these two kinds of power in our relationships? Personally, I have found the attempt to balance unilateral power among lovers, friends and friend groups to be futile.

But I do think that naming it and having an open conversation about it with the goal of removing barriers to connection is a fruitful thing to do. And I also believe that having a nuanced understanding of power that values the “deeper magic” of love offers us a path forward when we find ourselves overwhelmed from trying to untangle the spaghetti of our relational power dynamics.

To be honest, I don’t think I ever would have realized how deep all of this goes if Gabs and I hadn’t gotten into a silly argument about who was the “alpha” in the relationship, and I think that’s pretty darn funny. So I dedicate this blog to Gabrielle for keeping me humble and most likely being the alpha (in both definitions of power) in our relationship. What a lovely thing it is to learn all this weird, beautiful, uncomfortable stuff alongside someone so profoundly loving.

As always, thanks so much for being here and reading! I intend each of these blog posts to be more of a conversation starter than a monolithic beacon of wisdom, so please get busy in the comments!

I love you all, have a lovely day.