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The Vexing Problem of the ‘Medium Friend’
令人烦恼的“中等朋友”问题
Most of us maintain an informal mental inventory of our friendships, sorting those closest to us, our intimates, from our acquaintances. My friend R. once went a step further. He ranked his friends on a document on his computer.
我们大多数人都会在心里对自己的朋友列一个非正式的清单，将那些与我们最亲近的密友与熟人区分开来。我的朋友R曾经更进一步。他对他的朋友们进行了排名，并记录在电脑的文件里。
As a younger man, R. found himself dissatisfied with his social life, which kept him busy yet unfulfilled, and he built his friend hierarchy to diagnose why.
作为一个比较年轻的人，R对自己的社交生活不太满意，他的社交生活让他很忙碌，却不能带来满足感，于是他建立了朋友等级排序来找出原因。
He found that he had a small group of first-tier friends, with whom he was happy to spend time under any circumstances. And he had a huge number of acquaintances.
他发现自己有少数一级朋友，他很乐意在任何情况下与他们待在一起。他还有大量的熟人。
But the friends who caused him the most strife — as well as the most inner turmoil, yearning, anxiety and guilt — were those arrayed along the middle levels. Call them the “medium friends.”
但给他带来最多冲突的朋友——以及最多内心的不安、渴望、焦虑和内疚的朋友——是那些排在中间层级的人。把他们称为“中等朋友”吧。
As an example, R. told me about a certain friend. They were close during college but by their 30s had grown apart. There was no falling-out, no identifiable reason for their friendship to wither.
例如，R跟我讲了某个朋友的事。他们在大学时关系很密切，但到了30多岁时就疏远了。他们没有发生争吵，也没有任何明显的原因导致他们的友情逐渐消逝。
R. simply did not feel as connected to this friend as he once did. And so, without malevolence or even conscious intent, he shuffled her down in his personal friend deck.
R只是感觉和这个朋友不像以前那样亲近了。因此，不带恶意地，甚至也不是故意地，他把她从自己的私人朋友列表中移除了。
When R.’s friend recently reached out, to ask for his support during her addiction recovery, his first impulse was to feel taxed — then vexed at his own irritation.
当R的这个朋友最近主动联系他，请求R在自己戒瘾期间给予支持时，他的第一反应是感到沉重的负担，然后对自己的不耐烦感到恼火。
But she was leaning on him in a way that felt too heavy, given what their friendship had become, and he wrestled with how to be there for her. He didn’t book a flight to visit her. He didn’t even call her. He observed himself not doing these things and felt self-reproach.
但考虑到他们的友谊已经变成了现在这样，她对他的依赖感觉太沉重了，他绞尽脑汁地想如何去支持她。他没有订机票去看她。他甚至没有打电话给她。他观察到自己没有做这些事情，并感到自责。
Emily Langan, a communication professor at Wheaton College who studies friendship, described this feeling as, I’m not willing to go there, and I feel kind of slimy for not going there. But we’re just not that kind of friend.
威顿学院研究友情的传播学教授艾米丽·兰根将这种感觉描述为：我不愿意这样做，而且我因为没这样做而感到有点可耻。但我们并不是那种朋友。
Medium friends are genuine friends. You share history (such as the same alma mater), circumstances (an employer) or interests (rude jokes, the royals, thrifting or squash). Medium friends make you laugh, bring news, offer insights or expertise.
中等朋友是真正的朋友。你们有共同的经历（例如同一所母校）、共同的环境（比如雇主）或共同的兴趣（比如低俗笑话、皇室八卦、省钱或打壁球）。中等朋友让你欢笑、带来新消息、提供见解或专业知识。
But, unlike the closest friends, medium friends test the limits of your time, love and energy. There are only so many dinners in a week, so many people with whom you can be incessantly texting.
但是与最亲密的朋友不同，中等朋友会考验你时间、爱和精力的极限。一周只能吃这么多顿晚餐，只能和这么多人不停地发短信。
Medium friends prove the lie in any naive attempt to be all things to all people. And that is the problem with medium friends, the invisible lines you draw around them without ever being explicit — to them or even, possibly, to yourself.
中等朋友证明了，天真地试图让所有人都高兴是不可能的。而这就是中等朋友的问题所在，你在他们周围划出无形且从未显露的界限，你没有对他们表明，甚至也从未对自己表明。
Reciprocity is the foundation of every friendship: mutual sharing and caring in a context of trust.
互惠是每一段友情的基础：在信任的背景下相互分享和相互关心。
The tension embedded in medium friendship is this absence of clarity, allowing for the possibility of what Claude Fischer, a sociologist at the University of California, Berkeley, referred to in an interview as “asymmetric expectation”: You may like your medium friend less (or more) than they like you.
深嵌于中等友情中的紧张关系就是这种明确性的缺乏，这就为产生“不对称的期望”提供了可能（加州大学伯克利分校的社会学家克劳德·费舍在一次采访中提到不对称期望）：你对你的中等朋友的喜爱程度可能低于（或高于）他们对你的喜爱程度。
