My wife is a Dodgers fan. She sees someone wearing a Dodgers hat and calls out. For about four seconds, they go from strangers to friends. I have a friend who does the same thing with a drawn-out Chieeeeefs, and it works every time.
We are built to do this. That point of connection causes something in us to relax. You're one of mine. All it takes is a logo, an accent, even a shared complaint.
The reverse is just as true. Same parking lot, rival jersey. A sneer replaces a call out. Stiffness instead of ease. Two people giving each other a side-eye as they walk by.
With sports, that's mostly fun. It stops being fun when the marker is ideological. The friend you've had for fifteen years posts something you find not just wrong, but disturbing. The guy in your small group says a thing and you feel your body instantly on high alert.
That reaction is real. Your nervous system registered a threat and threat responses don't wait for evidence. The rhetoric we are inundated with every day is designed to produce exactly that. Every position is framed as an existential danger, every disagreement as the leading edge of something catastrophic. It plays on our fundamental safe/not-safe neurobiological machinery.
And it works.
The conversation stops being about what is right and becomes about who is right. The first one can be explored together. The second one has to be won. Once you're in the second one, your friend isn't a person with a view anymore, they're a position to be defeated. And the relationship suddenly becomes the thing you’d rather lose.
Love held hostage to an issue kills a love that covers a difference.
We all have friends we love but can disagree with. This is different. Requiring someone to adopt your side as a prerequisite to remaining in relationship creates a divide that extends far beyond friendship. It impacts our entire society. The moment we diminish a person to their ideology, trade their humanity for their political posture, we lose the thread of unconditional positive regard therapists are trained in and believers are called to.
Here's what changed things for me. It’s not my job to change someone’s mind.
That sounds like giving up. It isn't. It's an accurate accounting of what I actually have access to. I don't have access to the twenty years of experience that formed my friend's convictions. I don't have access to what will finally move him, or when, or through whom. I have access to whether I stay in the room. That's the whole list.
Presence has more reach than arguments. Compassion has more power than rejection. Nobody has ever been argued out of a position by someone they see as an enemy. The condition for being heard is being safe to be near. If I've made myself unsafe, my correctness is irrelevant — I've disqualified myself from delivering it.
God has access to what I don't. He's been working on people through means I can't see for a long time, and He doesn’t ask me to close the gap by force. He asks me to love the person in front of me.
The bridges we need aren't built by people who agree. They're built by people who stayed in relationship when agreement is off the table.
For reflection:
When you find fundamental differences with someone, what happens next — do you get curious, or do you prepare your arguments?
Have you let a friendship go over a difference, and what would it cost you to reach out without reviving the argument?
Are you carrying the burden of changing someone's mind and what would happen if you pursued presence over pressure?
—Aron Strong, LMFT