Being available might be the most difficult thing to do—something we struggle with every day. Someone choosing a gift navigates three loyalties: give what was asked for, what you think they need, or what you want them to have. The first satisfies expectations, the second claims wisdom, the third serves your needs disguised as generosity. Being available operates along this fraught geometry.
How do we offer of ourselves that satisfies what someone expects of us? The question sounds simple until you recognise its impossibility. To do this, we need to know what the other person wants as well as have an opinion about what the other person needs to grow. These are not the same knowledge. One is stated, requested, demanded. The other is inferred, intuited, arrogantly presumed. Having an opinion about what another person needs to grow places us in the position of adjudicating their development, whether appointed to that role or not.
If instead of figuring what the other person needs to grow (develop in a direction that is good for them) we figure what we need them to do to grow ourselves (develop in a direction that is good for us), we are only being manipulative to them. The distinction sounds straightforward but collapses in practice. When you encourage a friend toward therapy, is it because they need healing or because their distress exhausts you? The motives tangle until separation becomes impossible.
Being a friend and not being a manipulative operative is an everyday struggle (even if we think not-manipulating others is a core, deep-rooted value in us). The struggle persists because availability itself contains contradiction. To be truly available requires setting aside our needs whilst maintaining enough self to offer anything. Complete self-erasure produces empty presence. Complete self-assertion produces domination disguised as care.
Perhaps being available doesn't mean resolving this tension but learning to inhabit it fully without pretending otherwise. Perhaps friendship is not the absence of manipulation but the ongoing practice of noticing when we've drifted from their growth toward our own and steering back. Not purity, but vigilance.
Do our deepest values guarantee our actions, or merely make visible the distance between who we are and who we claim to be? Can we remain available to another person whilst acknowledging we cannot distinguish their needs from our projections? Does mature friendship require abandoning the fantasy of pure service?