You're listening to Roundtable, I'm Nihon Ling, joined by Steve and Ding Hung.
You've just had the ultimate friendship breakup.
Goodbye to your daily text buddy and partner in crime.
It's a little like breaking up with a partner, but without the emotional baggage and maybe a little more drama.
What happens when friendships end?
Spoiler alert, it's not always as pretty as we'd hope, but it's always a learning experience.
And would you prefer air drying or clothes dryers for your everyday laundry?
Because here in China with the majority opt for air drying, more and more young people started to enjoy the toasty smell of the clean clothes.
But first, friendship, like any bond, is viewed on the delicate balance of shared moments, trust and mutual understanding.
But what happens when that balance tips?
When the people who once felt like family become strangers or worse sources of emotional turmoil?
Today, let's look at a very important and also life's hardest question.
What do we do? When a friendship has turned, has run its course, and how can we learn from the end of it?
So, exactly why are we talking about this?
Well, I think that a lot of media focuses on when a romantic relationship ends, right?
There are a trillion, probably ten trillion songs in every language around the world written about heartbreak, when you lose your boyfriend or girlfriend or things.
I mean, it's Taylor Swift.
Taylor Swift has made a career out of these types of songs.
So, when we have a romantic relationship, and yeah, tons of songs or movies or TV shows or books that we can turn to as a source of support, and we find it comforting to see or to hear about or to read about the fact that someone else is going through something similar or has gone through something
similar, and we find comfort in that.
But what you don't really see is a movie about a friendship ending.
It's just not as dramatic.
So it's not really covered in popular media, and in research, too, there's been tons of research conducted about what happens when a romantic relationship ends.
But they don't get, when friendship ends, friendships end, that topic doesn't get as much attention from researchers as well.
And Grace Veith is a researcher in social psychology at the University of Minnesota, and she studies friendship dissolution, which, to answer your question, is why we're talking about this today.
And Grace said, I think people would be surprised that we researchers are just now starting to consider how friendships might end and that it's a very recent phenomenon, the research, not that fact that friendships end, but the work is just beginning, and there's a clear societal script for how a breakup
should go with a romantic partner, how we could get over it, step one, step two, step three, step four, but there's nothing for us to look to in how to get over it when a friendship ends.
Yes, and I think it has a lot to do with exactly why the friendship has ended or what caused it or the process of it.
So I'm going to ask this personal question to Ding -Heng.
You can say no, if you do not want to share, but do you have a friendship or a story you want to share with us?
How did the last very memorable friendship ends for you?
What was the reason?
Were you just drifted apart or was there a big dramatic scene you shout out to each other?
Or what was the story?
Was there a story that is so memorable to you that you even feel a little bit regret having that friendship ends?
Well, friendship ends.
I need to look at my very remote memory, maybe when I was a very little boy, but in my adulthood, after entering my adolescence, teenager years, I can hardly think of any case where friendship ended for me.
Thank you. Actually, I was looking for that answer because I feel like for adults, sometimes the friendship, they're not ending, they're more likely to be fading away, being watered down.
But that's also ending.
That's also ending.
And researchers, they looked at one study from the 1980s, they looked at 90 adults between aged 20 and 28.
And the different reasons that their friendships came to an end.
And one of the reasons was a lack of physical proximity, geographic inconvenience, if you will.
And being an expat, someone who has lived overseas for half of his life, I can attest to that.
You have friends come into your life because they'll move into the country where you're living and then you'll have friends leave your life because they go back to their home country or somewhere else.
And that in a sense is the friendship ending.
It's not that there was a big dramatic fight, but you're not close to each other geographically anymore.
So you tend not to communicate that much anymore.
This makes a lot of sense.
When I was in primary school or in middle school, I can always be good friend with my seatmate, whoever's sitting next to me.
And the thing is, when the seat arrangements changed, we talk a bit less and I have, quote unquote, new friends with my new seatmate.
Yes. I was really realistic when it comes to this.
So geographically, it makes a lot of sense.
Yeah. So again, going back to the sharing of my personal experience, I also have had situations where I used to have a lot of interactions with a particular group of people or a particular individual during a particular period, middle school period, university period.
But as we graduate it and move on to our next stage of life, indeed, that intimacy, that close level of interaction no longer existed.
But I somehow feel like less interaction does not really affect the core of our friendship, you know, because each reunion every now and then still gave us a lot of fantastic feelings.
Like most recently I made a trip actually back to my home town and the nearby cities with a particular purpose of reunion, of meeting some old friends once again.
I hadn't met with these people for many years.
For some of them, it's more than a decade.
But the moment we met, somehow I felt like the old feeling, the old relationship remains.
That also is very common for some people when they meet with old friends, their old accent even came back.
Yeah, their old accent.
Yes. So let's talk about interference in other relationships.
Have you ever had a friendship affected by that?
Interference? In terms of, you know, if you're dating somebody and all of a sudden you don't spend as much time with your other friends?
Yeah. That happens a lot, I think.
They did a survey in America and they said that 66 % of all or most of their friends, 66 % said all or most of their close friends are of the same gender and women were more likely to provide this answer than men, 71 % to 61%.
I think it's a natural thing.
Let's talk about that.
Do we agree or disagree?
When you get married, your relationships with a person of the opposite sex, those tend to disappear more so than the friendships that you have with the same gender.
Do you think that's fair to say or not?
Guess so. Yeah, I guess that's a fair point.
That's largely the case.
Yeah. And also in certain cases for those who started to have kids, they tend to remain the friendship and keep the friendship with those who also have kids, especially in the similar age groups.
You can talk about raising the kid.
Whereas if you continue to be friends with those without a kid, the common topics that you can share feels like there are fewer, fewer topics.
Yeah, well, I was reading a blog post from a writer, I believe she was a writer for the New York Times or some media, a big media outlet, and she was sharing a personal story.
She said that she was very close -knit with a small group of female friends of hers.
When they were in college, they did everything together.
They went everywhere together.
And that was about maybe over a decade ago.
And now the group still keeps in touch through a group chat and things like that.
But here's what happened.
In the group chat, suddenly, bing, a picture shows up, and it's all the members of the group, except for her.
They're in downtown New York.
They're in Manhattan having cocktails somewhere, and they're wearing hats from a local tennis tournament that they had attended together.
And she didn't get the invite.
And she said suddenly it hit her.
She has two children and a husband now, and those friends are still single.
And she was destroyed.
That she didn't even get an invite feeling that her friends, just because her life circumstances had changed, her friends decided to just ignore her and not invite her to the event.
I'm going to sound cold -hearted and harsh, but what lags in the story is that has she turned down invitations, and how many times did she do that?
Well, that wasn't included in the blog post.
We don't know. Yeah, that's true.
But yeah, I think it's an inevitability.
And this is what, you know, I looked at a lot of different articles on this topic.
And all of the researchers seem to agree on this, is that as we get older, our group of friends tends to get smaller.
And inevitably, we will lose our friends as time goes on, and as your life changes and your priorities change.
But here's the million dollar question.
Are these friends who maybe would disappear from your life, are they worth trying to hold on to, to put in the effort?
And experts say, oh, before I answer, what do you think?
What do you think they say about that question?
Is it worth putting in that effort when you have your other priorities to try to save these friendships?
Yeah. Well, I think ultimately it will come down to this question, how much do you really cherish this particular friendship with this particular individual?
How much nice memory do you share together?
If it's just a, you know, day -to -day, not day -to -day, but just average, nothing extraordinary kind of friendship, then why not let it go?
It sounds so terrible.
I know. To define somebody like that.
But I'm going to say something even worse.
But you're absolutely right.
It's just those words that are so harsh.
And also what Ding Hung here, at least what Ding Hung said is that how much you cherish the relationship, what I'm going to give is even worse.
That is how much the relationship means to you.
Because if you know Chinese, in the Chinese language, we have a word for friends.
That's peng yaw. And the first character peng, actually, initially it means a group of people.
And the second character yaw, it means hand in hand, it means cooperation, it means together.
So deeply, the first character carries the meaning that if you're friends, you should have the same goal, you should work together towards the same direction.
Whereas the second character emphasizes that you should deeply connect with each other, you should be able to understand each other's feelings, you should be able to empathize on a deeper level.
So a peng yaw should be like that, a friend should be like that.
If you're not physically together, if you don't talk to each other that much, even if you still value that memory quite so much, technically speaking, this person is no longer the really, let's say, typical or up to standard friend with you.
His and he or she would be an old friend that you share memory with, but you no longer have the same direction, you go together and you do not, you no longer have the ability to empathize each other's situations deeply.
Then let's just, you know, call it an old friend.
Cultural question. In China, if you use that word between yourself and another person, peng yaw, you said?
Peng yaw, yes. Peng yaw, if you're using that word, is there more pressure in the friendship in Chinese culture, do you think?
If someone is considered a really close friend, do you feel more of a, I don't want to use the word burden, but a responsibility to take care of that person?
I think there is a certain element of that is true to that.
But it's getting less pressured.
Yeah. I feel like. Yeah.
Peng yaw. And also another word is shu ren.
It's more like. Appointance.
Appointance. So yeah, we have the Chinese equivalent of English.
And since we're switching to Chinese learning lesson for just one minute.
Don't turn this into take away Chinese.
But I do really want to introduce another word, Chinese idiom, jiu tong dao he.
It basically means we have the same aspiration.
We have the same goal.
We're working towards the same long term destination.
Then that is a true friend that at least at this life stage you should cherish.
So I think my answer is that if an old friend is becoming an old friend, let him or her be.
And back to my original question.
What do you think experts say about that?
That's what they say is that when a friendship ends, you don't necessarily have to worry about it too much.
Now we're talking they are talking about the types of friendships that kind of naturally dissolve without any dramatic event.
They say that it's OK to let it go.
They also say the research is.
And I thought this was quite interesting that people tend to.
And this might be cultural.
But people tend to over romanticize their friendships, perhaps even sometimes more than their romantic relationships.
Which is why it can be harder to lose a friend than it can be to end a romantic relationship.
Now, of course, that depends on a lot of different types of things, but it is a possibility.
Yes. And in the end, you only have a fixed amount of time and energy in your life.
And don't feel this or anything like a breaking up with an old friend of the ending of an old friendship, viewing it as the possibility of starting a new friendship with some new people that will even benefit both you and your friends more in the next stage in life.
Yeah. And just a final point on this, if it does end in a dramatic way, then they say that you should allow it's it's very analytical, but they say that you should allow your feelings about the relationship to inform your decision.
So if you feel like losing that person from your life is going to leave a massive void, then put in the work to fix that problem with that friend and don't just let them go because you're stubborn and you think you were right.
And it could be that could be a mistake as well.
Yes. So stop asking yourself what do I do when a friendship ends?
Ask yourself, how will this experience shape the way I approach future connections?
You're listening to Roundtable.
Coming up next. Why do people in one of the world's most attack -savvy countries do you prefer air drying their laundry instead of have a clothes dryer at home?
Don't go away. Looking for passion?
How about fiery debate?
Want to hear about current events in China from different perspectives?
Then tune in to Roundtable, where East meets West and understanding is the goal.
It's Roundtable with myself, Niu Hong -lin, Steve Hatherly and Ding Hong.
In many parts of the world, clothes dryers are seen as essential household appliances.
However, in China, they remain surprisingly uncommon.
This decision isn't about space.
There are deeper cultural and economic factors at play.
From a reverence for natural methods to concerns about energy consumption, this avoidance reflects a distinctive approach to daily life.
So before going into detailed facts and figures about air about clothes dryers here in China, allow me to ask both of you, do you use clothes dryers or prefer air drying?
Well, to me or at my home, it's actually a combination of the two.
You know, yeah. Nowadays, some washing machines, including the machine at my home, they are advanced enough to be equipped with this drying function within it.
But you don't use it all the time.
Yeah, not necessarily all the time.
So we're so if we are talking about a scenario in which I am really in a hurry, like I hope I wish to wear this T -shirt right after washing it, then I will turn on that drying function right after washing it.
This is even more interesting.
You have it at home, but you don't use it all the time.
This is a great example of how people here in China don't at least rely on these machines.
Well, I mean, it's not that surprising, right?
Look at your smartphone.
Do you use your smartphone for everything that it can do?
It's not a perfect analogy.
But I understand what you're saying.
Yeah, right. You have to wash your clothes, but you don't have to dry your clothes if you don't want to.
Right. I thought this was quite interesting.
The number of dryers per 100 households around the world.
And this will explain very clearly the difference in dryer culture.
This is something I've never thought about before.
Drier culture per 100 households in America, per 100 households in America, 80 dryers per 100 households.
That implies nearly everyone has one, right?
80 percent of the households.
UK, France and Germany, around 40 per 100 households.
Japan 39 per 100 households.
China 6. 6. Wow. So tell me about this non -clothes dryer culture that it seems anyway to exist.
Probably not so much in the modern day times, but at least in the past, I guess.
Well, I think to start with, for us, a lot of different types of household appliances, if you really think about it, they don't enjoy a really long history here in China.
It's about 40, 50 years ago, if we take time back a little bit.
For washing machine, its first emerged in China in the mid 1970s.
Yes. And also, for example, television and also 80s and refrigerators.
So we didn't really have a really long history about it.
And if you think about, for example, refrigerator, the amount of electricity spent per refrigerator and also the amount of electricity used for a clothes dryer, then the clothes dryer is a monster eating electricity.
And that was culturally not something that every Chinese citizen would enjoy.
So that was definitely one factor.
But for today's Chinese people, I feel like they concern or we concern about the environment a little more as well.
Yeah, because, you know, drying machines, they are more energy costly, that's for sure, compared to, say, washing machines or refrigerators, TV sets, that's for sure.
But in the meantime, I feel like in the Chinese mindset or mentality, there is this great emphasis on, you know, proximity or being close to nature that you're close.
You know what I mean, you know, this kind of your clothes being dried by natural wind, by sunshine.
Oh, sunshine is very important.
Yeah, it looks much more, looks much more healthy, looks much healthier than machine dried clothes.
Yeah, in the Western country, don't you want your clothes to be air dried as well as dried by sunlight?
When I was growing up and I used to hang out at my grandparents house, I have very vivid memories of the clothes line outside my grandma's house because she used to ask me to help her to hang the clothes.
And the reason I remember it so clearly is because I was short at the time I was a little kid.
So I remember trying to reach up to the clothes line with the clothes pins.
She preferred it. She preferred drying her clothes in the sun a lot, just a lot fresher and you're right.
A connection to nature.
But it's just so it's just such a natural part, a part of being at a Canada house I think is to have a dryer there.
And I wonder if it has something to do with colder weather.
Maybe it's not as easy for many months of the year to dry your clothes outside in Canada or in the northern part of the United States as it is in the in the warmer months.
We don't have as many warm months, perhaps, or the temperatures aren't as friendly.
I'm speculating here, but that could be part of the reason as well.
It could be part of the reason.
And it is also affecting the situation here in China.
If you live in the southern part of the country, we get to see more and more, especially the younger generation started embracing the lifestyle of having a clothes dryer at home because in the southern part of the country, like Steve has said, we do not really have sunlight and dry air in many months.
And being able to dry the clothes instantly and take it out with the toasty temperature and even the smell is actually a really good experience.
What's funny is that nowadays, some people, especially young people, for those who enjoy this kind of service and do also do not have a clothes dryer at home just yet, what they're doing is to go to a hotel, rent a hotel room for not one day, but several hours, four hours or so.
I think that is the amount of time that you can rent a hotel or book a hotel here in China.
You book it for four hours.
You use the clothes washer and you use the clothes dryers and you enjoy that service a little bit.
It was funny for me.
Maybe it's more convenient, but it is a cultural difference between even between Europe and North America as well.
I found, you know, Reddit, right, the website where you can post things and then people comment on it.
Well, the post on Reddit was what's for for you non -Americans, what's everything every American needs to know.
And the top comment was electric dryers are nowhere near as common in the United States.
And it had seven thousand responses to that particular post.
And it got comments from people all over the world.
And as I was reading through this, you know, I didn't know this.
And I remember when I moved to Korea, into my first apartment, looking around thinking, where's the where's the dryer, you know, not thinking that it would be any different.
But there are cultural differences there as well, even between Europe and North America.
In that case, I was wondering with more and more people concerned about the energy consumption, about carbon neutrality, about whether or not we're taking good enough care of the planet, do you think more people would be able to embrace this at least hybrid style of drying their clothes?
Yeah, I think that's that will be the trend in China as well.
That will be the future, because at the end of the day, it comes down to what kind of lifestyle, what kind of pace of life you will have in, for example, in in urban areas.
More eco friendly dryers.
Yes. So it's always fun to see something as trivial as a choice to forgo clothes dryers in China can be a reflection of broader cultural values that we've just discussed.
That brings us to the end of today's roundtable.
Thanks for listening.
This is Yeo Hong -lin, Steve and Ding Heng.
