FLASH MUTT

Most people think a support network is something you build. You picture it like an emergency kit, assembled in advance, checked every so often, ready for the day you need it. So when the crisis comes and it isn’t there, it feels like a failure of preparation. You didn’t build well enough. You didn’t invest in the right people.

I don’t think that’s quite right. You can build the conditions for a support network, but you only find out what it actually is when life puts it under pressure.

When my marriage ended, I found out how thin the network I thought I had really was. Family of origin weren’t interested. Close friends, people I’d have described as close without a second thought, went quiet. They became strangers in the particular way people do when they’ve decided your crisis is inconvenient. What I had left wasn’t who I expected, and it turned out to be enough. That’s a strange thing to sit with.

Here’s the part that’s harder to see from the outside, and harder still to admit from the inside: some of what looks like support isn’t, and some of what doesn’t look like support is.

Real support tends to be reciprocal, not equal in the sense of matching hours or emotional labour, relationships don’t work like that, but reciprocal in the sense that both people are actually invested in each other’s wellbeing. It listens, and it also challenges. It comforts you, and it also asks whether the thing you’re upset about is the thing that’s actually wrong. It tells you something uncomfortable because it values your growth over your immediate approval. Comfort without challenge starts to resemble support while doing very little of its work.

Then there’s a different kind of relationship, one that looks like devotion but runs on something else. People who arrive loudly for your crisis and quietly disappear once you’re stable, because your crisis was where they felt useful, or needed. People who validate everything you say, not because they’ve weighed it and agree, but because agreement is easier than risking the relationship. That’s not always manipulation. More often it’s someone acting from their own unmet needs, offering the only version of closeness they know how to give. It doesn’t make them bad. It doesn’t make the relationship healthy either. It creates something close enough to support to be mistaken for it, sometimes for years.

Which raises the question this kind of piece usually avoids. It’s easier to ask who’s shown up for you than to ask what you’ve been showing up as. When someone you care about is struggling, what do you actually offer them? Comfort is easy to give. Agreement is easier still. Do you ever tell them something true they didn’t want to hear, and stay anyway once they’ve heard it. Do you stay once the crisis has passed, when there’s nothing dramatic left to be needed for. Do you show up for their recovery with anything like the energy you gave their suffering.

A support network isn’t measured only by who appears when everything falls apart. It’s worth noticing who’s still there once you don’t need appearing for anymore, and what that says about what they were actually offering you in the first place.