The role of confidant

Nobody decides to be a confidant. The role settles in by repetition: a first conversation goes well, the person comes back, others hear about it, and after a few years the function is established without ever having been discussed.

What triggers it is identifiable: listening that does not interrupt, an absence of visible judgement, and above all a discretion that has been verified. All three are quickly noticed in a group, and they are rare.

The particularity of this role is that it is not exchanged. Whoever receives knows things about many people, and many people know almost nothing about them. The asymmetry is not intended: it follows from the position, since nobody thinks to question the one who listens.

Added to this is a practical obstacle. Confiding presupposes finding someone who has not already come to confide, and the number of candidates shrinks as the role expands.

Listening is not a neutral operation. Work distinguishing empathic distress from compassion suggests that the first, which consists in sharing the painful state, comes with negative affect and exhausts, whereas the second supports action.

The phrase compassion fatigue, used in the world of care since the 1990s, designates that exhaustion. If the preceding analysis is right, the phrase names the opposite of its cause: it is not compassion that wears people down, it is shared distress.

A confidence commits whoever receives it: it creates an expectation of future availability, an obligation of secrecy, and sometimes a position of arbiter between two people who both confide. None of these obligations has been explicitly accepted.

That is what makes withdrawal difficult. Saying one is not available on a given day reads as a refusal of the entire relationship, when it bears only on a moment. The role makes no provision for interruption.

There is no advice to give here, and this review does not give any. There is an observation: affective availability is a service rendered, it has a measurable cost, and it appears in no accounting, domestic, professional or friendly.

Naming it changes nothing about the situation. It does change how the person occupying it reads it, since they often reproach themselves for a tiredness whose source they do not identify.