What I Learned About Relationship Maintenance From My Little Pony: The Basics

Growing up as a kid with autism, I got used to the idea of having one friend at a time, an outcast like me but more socially able. I only ever had a best friend, and they all eventually moved away. When I became an adult, I continued that pattern. But I also found (subconsciously) that I could temporarily gain self-esteem by sacrificing my needs to try to help other people. This began seven years of severe r/Codependency - an unhealthy need to be needed to feel of worth. I could suborn my own problems as long as I was being righteous and helping someone else. It's taken me decades to climb out of that pit: my lost and misspent 20's and 30's.

In 2010, I was at my lowest. I'd just lost the best job I'd ever had because of the economy. I found part-time work that barely paid gas money. I was severely depressed. Then, one evening on 4chan, the only place that gave me even a glimmer of solace, I ran across a thread on My Little Pony. I watched the show, and felt alive, joyful, happy.

It was an ensemble sitcom-adventure, much like the Disney Afternoon syndicated shows I'd grown up with in the 90's: DuckTales, Darkwing Duck, Gargoyles, or Tale Spin, with a dash of Tiny Toon Adventures. MLP helped heal my depression, it healed my broken creativity (I wrote dozens of short fanfictions), and to my surprise, it also helped heal my codependency by giving me a practical, cogent Theory Of Mind for relationships: the Elements of Harmony.

The Elements of Harmony are necessary parts of every harmonious and vibrant relationship. But they're not personality traits; they're character traits. The difference between personality and character, as I define them, is that personality is how you react to the world, and character is how you choose to change (or keep) the world. Personality is in the emotional sphere and character is in the moral/ethical sphere.

Each of the Elements require one to give up the selfishnesses that erode or poison friendships:

• Generosity: envy and greed
• Kindness: pettiness and spite
• Loyalty: hypocrisy and infidelity
• Honesty: secrets and lies
• Laughter: grudges and slander
• The Magic of Friendship/the living experience of having and being a friend: isolation and disinterest

If one Element is missing, the friendship is hurting; if two are missing (or only one-sided), the relationship has turned toxic. If three or more are missing or malformed, it's not even a friendship.

How My Little Pony exemplified each one was by doing something subtle: during season one, most episodes had the friendship between two of the ensemble's six heroines as the protagonist, and each heroine exemplifying one of the selfishnesses and thus, consciously or unconsciously, working against the friendship. It was a tutorial on friendship even a depressed man with autism could understand.

I found I could diagnose all my own friendships, family relationships, and other types of peer and unequal relationships, present and past, using the Elements of Harmony. I could see where I wasn't putting enough into a relationship, and where the other person was the reason it ended.

I was able to realize that one of my first best friends as an adult, "Bad Friend One," had systematically dismantled my self-esteem and joy eight years earlier: there was no laughter in that friendship, and his generosity was merely material: he never gave me the benefit of the doubt. "Bad Friend Two" broke every one of the six Elements in various ways over six years, leaving only the transference of the best-friendship I'd had when I was nine and ten. When I realized that one afternoon, the final tether was cut and I was freed from my self-made bonds.

Later, when I found a support group for codependency, I applied the Elements of Harmony to my list of relationship resentments in a more structured way (sample PDF), and things became a lot more clear, and thus easier to clear out of my life.

But the learning didn't stop there.

In the third season finale, Twilight Sparkle (a purple unicorn with the mind and personality of a grad student with autism) ascended from being a mere unicorn to being an alicorn princess, earthly avatar of an aetherial ideal. She was granted this boon by the universe after a sudden realization, a divine spark of inspiration, through which she coordinated each of her five friends help another of the five regain her lost purpose in life

As a fanfiction author, I had to extract every ounce of meaning from the deep lore, so I thought, and thought. Then it hit me: the closeness of a friend isn't just a scalar, a quantity; there are different qualities of friendship shared with different types of friend:

• Acquaintances have shared attributes. These are people who are in some way connected to you: through proximity, religion, fandom, school, work, etc., but who you haven't taken the time to get to know.
• Friends have shared experiences. These are people who have experienced the same things as you. This can be fellow fans you've seen a concert or sporting event with, gone to a movie or a play with, people you rely on sometimes and whose life details you know a bit about. These are people whose birthdays you celebrate with gifts and whose tragedies you lend a shoulder to cry on.
• Family or Partners have shared purpose. These are people who collaborate with you on decision-making, people with whom you might share your "telos". These are people you can't let go of. And they need not be blood; they can be business partners, brothers in arms during a war, or partners in a police squad. They can be mentor/protégé pairs, or sponsor/sponsee in recovery. They're the people you'd give anything to stay connected to; but if their purpose ever splits from yours, they'll become your bitterest foe. Betrayal. Divorce. Arch-rivals. Tied together but twisted, like Batman and Joker.

(It turns out I thought harder about it than the writers, who to this day have no idea what the final form of the magic spell actually did. I still need to write that fanfiction short.)

Learning these qualitative differences in types of friendship helped me grow and maintain personal boundaries. Now I could act appropriately with everyone in my life, by knowing the expectations of each role. Attributes, experiences, purposes. This was the second major step in healing my codependency.

Postscript:

Since 2010, I've spent a lot of time thinking about the Elements of Harmony, and apparently so did the writers, who revisted them in different forms: as the Qualities of Leadership and later as the Pillars of Equestria, the foundation of a stable society. Around 2018 (?) I heard a preacher mention something that tickled my ear. I dug down and found that Peter's first epistle had listed the opposites of five of the six, and in a way which were perfectly exemplified in the season 2 premiere which introduced a Q-like villain, Discord. I present them here as a table for your pondering.