good advice: develop your people filter

So my experience with friendships with other gringos-friends I’ve made in Colorado, Minnesota, Spain and Chile-for the most part, is, that if a gringo seems to be buena onda – like fun, and enjoyable to be with, (s)he is enjoyable to be with and turns out to be a good friend. That strongly contradicts with my experience of friendships with Chilenos. Here I’ve found that not all people who seem to be buena onda, are. My first year in Chile, I had a bit of a hard time due to this difference. The mala-onda gringos I've met in my life, don’t even make an effort to seem buena onda. What’s the point? But apparently here in Chile it pays off, because it seems to be rather common that someone comes off as a good friend, but screws you over when given the chance. One day, upset and confused about some Chilean "friendships", I went to talk to my host mom, V, about some dynamics that I just didn't understand.

She gave me a very simple, good piece of advice. She said, you need to develop your “filter” for friendships. Just her saying that was enough for me, I understood what I had to do and put her advice to really good use. It's like I keep my new Chilean friends at arm's distance, so to speak, and don't trust them until we have a solid, understandable history. If I don't understand how the other person is relating to me, then I assume they are operating from different values and principles than my own and I don't trust them. I don't treat them bad but no me entrego, tampoco. I got along much better after receiving this advice, but not before stumbling along with it all for awhile. The nice thing about people who seem friendly and then turn out to be assholes is that it really makes you appreciate your real friends.

This I think is pretty upsetting to gringos, I've noticed other gringos go through similar things. For us, it sucks, because we like to trust each other. We're just used to it. Unless a gringo seems like a total jerk, I generally trust them. And really, to come to the realization that I couldn't trust anyone off the bat was pretty earth-shaking and upsetting for me, but I'm over it now because I'm blessed with a bunch of really nice friends here in Chile, both chilenos and afuerinos.

Another thing I found is that in Chile, it was much easier to make friends with guys than girls, at first anyway. I think it partly had to do with that I knew more guys than girls. In fact, I knew few chilenas when I arrived. The other factor was that lots of Chilean guys who I thought were my friends-like in a platonic-gringo-friendship sort of way-were actually joteandome. (Platonic friendships between males and females seem few here, not that common.) Ultimately they were interested in hanging out with me, not because they wanted to be my friends, but because they wanted to be my boyfriends. To be honest, I still find this annoying.

But my filter reminds me:

• that most guys who show interest want to date (I'm not sure this is totally true, but compared with gringo guys it happens waaaay more often, In fact it rarely happens with gringos.)
  
• that I shouldn't trust new friends until they gain my confianza. I sort of have a guilty-until-provend innocent mentality with the Chilean "other". Sorry, but I didn't arrive with that, so there is something to it.
• trust my intuition, almost always
  
• if a person is consistently buena onda and I enjoy their company and my intuition says they are ok, and we have a bit of history together, then I trust them.

When I lived with my host mom V, I found her quite prejudiced against people. When she met someone - generally someone about my age - right away, she often said she didn't like the person. I found her prejudice harsh from my innocent-until-proven-guilty mentality, but now I totally understand her, and realize she just has a highly-developed people filter. And you really have to pre-judge just so you don't get screwed over by someone. I'm prejudice too now. Upon meeting new chileans I don't always trust them to begin with. Sometimes there's something about them that makes me feel uneasy, and I start to watch my things, to make sure they don't steal from me, etc. If I meet friends of friends, they are almost always really cool people, so I trust them. But when I meet new people that my friends don't know, I do keep a bit of distance until I feel I can trust them. And I can't think of a case where someone has passed through the filter and then screwed me over. It seems to be working.

July 13: I'd like to add that this is my extreme filter, the one I had to develop four years ago because my social life was too unstable and unpredictable. I still use it from time to time. However, for the most part, I don't have to, because I've done a really good job of surrounding myself with really cool Chileans (and fellow foreigners) that I trust. This filter is quite useless when I'm hanging with my friends.