The newly opened browser offers a selection of articles I might like to read. One of them is about friendship breakups. I don’t click the link (I usually don’t) since I wager that there’s nothing in the article that will actually inform or surprise.
Friendship breakups! I have drifted apart from friends, especially when there’s great geographical distance between us. But I’ve almost never had “breakups” with friends and it seems strange to me when people talk about this as a regular feature of their lives. (If you, reading this, feel like this is a regular part of your life and you want to respond and clarify why this is so, please do so because I’m curious to hear what people say about this kind of thing.) In college I half-intentionally ended one single friendship. This person had proven extraordinarily flaky and self-involved, not out of malice, but in a way that I’ve come to associate with a sense of entitlement stemming from an affluent upbringing. The conversation we had, after which point we happened never to hang out again, wasn’t ugly or mean-spirited or even conclusive, just a little sad. Life went on.
In my experience, too, people who report this sort of volatility in their relationships (amicable, romantic, business) can sometimes be pretty prickly, themselves. My temperament is different; I try to avoid ways of increasing static with people I like or spend time with. I typically enjoy the company of most people I end up meeting. This remains true even now, despite becoming older, crankier, and more set in my ways.
But I want to return to the concept of entitlement, one of whose byproducts seems to be a lack of conscientiousness or agreeableness toward friends. I’ve long been a little perplexed and perhaps, if I’m honest, intimidated by people who seem to have an abundance mindset when it comes to meaningful human connections. As in, why are you not more interested in connecting and sharing with people who share common interests or goals? Do you already have a surfeit of these people in your life!?
I’m reminded of a post from an old blog (remember blogs?). The author, a grad student at the time, saw someone reading a Paul Scheerbart book at the library, and decided to try to chat the guy up because this was a niche interest. But the other guy seemed completely uninterested in talking about Scheerbart or, more to the point, making a new acquaintance. By now we are probably conditioned to be very skeptical here: we might intuit that the young man relating this anecdote was invasive, maybe he gave off weird “vibes,” whatever. And for all I know this is true. But I think the phenomenon the author describes is very real. He writes:
“I lament! Can't they tell they've got a live one here? (How many have even heard of Scheerbart—let alone read his novel? Shouldn't that alone put me in the 'intriguing' category for anyone interested in glass architecture? Maybe I ought to have mentioned the epic poem I once wrote on the subject.) Don't they long to share and be challenged—and, even better, outside the formal structures of academia? Do they not find, as I do, that soupçon of camaraderie—even possible camaraderie—the most exciting of all things? Are they so flush with fascinable and inquiring acquaintances, that the appearance of another fills them only with boredom and distaste?”
Indeed, who are these lucky ones so flush with connections that they can be cavalier with their chances to meet interesting people? I have not kept up with the friend I “broke up with” in college, but my sense was that she eventually got involved in ritzy, artsy social scenes that involved a lot of parties and much more money than I would have been able to keep up with, anyway. Perhaps for her, the connections she was looking for were abundant.
Though I don’t lack for friends in my life (and I’m grateful for this), it has always been tricky for me to find people who like thinking and talking about most of the things that occupy my mind. For this reason I still remember vividly many “missed connections,” in a manner of speaking. Everyone has similar experiences here, I think: times when you met someone who seemed to be on the same wavelength or indicated a deeper common interest, but never saw again. I’ve wondered what might have happened had I put in slightly more effort creating some kind of connection with some of these transitory people in my life. I think back to someone I met when I did some door-to-door canvassing for a nonprofit back in the summer of 2003 (she and I shared the route the day); I think of a postdoc who approached me on a train platform because I was reading Mikhail Iampolski’s The Memory of Tiresias; I think of that older gentleman I wrote about a few installments back, the one my friends and I met at the Flushing food court. Ultimately, the question is, what might have resulted if I had just picked up a couple extra friends along the way?
Recently I watched Another Year, one of the few Mike Leigh films I hadn’t seen. If I had caught it in when it was released in 2010, I very possibly would have intuited from it the “message” that I was comfortably on my way to being “like” Tom (Jim Broadbent’s character): partnered, secure, responsible, a little goofy, not too worried about the world or the future. To the extent that I was, indeed, on a Tomlike trajectory, I soon learned that life had some detours waiting for me, and I would soon ask some very difficult questions of myself. Seeing the film 14 years later, however, I ask myself if I might have been able to glean a different lesson, namely, that there are dangers to being dissolute and passive, and of being unable or unwilling to discern the sources of one’s unhappiness.
And so maybe I would have found a message from Another Year, but maybe it would have been the wrong one (i.e., carry on doing what you’re doing, Zach!), or maybe I wouldn’t have been receptive to it at all (i.e., why does this movie seem to hate its slobby characters?). Maybe the only lesson I could really have learned from it was in retrospect, necessarily in retrospect. Too late. And anyway, lessons and messages are such a hamfisted way to describe it all. Art isn’t about lessons and messages. These clumsy words are only a shorthand I’m using to describe the ineffable and complex feelings you can get from artworks, sometimes, that through embodiment in forms prompt you to reconsider your orientation to the world. (The familiar refrain: “you must change your life.”)
I sometimes feel guilty about liking Mike Leigh films because of the influence, or imprint, of my late friend and mentor Damien, who strongly disliked Leigh’s films and thought they were annoying, arrogant, sanctimonious works that exhibited nothing but condescension toward their characters. I never held the same opinion, really, and Damien knew it. I think where his low opinion influenced my own approach is that I never really rushed out to see Leigh’s films. In some strange way, it would have seemed disloyal of me to do so. Damien died in 2012. In 2014, feeling deeply depressed and isolated and unable to figure out why, I started watching or rewatching some of Leigh’s movies and saw that they tapped into something vital. Before, I sometimes half-agreed that Leigh was condescending, even contemptuous, toward the characters and milieux he depicted. But this changed, particularly when I finally watched Naked (a movie my late friend absolutely despised). But I remember feeling fascinated and exhilarated by the film, and being overwhelmed by the ending because it seemed to reflect onscreen something of the condition of my broken soul. It wasn’t because Thewlis’ character “represented” me or was “relatable” in any straightforward way, but that his figure seemed to capture and embody a mode of being accessible only through deep compassion for the most reprehensible and abject. I think we can not access this kind of compassion when we think of friends and connections as abundant, i.e, always potentially superfluous—and yet, almost paradoxically, this compassion is precisely what opens us up to the true abundance of our fellow people.
In friendship, too, there will be sea changes. There should be growth toward the good. A friendship must adapt to new habits and situations and reference points, or else it can feel like a kind of nostalgic graveyard. What makes sense in youth doesn’t always fit later years. I talk with friends today about the importance of keeping limber. Every once in a while, I’ll trade earnest texts about life with a friend from college who was never “emotionally open” back then, but who has since learned to be more communicative in this way. There are friends with whom I will never sit and drink another beer, after making countless memories doing just that. If my friend Damien were alive today, I doubt I would have convinced him to like Mike Leigh (although he and I did occasionally change each other’s minds about things). But I’m sure our friendship would have found a way to incorporate the newer developments of my taste.
It’s in the sea changes that a friendship continues to develop. The importance of keeping limber is not just physical. People who go through a lot of “breakups” with friends are, possibly, better served if they are more flexible and forgiving; even if they are reasonable and it’s their friends who are unreasonable, we still must be able to recognize and determined when to accommodate some of that unreasonableness, too.
There’s no novelty in describing how much online communication seems to leave us lacking. A recurring theme of my conversations with friends is that, despite the advantages of global and instant communication, even the good can be washed out by the bad, and it all gets so tiring, so overwhelming, so repetitive, so stupid. I try to think about small, local fixes to this problem; I’m too busy day-to-day to devote enough time to these fixes in visibly significant ways. But I’m always trying to move toward conviviality, and I hope in time I can still share some of the fruits of that labor with more people.
Personally, I'm of Common Interests Connections camp like you, but my father (taking after his father) has this maximalist approach when it comes to connections. I believe he'd reason it by presenting the utility of having a myriad of friendships and links in life, especially in trying times. When shit hits the fan and beyond - as it seems to have in my adult life now - I can't help but ponder maybe he has a point. Does that ever happen to you?