Closeness

Wednesday 9/2/26

People often confuse getting along with someone with closeness. There's someone with whom you joke. Your back-and-forth is easy. It isn't hard being in their company. You don't feel like you're lifting weights. You don't disagree. Or fight. No stress, no risk in calling them up and chatting for fifteen minutes between weekend tasks about the playoff game last night or if they're over that cold or how Sally's birthday party went.

But this isn't indicative of closeness. People can be close and have the above be true, happen. Regularly happen. We want to think of ourselves as close to people. Everyone wants to have at least one person they consider as being close to them. Including unmarried people. For them, that person they wish to think of that way is often a friend.

"What" people are talking about is a big determining factor of closeness. If it's always, or primarily, just the game, how the kids are doing, how's work/it's okay, vacation plans, how people are physically feeling, two people won't be close.

We now live most of our lives on the surface. The surface of everything. And yet, we want certain things to be things of depth. To have weight, significance. To uncommon and not typical. To be special and notable. Which also means, to our thinking, and presuming, that we are as well.

As a result, we do a lot of inaccurate labeling. It's almost like a form of wishful thinking, save that we believe it. We don't push back on what we want to believe. We don't do probing scrutiny. For anyone to do so is akin to a miracle. It isn't what happens or how people are or how hardly anyone is going to try and be.

One reason is because what if that thing proves not to be true? In this example, what if we have no one we're close with? Then what? Who wants to think that? And who wants to think they're the kind of person who isn't close to anyone? Which leads to the thought, and fear, that they're someone who isn't good enough, likable enough, lovable enough, for anyone to be close to them. And what would you do about it?

Would you try and have a different kind of relationship with that person? Even after you've known them for a lot of years? Or your whole life?

That doesn't sound particularly feasible. The next time you talk to your dad on the phone it's going to be more of the same, right? Are you going to try and reach out and develop what have been tangential relationships to date and see if there's anything more to be had there or find a way to meet new people? You're exponentially likelier to think that those people are going to think you're crazy for all of a sudden phoning them or texting them or emailing them more--or at all.

Meeting new people, unless it's job-related, feels almost impossible now after college. Never mind in one's thirties, forties, fifties, sixties, seventies. Most people are entirely wrapped up in themselves. Doesn't matter how lonely they are.

Doesn't matter if a person who is their "dream" person, or dream friend, or has all these characteristics they say they can never find in another person knocks on their door, or slips a heartfelt note underneath it. That person inside that place is almost certain not to hear the knocking, or see the note on the floor, because they're always in the rear of the house staring at themselves in the mirror. Then they're going to post online as well as complain to themselves about lack of opportunities.

These judgments will be adorned with bromides about protecting their peace, and I'd rather be alone than settle, and lies-to-self about the sanctity of their standards. But usually it's just fear, insecurity, and blinding and deafening narcissism. Yes, people rarely come along. My point is that when and if they do, we are so seldomly ready to even acknowledge them, let alone receive them.

People are also more cautious than ever. Less brave. You need to be vulnerable in order to try and have a close relationship, and of course to develop that relationship once you have it.

People seldomly have their own interests. Which means that people are largely interchangeable fundamentally. They don't have a way of speaking that's their own. They use the exact same word modules and cliches and sentence structures as everyone else.

We say so many things about ourselves and our lives as if they were unimpeachably true because their failure to be so would be too much for us. Too much to accept, because in many instances we wouldn't have a plan or means or the strength or dedication to find a way to have those things in our lives for real. Or to be those things for real.

Instead, we stick with our narrative. The narrative can be a complete falsification. But once the narrative is established, it becomes like a heart. A falsified second heart, but a heart all the same.

People can't live without that heart. They could actually die. Because they'll give up. That includes in going through what are in effect motions. Because those motions often make for the whole of their lives. Those motions are why they are alive.

They can live for other things. They don't have to only go through motions and believe they're something else whilst doing so.

But now you're talking about the doing of feats that people just don't have in them. And they also don't know other people who are doing that with whom they can share their experiences and depend on, as those people do the same with them.

Now we're in lone wolf territory. With there unlikely to be another wolf on the road for you to meet and maybe bond with.

Sometimes we get along with someone as we do because it's all surface. Because of that which isn't plumbed. Brought up. The familiarity of the roteness. Our foreknowledge that when we talk to this person it will go as it always goes. Same topics, same rhythms to the conversation, same order of what's discussed and who says what when.

Closeness is depth. It's nakedness. It's emotion. It's vulnerability. It isn't mostly talks about the weather, the kids' new teachers, how the football team is faring. It's the things that frighten you, inspire you, the person you want to be, where you're going wrong, how you're struggling.

There is accountability and expectations. The latter aren't low. We can care about someone and not be close to them. We can marry someone and not be close to them. Happens a lot.

No, closeness is rare. It can exist in different types of relationships, but that paradoxically doesn't seem to make it less scarce.