new friend project

an anthropological study in platonic situationships

Two lives intersect in a chance social encounter. Points of impetus, geneses, all heaving with the weight of possibility. Like Plath’s great fig tree, each intersection hangs like a newborn fig off the branches of one’s life, unripe and fledgling. That they might blossom into something more substantive, the fruit of acquaintanceship or familiarity or even friendship, relies upon their nourishment; the strange, arcane rituals through which we prune a stranger into a loved one. That cultivation of intimacy is a daunting process. It teems with vulnerability and rejection like so many weeds, and our instinct bends away from things so arduously earnest. We sustain ourselves instead on the relationships hand-delivered to us by proximity and time, the pre-packaged convenience of decade-long childhood friends or a flatmate. All the while, so many figs wither away at our feet.

I heard an anecdote once about the Belgian cultural practice of refusing food—when a host offers refreshments, it is polite to decline the offer at least twice before finally relenting. When a foreigner accepts the offer immediately, it is jarring and anomalous, a clear misunderstanding of the social codes. At first glance, perhaps such a custom seems unusual; yet wherever we are, our social worlds fester with these unspoken social protocols, always working against us in subtle forms. They are ubiquitous and commonplace and constitute the veil which conceals us from one another: you must never say what you want, but rather delicately suggest that a want may exist, coyly flirting with its fulfillment. We are like so many kabuki performers, exaggerating our politeness in a theatre of formalities, ever-nullifying our desires and ever-masking our needs. 

I want to befriend a stranger at a party. I greet him politely. I ask him questions about himself, never too invasive but never too frivolous, perhaps I suggest a coffee ‘some time’ ‘this week’. It is critical that this means absolutely nothing. We both know the invitation is a hollow courtesy; it is a game of make-believe that we might be so mad as to brave a one-on-one hangout so soon. But at the same time, it is a necessary stepping stone, because perhaps by the fifth time this suggestion comes up, it may just happen. We can only get there through this fragile kabuki, a choreography of unspoken desire, so that we might thwart the boundaries delineating our interiorities from one another. I must pantomime my way into an evening drink.

The epidemic of disconnection seems to be a global phenomenon, but it strikes me that the cultural makeup of New Zealand holds an impenetrable Wall of Politeness. The make of a good Kiwi man is a self-denying stoicism, a humility so potent it denies his own humanity. There is no cardinal sin worse than being too honest or too eager; the Kiwi is nice enough to help a stranger pump their tires on the highway, but never kind enough to invite you into his life. Scroll through the r/newzealand subreddit and it swarms with pleas from immigrants asking how to make friends, how to ‘break in’ to our insular communities, how to move past polite acquaintanceship to real-blood friendships. They are permanently rooted at the tollbooth of cultural immersion, always sneaking glimpses into a party they can never enter. 

I had a friend from London who lived here for a year. I would bring him out to parties and gatherings, and because he was perfectly affable, I felt that I could just leave him to figure it out on his own. He did everything right: struck up the right conversations, asked the right questions, stayed out until late hours. Still, he would say to me, he felt there was some invisible barrier he could not break through, some resistance he met at every turn to open up and bring him into this world. It was done silently, but what we were experiencing was the palpable formation of an Outsider, exiling him to the other side of the looking-glass and holding him in chains of empty, courteous acquaintanceship. Everywhere there is a familiar face to greet; nowhere is there a familiar face to spend time with, to feel comfortable in the presence of, to return to roost after countless artificial greetings and awkward lulls in polite conversation. 

He would often ask me, how do you do it? How do you break through? It was something I had never considered—that twenty-one years in this city had made me almost oblivious to the Wall. I had done this song-and-dance for so long that I now had an intuitive knowledge of its composition. There was some kind of atlas I had discovered: you know what to say and what not to say, when to leave and how long to wait, the incremental steps of intimacy you undergo like marital rites (three separate run-ins, then an Instagram follow, a texting conversation, then maybe a small pre-drinks, and then maybe, just maybe, you might get that one-on-one coffee). 

These tools allow you to carve out an opening in the city’s small, dense fabric. It is the only way to navigate its structural two degrees of separation, where everybody you meet is somebody you should already know. You know the right people who know the right people, you coax the latter friends-of-people into the former category of a Primary Friend. Always underpinning this is a premise of presupposed familiarity. An amorphous network of pre-existing mutual friends legitimises your presence here, vouching for you and tirelessly bringing you into the fold until you stick, acting as a safety net to filter out the true Outsiders. In the absence of this, in the absence of that instinctual understanding and an existence as an Already Known Entity, you must flounder at arms’ length, reduced to a ‘Hello’ in the supermarket aisle, always in this half-lived alienation.

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A month ago, two good friends of mine moved away. The loss of two concrete fixtures in my social world produced a host of emotions—sadness, empathetic joy, gratitude, hope. But curiously, what I also found lingering in the shadows of my emotional landscape was a quiet dread. The first round of departures from your mid-20s social group is a canary in the coalmine, foreboding many more to come. One becomes painfully cognisant of the transience of our relationships, of how these moments can never be captured again and how the ‘best of times’ may be unfolding right now before us, soon to be in the rear-view mirror of marriage, career, settling down. As somebody for whom those latter aspirations feel unattainable, I was left wondering: will I be left behind? Have I become too complacent, so confident in my ability to navigate some niche scene of young adults that I had forgotten to check its structural integrity? Will my social world crumble to the tides of change, all because I have neglected to build anything real? 

The anxieties of this realisation, the latent fear of losing everything, compel me to take action. I know I must become an active agent over the circumstances of my life before it slips away, and because I can never be normal about anything, I decide the only way to alleviate my impending doom is to conduct a new social experiment. I call it my ‘New Friend Project’. Abstract as the title may be, the endeavour is simple—I am going to take on the revolutionary challenge of… hold for suspense… Making new friends. 

But, of course, it is never as simple as just making new friends. It becomes an experimental project as soon as I introduce my hypothesis testing: how does one become a real friend? I was cognisantly aware of social kabuki, and considered myself masterful in its execution; I knew how to get along with people. But these hollow acquaintanceships were as frail as they were omnipresent, and it was true intimacy I now craved. I wanted to cut through all the auxiliary bullshit and love someone without inhibition. What happens if I were to reject the social code, to supersede all our performative niceties and laser-focus on my desire to befriend? 

Running concurrently with the question of form is the question of substance. What constitutes a real friend anyway? My friend Tom once shared a sentiment that I have always taken as sacred advice; you can’t build a life out of weekend friends. The ‘weekend friend’ is an acquaintance in sheep’s clothing, an entity who seems like your bosom buddy when you are both on a drug cocktail at 3am on a Saturday night, but who is not really synthesised into the organisation of your life. Another friend once took umbrage with me for using the phrase, because our work schedules only really allowed us to see each other on the weekend. But I think the phrase transcends its practical meaning: it separates out who is there to have superficial conversation with and who is there to be a part of your world, who facilitates your joy and your suffering, who works on the rich tapestries of your inner life.  These are the real friends we seek, the souls who care about what we had for breakfast and what our thoughts on Winnie the Pooh are, and from whence we build real communities. And the creation of such a relationship is what I wanted under my microscope.

New Friend Project is an ever-evolving exercise with no foreseeable end-date, but I begin it with three individuals. Each one is somebody I already know vaguely (I am not so brave as to venture out into the true unknown yet). They are all people that I can feel some kind of potential with, a mutual acknowledgement of something special that might lend itself to a fulfilling friendship. My experimental design proceeds as such: one subject is my control group, in that we have known each other for years, undergone the painstaking process of ice-breaking and building gradational closeness. The other two are relatively new appearances. In all three instances, the true experiment is to rebel against the social playbook. I cut the preamble of decorum and set clear intentions: I want to hang out with the intention of getting to know each other. I want to work on this friendship, I want us to spend time alone together, and there will be no qualifiers. (I say it a lot more elegantly than this, obviously.)

Friendship as a form of connection is a remarkably unique beast. The other two major influences in our life—family and romantic partners—can be somewhat easier to navigate. Family often comes with the pretext of biology and some concept of unconditionality, and so there is comfort in at least knowing what that relationship is supposed to look like. When we date, while the fear of rejection is salient, you can often leave an unsuccessful date and decide to completely extinguish that person from your life. Because friendship is not typically characterised as intense in the same way, the fear of rejection is almost more palpable; it’s not that you disappointed your father or weren’t sexually compatible with a lover, but that this person seriously just didn’t fuck with your vibe. There is something rather decimating about that possibility, and more often than not, the agent of that rejection will likely still be around in your world, friends with people you know and always reminding you that you kind of suck for some inarticulable reason.

What I observe on my various first friend-dates is this exact fear of rejection, looming like a spectre over each conversation. It is something I am constantly countering; I ask questions and listen actively and affirm each response, and more importantly, I am always trying to actively validate. I like that idea, I love this quality of yours, I would love to do this thing with you, I can’t wait to see you as soon as possible. But still, that ghost feels inescapable, and what it really haunts is space. The fear seeps into awkward cracks in conversation, small gaps of miscommunication, and most notably, the crack of absence—when we depart from one another and are no longer flesh-and-blood, our idea of the other becomes a projection of insecurity. Did they like what I said? Was I too annoying? Do they really care about seeing me ever again?

Often, when I get a few drinks in me, I start ranting and raving about my War On Shyness. It’s not that I think shyness does not exist, of course, but I do think that as a functioning adult who craves and needs social connection, it is important to be building tools with which to overcome that awkwardness. In Peter Biskind’s My Lunches with Orson, based on tape-recorded conversations between Orson Welles and Henry Jaglom, Welles launches into a tirade about his hatred for Woody Allen. The crux of his vitriol is that Allen’s performance of shyness is truly a performance of arrogance, a constant need to hold his audience hostage to therapise and ‘free himself from his hang-ups’. I sometimes feel a similar way about shyness at large, at least in this age of self-identified introversion. There is something myopic, almost self-indulgently so, in succumbing to that constant fear of rejection and believing that the world is so uniquely interested in your failure. You are no different than any other person, and no man is an island. You deserve to give and experience love in all forms, and that is not to say it isn’t scary to put oneself out there—but can shyness ever be an excuse after the age of twenty? Do we not have to grow up at some point and try and fail and try again to connect with one another?

So the success of this project relies now not only on the building of intimacy itself, but a constant vigilance against the instinct to withdraw. A throughline must connect each hangout, a consistent affirmation of this developing relationship: I saw this book and thought of you, I love this outfit you’re wearing, how is the job-hunt going? You have object permanence to me. You exist in my mind outside of your physical presence. I am incorporating you into my understanding of the world. You have nothing to be embarrassed about—I want to connect with you, you want to connect with me. These are the foundations of our realness.

The results-phase of the New Friend Project is an endless time-loop. Who knows where I am in a month or a year, what friends I have around me and who I have successfully integrated into my life? The end-goal of the New Friend Project is far less important than the process itself, in the way it has restructured my approach to interacting with the world. Everybody you like is somebody worth knowing, and it feels good to tell somebody you like them, to actively pursue the beautiful journey of understanding another being. The shame that cripples your openness to possibility is also killing love unborn; and what a waste it is, to let love pass you by.