On Friendship

When I was in elementary school, I would occasionally be harassed by an impish fellow by the name of Justin. He would run up behind me, poke me in the neck (not too hard, thankfully), run off, and tacitly dare me to catch him and beat the snot out of him (pantomimed, of course). We'd been in the same 3rd grade class together, where, whenever I made a chess move that did not work in his favor, he'd invoke the curious rule of "didn't see that," and undo whatever advantageous position I'd secured. Needless to say, I didn't win many of those chess games.

On the first or second day of 5th grade, amidst our usual routine of pseudo-battle, he happened to note that I was in class 5A. Given that I had him in a hammerlock at the time, I didn't know what to make of his comment. Justin followed with a simple question:

"Do you know Bryan? He's in your class, and we've been Bros since kindergarten."

I didn't know Bryan, and I had no clue what a "Bro" was. But immediately afterwards, I figured I'd go meet this "Bryan."

Before school starts, the people of each class would always cordon off a part of the playground for themselves by placing their packs there in neat, orderly columns. This was done more for efficiency than anything--when the bell rang, we'd all have to hoist our packs onto our shoulders, and stand in those same columns, double-file, ordered by height, until we were marched off to our classroom under the watchful eyes of green-sashed prefects. After a few rounds of trial and error, I found "Bryan." Since he was roughly the same height that I was, he was actually sitting a mere 3 bags away.

I don't recall what happened next. All I know is that I soon learned that amidst the many types of video games out there, he was a big fan of RPGs. The only RPGs I'd ever played had bored me to tears, so I presume we then got into a modest discourse over them, and I eventually agreed to give them another chance.

The game in question was Romancing Sa.Ga. 2. We both had strategy guides for it. In the history of RPGs, I think there were only two that have ever allowed players to arrive at an outright dead-end, requiring that they start over from scratch; RSG2 was one of them. Both of us ended up hitting that dead-end, albeit in different fashion (yes, the game allowed us to screw up at the same spot in multiple ways).

Before I knew it, we were spending recesses talking about our respective progress in the game. When we finished RSG2, we moved onto Final Fantasy 6. When I finished that, we moved onto RSG 3. And Super Robot Wars EX. And Chrono Trigger. And Secret of Mana 3. By this stage, we weren't just talking about gaming during recess; we'd developed a game of our own: pitch a drink container past the goalie, into the trash. Any pitch was legal--bank shots, fakeouts, through-the-legs...

Eventually, Justin worked his way into the act by applying his "poke" routine to both of us. So now, I had somebody to pseudo-punch him while I pseudo-hammerlocked him. Good times.

Over the years, all three of us mellowed out somewhat. Justin bartered a peace treaty with us, and eventually joined in our RPG discussions. We collected basketball cards together. We played ping pong together. We called each other after school just to kill time and talk for an hour or so. We picked up each other's mannerisms and phrasings, and had plenty of memories we could bring up whenever we wanted a good laugh.

* * *

I notice that as I get older, those kinds of friendships are harder to build. I meet far more people than I did in the closed environment of grade school, but the number of people that I become good friends remains quite constant at one or two per year.

Why is that? One would reckon that with so many more people to meet, you'd be far more likely to find people who resonate with you. Assuming that I'm not atypical (though I very well might be), what is it that keeps us from befriending more people than we do?

Here's a few possibilities. For clarity's sake, let's just assume that all of the following afflictions are mine alone. My time is scarcer nowadays. I rush from one task to another, biking by my acquaintances with a brief "hello" on our way to class. Even my idle time's meticulously organized now--poker games are planned a week in advance; lunches, dinners and coffees, a few days. To some extent, it has to be--everybody's so busy nowadays that to plan something impromptu would be impossible. And asking somebody to join me on my more mundane tasks--grocery shopping, errands, dishwashing--it seems too cheap a use of their precious time, especially when, y'know, they're out there changing the world.

I make time for friends nowadays; idle time's no longer easy to come by.

Here's another. Perhaps I'm so used to dealing with people on an operational level that I've lost the natural curiosity about others that we, as children, used to harbor. There's no longer that burning desire to know everything I can about another person; simply knowing that they're not dangerous now suffices. Once that level of assurance is reached, I have no further questions to ask of them; by this point, I can settle for questions about what they know rather than who they are. A genuine interest in the topics that fascinate them. Dale Carnegie perfection.

What about this? When I was young, I was curious about other people because they offered me a whole new way of looking at the world. New friends fascinated me because I was essentially discovering a new species with each one I met. As I grew older, people started falling into buckets I'd seen before--variations on a theme, if you will. I could be much more presumptuous about them, make many more inferences about their background and their interests, to the point where I no longer had the curiosity I'd need to ask them outright about these things anymore.

Now suppose a good friendship cannot occur without both people having a strong curiosity about the other. Then despite the best intentions of one party, the relationship cannot progress if the other is in the least bit hampered by any of the issues I listed above. Friendship becomes harder, and acquaintanceship becomes the norm. Over time, friendship-seeking people get conditioned to expect mere acquaintanceship responses. They, themselves, then begin to settle for the new norm, and stop asking curious questions about others unless they are absolutely sure that they'll get real answers. This ends up raising the bar for friendship, because everybody now needs a whole set of additional signals before they're able or willing to ask the right questions for building a friendship in the first place. I, for example, might no longer appear interesting or novel enough to be worth exploring--anybody who looks at me can quickly discern that I'm Asian, that I dress pragmatically, that I smile a lot and are therefore nonthreatening, and that I'm dorky enough that I probably work in technology and have had a fairly happy-go-lucky Bay Area upbringing. (They'd be wrong on some of those accounts, of course, but they already have so many inferences about me that they don't need to inquire about those things unless the conversation naturally goes in those directions).

What do you think, reader? None of these hypotheses seem to contradict one another on first glance, and from my limited perspective, all of them could be at work simultaneously. If such is the way the grownup world works, then I guess I must resolutely accept it.

Before I leave, though, I'd like to posit one last hypothesis--one that actually disturbs me.

When I was young, my interests were simple and common. They were closely tied to the fads of the time, and I could usually expect some handful of people to feel the same way that I did about them. As I grew older, my interests became more esoteric, became more deeply entrenched in my values than my pursuits. And consequently, they became harder to articulate in ordinary conversation, because talking about Agape is more difficult than discussing how to beat Final Fantasy 7. Conversations about pursuits are still easy to set up, even if they now invoke discussion about Milton and Heisenberg instead of video games, but they no longer serve the same purpose of signaling that you are truly aligned with the other person.

CS Lewis once wrote that friendship is defined by having a common longing for something; some burning desire that, when confessed, could cause the other person to exclaim, in glee, "what? I thought I was the only one!"

If what I care about is no longer articulable in normal conversation, then that means I am now at fate's mercy to be put in circumstances where the right kinds of conversations can take place. I must overcome those annoying hurdles that I listed earlier--the reality that everybody's time is now scarce, the natural tendency to be cordial rather than communal, my waning curiosity in others, and, God willing, the ability to appear interesting and worthy of investigation.

Some of my best friends were found in the following peculiar manners. Hanging around them after school and going out of my way to walk them home, in order to create those opportunities for elevated conversation. Randomly ordering Chinese food and then staying around to talk about Christian ideals for 4 hours. forming a band together to play Rage Against the Machine songs about social justice, which then evolved into long theological conversations about CS Lewis and the nature of belief. Asking, on a whim, to join in on a Saturday afternoon shopping trip, which extended all the way into a 4am discussion about feeling alone in a new world. Getting regularly asked to go on In-n-Out runs by somebody who, I learned, had a family history as colorful as my own. Awkwardly admitting that facebook profiles revealed a common interest in CS Lewis, giving us a safe haven for discussion while the other end of the table veered towards something that neither of us could relate to. Finding running partners, fortuitously guaranteeing at least 30 minutes of conversation that could be taken in any direction. Bringing quirky Hong Kong movies over to one of the few people I knew would enjoy quirky Hong Kong movies as much as I did...

There are many others, but these are ones that come to mind. Some are by pure happenstance, yes, but many of them have at least some element of structure to them that weakens one or more of the hurdles I've listed.

I am thankful for the good friends that I have, and I'm curious about when the next one, flying in the face of probability, will emerge...