The weird fusion of friendship

on "that thing that happens" when you're together

Village Politicians (James Campbell, 1880)

I often hear well-married people say things like, “There is a person I can be around her that does not emerge elsewhere,” or “I am not naturally like this but being married to him brings it out of me,” or “She explains me to myself” or even, “I didn’t know who I was until I talked to her.”

Which I never really understood. But, recently, it’s begun to make more sense.

There are certain people who, when I’m around, bring me out of me. Who I simply am more myself with. The conversation is natural and effortless and fascinating and wildly generative, for both of us. I seem to unfold more of who I am within that dialogue, overhearing myself saying things that surprise me, things I didn’t even know were in me, saying whatever pops into my head and it’s not disliked or weird. And their words find places within me that I thought were buried or lost.

But the conversation is not only deep and complicated but also full of smiles and laughter. It’s both cerebral and silly, switching between modes of seriousness that we instinctively meet each other on. Without trying. Without knowing how not to.

It’s not just a matter of being comfortable around them, which I am, but there’s something more mysterious and deep at work.

It’s almost like, to try an analogy, how some things taste more like themselves with salt. But not exactly because it’s mutual and there’s no solubility. One isn’t absorbed into the other. Rather, some new thing emerges, a third thing that we are both orbiting, mutually caring for, the sum being more true and human and enduring than each individual part.

I think this is true for all great relationships. Really, I think this is the DNA of friendship.

One Fall, I worked on a farm in the Okanagan Valley. Every morning around 5am I would wake up in my tent, the temperature just above freezing, the sky still raw black and hungry, shimmy out of my sleeping bag, rush to throw on clothes, then head to the farmhouse, its calm yellow windows in the distance humming out into the night like a lit city on a hill. I would bound up the front steps and through the front door, the sensation of warmth flooding in after being out in the cold. Rajko would be there already, sitting at the kitchen table, the coffee maker steaming and choking and sputtering like a sick man. We would bow to each other, like they do in Thailand, like nineteenth-century Russian aristocrats, and spend the early hours of the morning sitting at the kitchen table, drinking coffee, me reading the Bible, him reading the local newspaper from his small town outside Venice. Not saying much, watching the day grow bright, watching the mountains gradually materialize on the horizon. This lasted an hour or two, before the couple from France and the two Aussies and the group of Germans and all the other volunteers on the farm from countries that used to go to war with each other came into the kitchen and began rummaging through the cupboards and toasting thick slices of bread with slabs of butter and gobs of nutella and shaking out bowls of cornflakes and pouring orange juice and sitting to eat, mostly in a groggy, half-sedated silence¹. (The French, in particular, seem to have an almost superhuman capacity for sugar in the morning).

We started work on the farm at 8am, unless there was a bad frost. I’d head out into the field and spend the morning in the long dirt rows, watching the sun slowly crest over the mountains, bathing everything in a pale and glittering light. Some days I’d harvest arugula, grabbing a bunch with my first and slicing the stems at the bottom with a knife in a kind of sawing motion, almost as if I was scalping a man, and then sorting through the handful to pick out weeds and wilted bits, and dropping the rest into a big blue bin. Some days I’d harvest heirloom tomatoes or lettuce or spinach or tuscan kale, all by hand and by eye. (Food, it turns out, isn’t magic). Some days I’d listen to an audiobook of The Odyssey, but most days I would work in silence, with nothing but me and my thoughts, my heavily populated solitude, the monotony of the work becoming a kind of meditation.

The best days were when I’d work with Rajko. He’d do his work rapidly, ferociously, almost with appetite. But we’d talk. We’d talk about fate and free will and God and what it means to be a man. He would tell me stories of Italy and stories of delivering beer, how it’s a beautiful job, and stories of dating a woman ten years older than dating a woman ten years younger. Sometimes he’d say cryptic things like “Men used to go to war” or, “We all have a remote control but we don’t know where it is and don’t know how it works. In life, you have to find your remote control and find out how it works. You’ll probably figure it out right before you die. Say, ‘Oh, that’s what it was!’, then you’re dead. That’s not tragic. That’s life.”

He’d tell me stories of his ten years of travelling the world, living in the Australian outback alone for two months with no cell service, wandering through a jungle in India at midnight, working in a bar in Toronto and making friends with the homeless, giving his bike away to someone who needed it more than him, walking down Younge Street half-yelling “Trahno!” but no one would notice because people in a city have blinders on, oblivious to everything but their own snowglobed world. And he would tell me how he was ready to move back home for good now and buy a little piece of land by a river he grew up swimming in, and build a little house on the bank, because, as he told me, nothing can replace your home soil and where you’re from.

The other thirty-odd people I met on the farm were nice and interesting and everything, but there was a distance, a barrier of pretence and pretending that dissolved with Rajko. If you were to ask me for the reasons I liked him, I could point toward his big goofy smile and absurd lightness of spirit, which often cracked me out of my more serious heaviness. I could tell you about how he wasn’t afraid to think for himself or about how he greeted his girlfriend, also on the farm, with the same simple excitement as a golden retriever, like he hadn’t seen her in five years even if it’d only been five minutes. I could try to explain how he had a heart for animals and the helpless more than anyone I’d ever met. But none of these reasons, added up, equal to the friendship that formed. It was hidden somewhere in the conversation between us.

This leads to our first important point: real friendship resists articulation.

We are all born with this deep, complex interiority. You could call it the soul, whatever it is within you that is unchanging and unblemished; unwounded, despite that pain you’ve experienced. But nobody can see it. You can’t even see it—not really. But without having to understand it exactly, you can notice what kinds of people dissolve in your interiority, fuse with it, expand and aliven it. You will not be able to explain how or why this works. You will only be able to assent. And through this fusion and expansion you see more of who you are, more of what is within you. It is drawn out of you, mostly to your surprise.

I think it is crucial to let friendship resist articulation, not needing to explain itself to justify its existence. Articulation is a friendship killer because that thing that happens between you doesn’t really make sense. The best relationships are rarely compressible into a sensible string of words, especially a string of words that impress others. They rarely conform to the kinds of tropes we expect. They’d be annoying or embarrassing to try to explain, almost offensive. Rajko had a tattoo on his scalp! But, within an hour of meeting him, leaning on a farm truck in a MEC parking lot outside Vancouver, he asked me about my ten year vision for my life and I excitedly started saying things I never heard myself say before, things I didn’t even know were in me.

Friendship is a unique resonance between two people. But our mind is a pretty bad judge of the kinds of people we will uniquely resonate with. This is because it’s mostly a mystery². In Crime and Punishment, Dostoyevsky has a line that gestures toward this, how “we sometimes encounter people, even perfect strangers, who begin to interest us at first sight, somehow suddenly, all at once, before a word has been spoken.” Joseph Campbell called it a recognition of identity in the other. Well-married couples say something similar. How they could tell this person was different, almost instantly, but had no real reason why. Even if it was awkward initially because they hadn’t learned how to talk to each other yet and he couldn’t look at her for more than a few moments without having to look away, there was something there. Love always takes us where we did not think we would go.

The way we find this unique resonance is through sensitivity to context. But instead of explaining context, which is harder to define, I want to explain why people get into trouble when they start with form rather than context. Meaning, when they think that reality shouldn’t surprise them. That someone must fit into a pre-defined shape and check all the boxes of the kind of person they would describe as ideal on paper.

We see this play out all the time in literature; Tolstoy and Austen come first to mind. When romantic relationships start with form, a checklist, a good match in the eyes of society, because someone is rich or high status or has nice epaulets or whatever. The relationship is a social creation first that is then pushed onto the two unsuspecting individuals who begin to think that maybe they do love that person after all because everyone else keeps making eyes at the two of them and telling subtle suggestive jokes. They like the social approval, what being with this certain person says about them or how it makes them look around others, and never look at the actual person. We are such social creatures that we will let this crude force sway even our most important and intimate emotions, like love³. Of course, you can imagine these relationships don’t go very well. Love always smashes through the box that reason tries to place it in.

I saw the same thing play out with a roommate. When two or three people in his social circle tell him to ask this certain girl out, a girl he’d never thought of romantically before but now, all of a sudden, now that he thinks about it, maybe he is in love with her. This kind of crude social pressure, like in literature, results in cancelled coffee dates and frustration about the fragility of one’s romantic feeling and a solemn vow to not pursue anyone unless it’s obvious, which I think is mostly a good rule.

When you start with form, what a relationship or person should look like, you cannot be attentive to the weird fusion that happens in the presence of some people, the unrestrained animation on your face, the feeling of expansion, the way your sentences build and overlap, the way your words mix together.

However, an important caveat is needed here. This fusion, this unique resonance, this recognition of identity, whatever you want to call it, is a feeling but a feeling that only emerges from a shared foundation of virtue. An admiration of each other’s character and what they stand for.

It is easy to start liking someone because they’re funny or hot or cool and make you laugh and feel excited and good. It is easy to think you are friends because you both like to ski or watch 80s movies, because they can help you get an A in a class or access to that new nightclub or elevate your status or whatever. But neither of these things, neither pleasure or usefulness, are a firm foundation for friendship. These things come and go. People will be more or less fun and useful to you in different seasons of life, as emotions ebb and flow, old interests die and new interests are born.

Real friendship, the insoluble, full-bodied kind of friendship, only forms when two people come together out of respect for each other’s values and admiration of their virtues, and decide to care for the development of their character, even learning to grow fond of their flaws. You may have fun together and they may be useful to you but even if they’re not, even if they’re in an idiosyncratic depressive funk and can’t answer your question about Proust, you still love them, care for them, and want to help them unfold their life with dignity. You still want them around. Just as a human being.

When I say real friendship is found through sensitivity to context I think what I am saying is: when you drop the expectation about how something should look and side-step the crude social pressure and instead pay attention to how you think and act and talk around different people, who you become in their presence, whether the words that come out of your mouth surprise you, noticing who makes you feel alive and real and true and heard. This kind of sensitivity requires surrender, treating people as capable of surprise, complex things that cannot be contained in your thoughts about them. Something not to be figured out but rather met with in the freedom of space.

Of course, I’m talking about friendship but I think you probably find love the same way. By paying attention. By letting go of how it “should” happen. And always when you least expect it. In fact, the word for friend and lover actually comes from the same Latin root: amor.

This kind of fusion is important and life-giving because we do not understand ourselves properly or fully in the darkness of our aloneness but under the light that someone’s gaze and committed attention shine on us. Within the pocket of care they create. The loving space to articulate our inner thoughts and express our deep, complex interiority, however confusing or shameful or scary. In good times and in bad.

We discover who we are in that conversational space. In the conversation itself.

We cannot disappear into the library or gym or therapist’s office and come back changed, isolating ourselves like some kind of cancer until we figure out how to be less broken and more on top of things, because the very change we need most, the change we crave, can only occur in relationship, in the presence of people who love us and care for us, sometimes more than we can bear to care for ourselves. People who ask things of us. People who are willing to stick by our side as we sort through the rubble of ourselves.

Humans are creatures who need a co-witness. Who need the gaze of another to fully see ourselves⁴. We are only fulfilled by and completed in relationship. We do not find the meaning of life alone. We find it with another⁵.

Friendship, I submit, is the basis of all relationship. Even love relationships like marriage often suffer simply for a lack of friendship. A lack of genuine enjoyment of being in the presence of the other. A lack of that weird fusion that happens when you’re together.

Yours,

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1. I couldn’t help but think how a mere eighty years ago these two guys in front of me would have been shooting at each other in some muddy field in France but now, here they are, eating cornflakes shoulder to shoulder at the kitchen table, passing the juice. Just look at them.

2. There are probably people like this in your life you’re not seeing. Sometimes you can misread people you meet, place them in a category of “that kind of person”. Sometimes people are shy and require a gentle, patient curiosity to open up. Or an invitation into a new context. Sometimes it takes time for the other person to assent to the chemistry that is latent between you, while you try really hard not to be creepy about it.

3. If being friends or liking someone is socially awkward or inconvenient or hard to explain to others, but you still like them anyway, it’s a good sign the feeling is genuine and worth following. Because the feeling is strong and independent enough to overcome the social discomfort that wants to drive you away.

4. I sometimes theorize this is one of the main benefits of marriage: someone I can do life with who can validate this is, in fact, life that I’m living and my experience is real and actually happened and I’m not going crazy. Almost a kind of shared memory verging on shared consciousness.

5. The words of Thomas Merton.