Love, friendship and the rush to categorise

What if we prioritised connection over the end-goal?

Even after two years of writing this newsletter, I still don’t know what my weekly topic will be until I actually sit down to write it.

Case in point: this week. I was going to do a timely deep dive into the Wicked film. How I bawled my way through its closing tune, ‘Defying Gravity’. How the Wicked musical is – like all the best musicals – an all-singing, all-dancing Trojan Horse to carry a radical message, in this case one about staying integral to your moral instincts, even in the face of societal ostracisation.

I wanted to write about the difference between fitting in and belonging. How, as Brene Brown writes in Braving the Wilderness, ‘Belonging is being accepted for you. Fitting in is being accepted for being like everyone else.’ How the transformative friendship between Wicked’s green-skinned protagonist, Elphaba, and her ‘popular’ roommate, G(a)linda, exemplifies the importance of the former.

But first, I decided to do some procrastinatory grocery shopping, which set me on a different course altogether. On the way to my local Budgens, I listened to Slate’s How To podcast. Each episode, the host enlists an expert to help with a listener question. The episode I was listening to is titled ‘How To Find Your People’.

The listener, a 26-year-old woman named Katie, talked about feeling cut off from her university friendship group in the wake of the pandemic. In a bid to enhance her social life, she was trying to turn work friendships into bona fide friendships – but struggled to do so.

Friendship expert Danielle Bayard Jackson was enlisted to help her out. Her advice was: Prioritise connection instead of friendship.

‘Give yourself permission to relax into seeing what this might be, and enjoy the present conversation. Prioritise connection, and a natural byproduct of that will be making friendships.

She reminded Katie that friendship takes time, referencing a 2018 study that found it takes, on average, 90 hours to turn a stranger into a friend.

It was there, wandering the aisles in a hapless search for mussels, and listening to this podcast, that I bumped into a lustrously-bearded Canadian I went on a date with around this time last year.

There isn’t much to say about the date itself, other than to report there perhaps wasn’t a raging romantic connection, or a follow-up (perhaps on a different evening, in a different pub, at a different time of the year, etc…). We’d planned to meet up again, as friends, but never got around to it. A year on, as we exchanged pleasantries in the chilled foods section, it was clear that the moment had passed.

The reunion with a Ghost of December–Dating Past made me think, broadly, about all the would-be connections that have fallen to the wayside over the years.