Are All Our Friends Imaginary?

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"In order to exist, they also must consort with others." –Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea, trans. Lloyd Alexander.

I suspect that some readers younger than myself may dismiss this, while older readers may likely not need it. I hope the millennial non-adults like myself, suspended in that queasy un-decade between 26 and 34, will find it useful. The nomad demographic: renters and leasers, part-timers and freelancers. Our natural habitat is the coffeehouse, although we rarely congregate there—each of us sits isolated by an intricate security network of headphones and touchscreens and USB cables, sitting together but essentially alone.

Defining Relationships

Humans are social creatures. One of the earliest steps an infant takes toward individual consciousness is realizing the difference between the self and one’s caretakers—and conceptualizing the interpersonal space of words and actions that define a relationship.

“One of the main rubrics under which this question is discussed in developmental psychology is theory-of-mind, which is also called perspective-taking, and mentalizing. Here, once again, is the metaphorical and the making of models: our own mind imagines—becomes an aspect of—someone else’s mind.” This quote is from Keith Oatley’s Such Stuff As Dreams: The Psychology of Fiction. It may seem strange that a book on narrative psychology would devote so much space to social relationships, but the two are intimately connected.

Philosopher Paul Ricoeur in Time and Narrative writes, “Understanding—even the understanding of another person in everyday life—is never a direct intuition but always a reconstruction. Understanding is always more than simple empathy.” We socialize, but we never actually enter another human’s mind; instead, we create in our own minds a sophisticated model based on their words and actions.

Idealizing Friendships

In a sense, all of our friends are imaginary. And imagination, despite its many useful applications, doesn’t always get things right. Especially when it comes to differentiating between real and idealized relationships. An infatuated teenager, their expectations shaped entirely by powerful memes of ideal romance, often believes their first love will be their true and only love.

And in a similar way, encouraged by narrative, media, and social psychology, we nurture the fantasy of the surrogate family. Our first experience of collective belonging is influenced by memes of friendship as an intimate, perpetually enriching, and ultimately unbreakable bond. We project our peers and ourselves into a sitcom reality, where everyone stays together forever, where disagreements can always be resolved in 24 minutes. There are a lot of clichés about this sort of social construct: “do anything for,” “always be t/here for,” “never turn your back,” “no matter what,” “heartwarming,” “tightknit,” “deep down,” “one of us,” “where you belong.” It’s a lovely fantasy.

Sadly, the surrogate family does not usually survive the end of the circumstances (proximity, education, vocation, etc.) that created it. In other words, the Summer Camp Best Friends Club will likely not survive August. Sometimes two or three members may hold together, but these relationships are still transformed by the change in context. Group fellowship is a fluid thing. The particular friendship between two members of a group is informed and enriched by their social orientation among the other members.

Losing Friends

“Platonic” means “friendship” but it also means “perfect.” And the loss of a group of friends can cause disillusionment on the level of a first breakup. Perhaps it is even more painful, because it destabilizes both social identity and one’s interpersonal support network. And without the clean and well-defined ending of a romantic breakup, it takes longer to resolve, prolonged by false starts, shifting expectations, and other unpredictable complications. Worst of all is the temptation of eternal scab-picking on social media—hunting and haunting people we’ve lost, with comments and likes and emojis, futiley trying to maintain a deep friendship through a profoundly superficial medium.

If you haven’t experienced this yet, there’s not much I can say to prepare you for it—especially because we’re all inclined to believe that “my group is different,’ “that my group will stay together forever,” that my group is “do anything for,” “always be t/here for,” “never turn your back,” “no matter what,” “heartwarming,” “tightknit,” “deep down,” “one of us,” “where you belong.”

Maintaining Stable Relationships

In this age of uncertainty, we hunger for deep, meaningful, stabilizing relationships, for a place to call home. A place where we belong. And yet the realities of modern employment and transitory living mean that we’re less likely than ever to spend the rest of our lives where we grew up—or even where we were living eight months ago. The temptation to spread roots prematurely is strong, but if you suffer from anxiety, then the terror of being uprooted and transplanted is greater. If you have an obsessive disorder, or just a particularly vivid imagination, you may invest your relationships with greater meaning than they actually possess—leading to feelings of betrayal and deep loneliness if your imaginary family falls apart.

Friends Essential Reads

The Friendship Paradox: Why We Have Friends But Feel Lonely

Closeness Between Men

To maintain your stability in our age of perpetual migration requires a cautious balance. It requires a hardening of the heart—we must respect the walls that separate us from others, the same walls every infant builds between itself and its parents. But on the other hand, you can’t hide away to avoid being hurt. So: love the people you’re living with, let yourself be at home in the space that you build together. But when the time comes, let the thing be dismantled, walk away and do not look back—bring the story of your time together, not any lingering bitterness about its ending. You will need strength for the migration—and eventually, for finding somewhere new to settle. If only for a while.

Copyright, Fletcher Wortmann, 2021.