Guy Owens and I are very distantly related–he’s the husband of my ex-husband’s first cousin! Our paths would have never crossed but for the fact that I still spend most holiday’s with my ex’s family–two children, three grandchildren and many years later, my ex and I and our extended family comprise a “family apart.” That’s how Guy and I met, and now we’re consequential strangers who see each other at family events–proof of why it’s so hard to categorize relationships as “intimate” or “non-intimate.” I prefer to think about my various connections, family or not, close or casual, in terms of “meaningful” (instead of intimate), in which case all relationships matter. Guy sent this in an email and allowed me to post it in CS Stories.
For a few years I’ve been going to the Village Zendo every Friday for their midday hour-long sit. For various reasons I haven’t been able to go since before Christmas, until today. Among all the many people who have come and gone to that session, there are four of us who have gone every Friday since I started. Besides me there’s an older guy whose name I’ve never learned who dresses mostly in orange and seems to do nothing but ride his bike around all day; a younger guy named Larry who runs a music club and comes straight from bed (at 12:30); and a middle-aged guy named Bill who is a follower of the terribly obscure Gurdjieff. We only talk for a few minutes before and after, and never see each other anywhere else. I realized today that those guys mean a lot to me. Seeing them, talking to them briefly, week after week reliably in that setting. And I know that I wouldn’t have appreciated them with as much awareness as I did today if I hadn’t read your book.
(I posted Guy’s email in CS Stories, too, because I didn’t want it to be missed.)
January 22nd, 2010 at 6:08 pm
[...] Megan’s need to put quotation marks around “friend” is precisely why we need new words to describe our relationships–and not just our online contacts: Megan, a way to describe at least some of your online [...]
January 23rd, 2010 at 12:13 am
I’m reminded of the section in your book (Chapter 2) where you write about the work of Toni Antonucci, Bernie Hogan and others in the use of circles to represent groups of friends / levels of friendship. If they will be doing followup studies, perhaps they could add a question about how participants might label those circles
January 24th, 2010 at 11:28 pm
I believe that no one has aksed people how to label their circles–I think, because it’s hard enough to get them to put them in circles in the first place! Often, people ask to write names on the dividing lines instead of in a particular circle. Danah Boyd points out that MySpace imposes similar rules on kids by asking them to rank their favorites, which reinforces peer-group hierarchies and often results in teen drama. We have so many levels of relationships, and for so many different reasons (proximity, interests, needs) that it’s really hard to categorize people–even though in our hearts and minds, we know exactly how we feel regardless of what label we use.