The antidote for loneliness is to connect with consequential strangers.  Having a “tribe,” John told me when I interviewed him for the book, is the flip side of social isolation.  All of us experience loneliness at times, but it is most dramatic–and we are most vulnerable–during major life transitions when a dependable “circle of support” is disrupted. In this film, for example, the woman lost her CS at work when she had a baby.

It happened to me, too, when I moved from New York City to Northampton, MA.  Gone were merchants I dealt with, doctors, my hair dresser, people I’d chat with for a few minutes when our paths.  I didn’t realize how valuable those brief encounters were until I no longer had them.

I’ve heard similar stories from people who have been laid off.  They miss the everyday banter that they once took for granted.  And it’s hard to regain a sense of equilibrium.    In “What I Lost When I Lost My Job,” Dominique Browning, former editor of House & Garden, puts it this way: “With the closing of the magazine, my beloved family of colleagues was obliterated. And so was the structure of my life.”

In order to feel “at home” in new circumstances–whatever they are–we may need to recruit new CS.   To be sure, if one is shy or socially awkward, striking up a conversation with anyone can be difficult, but less so with someone you barely know.  There’s no baggage from the past–only the present moment.  It’s a good place to start.  For example, the woman this video ultimately connected with other isolated mothers.  She didn’t need to become best friends with them; knowing that they experienced similar feelings made her less ashamed of her own.

If you need a little help reaching out to people, check out “21 Ways to Make Meaningful Connections,” an article I contributed to Beliefnet.

So here I am again, now with two blogs–Consequential Strangers and MotherU–each representing a totally different part of my life.   I’ll funnel some ideas into in one blog, some in the other, and with others, such this one, I’ll be “bipostal,” contributing to both sites.   I’ll express my thoughts and hope that they resonate somewhere in the Universe, share my expertise and hope that it helps.  But I’ve let go of the expectation.

I’m not the only bi-postal blogger out there, according to some recent stats on blogging.  Approximately half of us are working on at least our second blog, and 68% have been blogging for two years or more.  To paraphrase Oscar Wilde’s famous quote about second marriages, “Second blogs are the triumph of hope over experience.”

This blog, Consequential Strangers, grew out of three years of writing and research on the book of the same name.  It features real-life examples from the news and further explanation of concepts in the book, as well as my own ruminations on various aspects of one’s larger social life.  It satisfies my sociological/psychological self. I’ve focused on relationships for decades now, written about all sorts–parent and child, couples, siblings, extended family.  But this book took me beyond connections involving intimates.  The blog enabled me–for the first time in my writing career–to continue to explore a subject even after the book came out, something a traditional book doesn’t allow.  Admittedly, it was also a marketing tool–what book today is not launched withouth a blog?  But I’ve since realized that while a blog may pique readers’ interest, it doesn’t necessarily lead them to a book store.   So Consequential Strangers has become a place where I throw out ideas about relationships. I hope someone is listening.

My more recent blog, MotherU, is the resurrection of a website my daughter created nearly seven years ago.  For nearly a year I’d toyed with the idea of doing it. Then suddenly I had to get it up there, reincarnated as a blog, and it almost felt like it was the site’s idea, not mine.  Its focus is the mother/daughter relationship when the mother becomes a grandmother and the daughter a mother and both are members of the “motherhood union.”  Only a week old at this writing, MotherU represents a fundamental piece of who I am — the mother of a grown daughter and, to my amazement, a grandmother (not a term I accepted gracefully!).  I have always found stories and theories about mother/daughter relationships particularly interesting–the inspiration for 1001 posts.  But also, I believe there is a need for this conversation between mothers and their adult daughters.  So I plan to throw out some ideas, and we’ll see what happens….

Two blogs, two audiences, no expectations.  With an estimated 133 billion people writing blogs, and “only” 346 billion readers to go around, how can anyone have expectations?  I guess I will base my “success” on the criterion that 70% of bloggers use: my own personal satisfaction.  Believe me about that, because I’m also among the 75% that describe themselves as “sincere,” not the 16% who describe themselves as “snarky”!

It was beyond the scope of the book to investigate relational differences in other countries, but many social scientists have looked at both “emotional norms”  in different cultures  and at the degree to which we see ourselves as  independent or interdependent.  It’s a complex equation, but culture impacts both personality traits and our everyday decisions.

Geert Hofstede, who looks at five “cultural dimensions,” finds that the U.S. ranks first in “individualism,” scoring 91 on the scale.  (The six runners-up are Australia (90), United Kingdom (89), Netherlands and Canada (80), and Italy (76).  In contrast, Taiwan scores 12, putting it fairly close to the “collectivist” end of the continuum.  Such cultures feature “strong, cohesive in-groups, often extended families (with uncles, aunts and grandparents) which continue protecting them in exchange for unquestioning loyalty.”

Out of curiosity, I also checked out where Hofstede ranked Ghana.  I interviewed and wrote about social scientist Eva Schiffer’s net-mapping work with a water management board in Bolgatanga, Ghana.  Ghana is part of  West Africa, which scores 16, putting it in the same league with countries grouped together as “Asia” (20).  And yet, Ghana’s collectivist leanings make its people no less hospitable to strangers, according to Schiffer.  Here’s an excerpt from Chapter 2:

Ghanaians have no word for “consequential strangers,” she says, but having a broad network of affiliations is crucial for survival.  “I expected that it would be all about family but it was very easy for me as a stranger to develop something similar to family.”   The man who helped her find a house in Bolgatanga and get a telephone in two months instead of nine became her “uncles.”  Others are now her “brothers” and “sisters

If collectivist Ghana values consequential strangers, why not Taiwan?   And why not the U.K. or Canada?  Indeed, it makes sense that regardless of where a country stands on the   independence/interdependence continuum, the need to connect with others is so basic and universal that it cuts across ideologies and cultures.  In Ghana and Taiwan they are accustomed to, and know the benefits of, working in concert with one another.  Even though Schiffer was a stranger, they welcomed her into the fold.  And although in the U.S., our networks may be more individualized and loose-knit than in other countries, anyone who’s successful knows that to achieve anything, you can’t do it alone.   As the old African proverb goes:

If you want to go fast, go alone.  If you want to go far, go together.

(Stay tuned, folks:  I’m off to Paris in May, where I hope to continue to amass enough CS to give me a sense of belonging!)

[My tears were] about my husband. I realized when you were talking about how these consequential strangers enrich our lives that my husband (a stay-at-home dad) hasn’t taken advantage of the consequential strangers he has access to, which has led to depression. I also realized that b/c my experiences are so rich and different from his (I get to meet people like you!) that he’s missing out and I just want him to be able to share experiences and “people” with me b/c it will enrich both of us, as a couple.

Sandy’s story brought to mind a point I often make about CS and marriage:  Outsiders can make a marriage stronger! 

Understandably, the academic literature on marriage typically stresses the importance of mutual values and interests–the couple that does things together stays together.  Still, that doesn’t preclude the fact that casual social ties outside a marriage (excluding sexual liaisons,  of course!) can also infuse a relationship with new life.  Nor does it address the reality that one person cannot be “all” to another.

Family historian Stephanie Coontz, author of Marriage, A History, explains: When women entered the workforce in the sixties, “overturning the cult of togetherness” that peaked in the 1950s, couples began to forge relationships outside the purview of marriage.  As she wrote in a New York Times op-ed piece, Too Close for Comfort:

Researchers soon found that men and women with confidants beyond the nuclear family were mentally and physically healthier than people who relied on just one other individual for emotional intimacy and support.

Rather than hunker down solely with our intimates, Coontz suggests, “we can strengthen our marriages the most by not expecting them to be our sole refuge.”

Similarly, psychologist Bella de Paulo, author of Singled Out questions the dominance of “intensive coupling” as the sole model for a good marriage.

No longer do Americans march in lockstep through a life path that begins in early adulthood with marriage, then continues through parenting and retirement and grandparenting. That path, even including an intensive version of the coupling, is still a possibility, but now it is only one of many options. In the 21st century, we have greater opportunities to create the interpersonal lives that best fit our unique sensibilities.

Sandy’s arrangement with her husband is a perfect example.  She’s the major breadwinner, and he’s Mr. Mom.   Ask any woman who stays at home with little kids–you need other people to get through the day!

More to the point, marriage (or cohabitation) and intimacy work best when both people are individuated–there’s no merging; each knows where he or she ends and the other begins. Each has his own set of resources.  Family therapist and passionate marriage advocate David Schnarch and is fond of using a “boat” metaphor in his couples workshops:  Rather than than imagining yourself going through life in the same boat, see yourselves in separate boats going down the same river.

In short, rather that expect your romantic partner to be your “everything,” as so many romantic songs suggest, take side trips with consequential strangers.  Talk to a variety of people, learn new things.  As a result, you become more interesting and more interested in others, including your partner! Then, when your boats come together, you are each stronger, more integrated, fuller.  Your side trips on the river bring novelty and new ideas into the marriage, and it stimulates the the relationship, which bodes well for your sex life, too.

I’m all in favor of intimacy and long-term relationships, but so many marriages end badly–the divorce rate still hovers around 50%.  So perhaps it’s time to rethink what kind of “togetherness” actually works.   For Sandy, a “light bulb went off” when she heard about consequential strangers.  See allowed me to reprint her email to “help others” who might be struggling with similar issues.  Most important, she was able to talk to her husband about it.

It was a healthy realization for me and is something I have talked about with him since. We’re on our way…

Note: This post, in slight different form, also appears on the Psychology Today website.

In Greenstein’s social convoy (as in all of ours), are people who ride along with her as she makes her way down the road of life–individuals and clusters of people from a particular realm, such as the office or, in this case, the apartment building where Mindy and her family live.  She writes about “Little  Louie,” her 58-year-old a doorman who drove a red motorcycle to work.  When he is critically injured in an accident, Greenstein and other residents and staff visit him in the hospital where he lay unconscious.  There she runs into his daughter.  Greenstein shows her the cards her sons made for Louie–artifacts of caring.  The doorman is an important part of their social convoy, too.  When a fellow first grader teased one of her sons, calling his artwork “scribble scrabble,” Louie taught him how to draw.  The daughter is not surprised; her father was “great at drawing…great at everything.”  Greenstein writes:

It feels intrusive getting this glimpse into Louie’s personal life, when I’m so used to it being the other way around. Louie always knew who came and went. He even knew when I returned from chemotherapy every other Tuesday three years ago, offering his usual smile and a kind word. A natural pessimist, I was still persuaded when he would say, “It’ll be fine, you’ll see.” I want so much to be able to say the same thing to him now.

I’m beginning to realize how little I know about him. I think he’s in his late 50s, that he hails from Puerto Rico and now lives in the Bronx, that he has a girlfriend whom he met when she worked in our building as a nanny. I know that he loves his daughters and grandchildren, and they love him. All the children love him, especially the two little girls who live on the first floor and like to call him the Grouch while he teases them and makes them giggle.

Such is the paradox of consequential strangers.  On her deathbed, Greenstein won’t be saying, “I wish I had spent more time with my doormen.”  Louis is replaceable. But he is also a one-of-a-kind, a person who changes her day in small, wonderful ways.  And he is a vital part of her everyday comings-and-goings.  This paradox is even more dramatic where there is an “assymetry,” as Greenstein calls it–a relationship of unequals. Theoretically, we save our tears for close relations, but when Greenstein leaves the hospital, learning that her doorman’s prognosis is grim, she is “red-eyed.”  When she walks down the block, knowing that his red motorcycle won’t be there.  She misses it; she misses him–and yet hardly knew the man.

Little Louie is the employee; it is his job to be friendly and courteous–for Greenstein, it was optional, and yet she valued the relationship.  She understood that he mattered.  After sharing the depressing news with three other employees of the building that Louie probably won’t survive, she challenges a long-standing social practice in her building:

Suddenly, I turn back around and say what I’ve wanted to say for 15 years. “Would it be all right if you called me by my first name? I know it’s not policy.”

“I would like it, actually,” Big Louie says. “We’re all family here.”

George and Elliot say they’ll do it, too, if that’s what I want.

“Yes, please. Call me Mindy.”

In a few words, Greenstein blurs the social boundaries and lets her consequential strangers know that they matter.  It is a fitting tribute to Little Louie and and expresses an important social and spiritual principal:  Relationships needn’t be painted as as “close” or “not-close,” but rather as meaningful.

I thought I was a Real Estate Broker, but the last few years it’s been all about desk top publishing/marketing and advertising via social networking. Makes “hauling & hoping” not look so bad after all!

So now what?  In the piece I admitted, for all the world to hear, that I felt as if I was no longer a writer, but a publicist–to which a former editor, after telling me that she enjoyed the piece, added these two sentences:

I love that you’re becoming a writer again.  I was starting to run from Melinda the Publicist

I’m not surprised.  I was getting hints of that from friends.   I wanted people to see what I had seen in the research, to appreciate the power of their own social convoys.  Clearly,  I had overdone it!

So now that I’ve metaphorically raised my hand to announce, “I’m Melinda and social media has made my life unmanageable,” what does “recovery” look like? Where does my admission leave me–and this blog?  Here’s what I learned and what I plan to do:

Right-size. I’m not going to abandon all social media, but I will put it in perspective.  When I’m on line, I chat, answer emails, research, read emails, play Lexulous on Facebook–much of it is social time.  I’m soaking up information or  exchanging ideas.   Just as I’d schedule a trip to the library, or an appointment with a colleague–and wouldn’t spend five hours in either place–I will plan and allocate my Internet time as well.

Balance. It’s not all bad.  I have connected with tens (that’s not a typo!) of new people through Facebook, Twitter and this blog–people whose ideas resonate with my own, people I wouldn’t have otherwise met.  They are younger or older, they live all over the world, and I love the exchange of ideas.  One of my new social media buddies captured this–in 480 characters:

I just read your article. I agree that we can easily fall into the “hype” and lose track of other things. But, without that hype I may not…have found Consequential Strangers. That “hype” has allowed me to appreciate the people in my life who I didn’t realize mattered. I have…also met tons of other people who have changed my thoughts. So, thank you for the Hype! I look forward to more in 2010.

Broaden. This is what you can expect in 2010. I will continue to tweet, write, and comment, here and on other blogs, but I won’t just write about consequential strangers.  (That said, almost every discussion involves social connections!)   But I needn’t limit myself.   Right now, in fact, I’m mulling over a post entitled, “Sixty-five Is the New Black.”   (Don’t ask. I won’t tell.)

Sometimes it’s hard to trace the origin of my various online connections, but I believe that Jason, who writes the Caffeinated Conversations blog, found me through the Gumption blog by Joe McCarthy.   In turn, I found Jason via Google Alerts, when he tweeted Joe’s review of CS.  What a great example of the wonderful, serendipitous, and sometime overwhelming connections we make in cyberspace!  We’re geographically and sometimes ideologically worlds apart. But somehow we manage connect.

Therefore, Jason’s question is right on target.  What is your dream?  Given this culture of continuous connection, what do you want your social future to look like?   Following Jason’s entry, in which he put forth the idea that through conversation we can change the world for the better, was Megan’s comment, in which she said,

I think if people are able to share ideas and cultivate relationships, it’s great, but really, there is no electronic substitute for talking with other human beings face to face. I have started referring to online “friends” in quotes, simply because I grew up with a different definition of what a “friend” really means.

Of course, I couldn’t help myself.   I  jumped right into their conversation, both to describe my own dream and because 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.  This is my comment:

Megan, a way to describe at least some of your online friends is to think of them as “consequential strangers”–people other than family and close friends. But I’ll bet that many of your online exchanges are with people you know in both contexts–on and off line.

My dream is that we stop calling online relationships “virtual” and questioning whether they’re “real.”  My dream is that we begin to appreciate and value all relationships and to think of those that matter, in small or great ways, as “meaningful,” regardless of where we meet or how deep the level of intimacy.  Our social ties span a continuum, from stranger to soulmate, but because close ties have been studied more and, until recently, talked about more, acquaintances  somehow seem unimportant.  But they’re not.

Implicit in Martin Luther King’s I Have a Dream speech was the idea that once we all look past the outer trappings, whether skin color or status, and dare to cross traditional lines, we will be better able to appreciate our similarities and see our differences as benefits.  And every bit of research I’ve uncovered over the last three year confirms this as well: The more we “integrate” our lives will all sorts of people and all sorts of relationships, the healthier, happier, and more successful as humans we will be.

I worry about the perils of online socialization, too.  But if we’re conscious and careful–if we learn to manage our (relatively new) online lives so that we reap the benefits of having so many others to call on–the advantages will outweigh the risks.

Besides, the genie is out of the bottle:  Every day we make new connections at an unprecedented rate and volume.  We consume tens, maybe hundreds, of byte-sized morsels of “conversation”–through emails, in chat rooms and on bulletin boards, and via social media.

Perhaps this avalanche of acquaintanceships will overtake us.  Or perhaps we will look back a few years from now to realize that many of the definitions we grew up with have changed and we simply had to adapt (for better and worse) as earlier generations had when newfangled technology threatened the status quo.  Either way, we’re all standing on the same hillside.

Why CS are now more important than ever. We’ve always had them, but today the world is too complex, our lives too busy, to depend on intimates alone.   CS impact health, success, and our sense of who we are.

Where we find them. New York is filled with “being spaces,” some of which I’ve written about on this blog: “dog runs and other mini-communities,  the High Line park, an everyday bus route. Cafes, laudromats, OTB parlors, the new Times Square promenade, Brant Park–they’re all places where strangers can become consequential strangers.

How casual relationships develop (and sometimes deepen) – the role of gossip. CS meet each other on common ground–based on interests, local, or need.   Casual conversation, gossip, and mutual self-disclosure can move us along the continuum from strangers to soul mates.  What are some of the markers? Check out the  “Friend or Consequential Stranger?” test.

The future of CS relationships–on and off line, in our homes, schools, workplaces, and communities. In the last ten years, the Internet has grown and with it our consciousness, our connections, and our ability to collaborate.  In the first decade of the 21st century, we’ve already witnessed dramatic changes in the way we “do” relationships.

No one is too young or too old to understand the power of casual connections.  Here’s one of my favorite consequential strangers, Zelda, age 98:

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.)