Care is Over Time

One of my closest friends goes on lots of dates she meets through the apps. She has lots of options to say the least. Usually she’ll go out with one guy a few times before finding some incompatibility or getting bored and moving onto another potentially better option.

I told her I thought this wasn’t great because it habituated her mind to seeing people as disposable options on a menu, instead of persistent, human connections. She agreed and sympathized, but she held fast: she has a soulmate out there who is totally compatible with her and has the right interests, community, career, religion, appearance, etc. She just needs to go on enough dates to find him.

But is that the way to find a soulmate? You go through a hundred people until you find the optimally compatible one and decide to go out with them exclusively and officially?

I think about my family whom I love so much, and I know why: it’s not because they’re my “optimal” brother, mother, aunt, nephew, etc. on any objective dimensions. I love them because of the time and care we’ve invested into each other. I feel the same way about many of my friends.

If I meet a partner, I suspect I’ll actually fall in love with them by spending lots of time and experiencing lots of life with them. The only way to do this is to invest time and energy into each other to give the opportunity for that love to develop, even if hypothetically there’s another person with features X, Y, Z I find preferable out there. This is much easier said than done when you have lots of optionality — you are constantly inundated with very plausibly potentially more compatible partners. It is not easy to make the deliberate decision to just continue investing time and energy into this one while all those potentially more compatible ones are right on the menu.

More generally, this is how I feel about my friendships. I value them not in proportion to the similarity of their interests, careers, money, etc., etc., but in proportion to their longevity. If someone has been in my life for several years, I’d rather invest a lot more in them than someone I met more recently who I happen to be more ideologically, mimetically, and professionally compatible with.

What really matters to me is resilience and integrity. People’s enthusiasms and ideologies are fickle, complex, and tell me very little about how they’ll act over time, especially in a decade. Honeymoon periods are a dime-a-dozen and some flames blow out with a single breath. All I can truly know about a person is how they acted when we hit obstacles, and the length of time and space they’ve traveled with me in between.

Since coming to the city, I’m incredibly lucky to have met a few friends who have overcome these obstacles and traveled a long path with me. But in the midst of NYC’s social abundance, some of my older friends have moved away from the city or have at some point prioritized newer relationships. I can’t deny having occasionally done the same thing and prioritized a cool new connection in the past. But lately, when I do make a new friend — someone I vibe with, laugh with, and feel included by — I feel both very happy for their warmth and companionship but also a bit sad, because I wish I didn’t have room for new friends and would rather have all my time occupied with making the oldest ones older until we’re sipping tea in heaven. May the new ones become old ones and join us among the clouds.