Intimacy Without Friendship
Tomorrow’s events:
The Psychotechnology Playground w/ Bonnitta Roy Every Friday @ 10:00 AM ET. RSVP here.
Collective Presencing w/ Ria Baeck. Every Friday @ 12:00 PM ET. RSVP here. 90 mins.
Socratic Speed Dating w/ Raven Connolly Every Friday @ 7:00 PM ET. RSVP here. 60 mins.
The Dark Stoa w/ Pat Ryan. Every Friday @ 8:30 PM ET. RSVP here.
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I woke up this morning to thoughts of friendship, mainly the few that did not work out. I am pretty decent at winning friends, I used to train others in this stuff. Having the Carnegie-esque ability to win friends can give you optionality in cultivating what Mark Granovetter calls weak ties and strong ties.
The terms are self-explanatory, and map over to the acquaintances vs friendship distinction. The interesting part in Granovetter’s The Strength of Weak Ties paper is the findings that weak ties are more valuable than strong ties for networking purposes, and will provide you better social mobility and more job opportunities.
Strong ties can actually be hindering in certain ways, by reducing access to new information and reinforcing old ideas instead of generating new ones. The skill of cultivating both weak ties and strong ties is what Dale Carnegie taught, and I think he is quite right in saying this skill is essential to be successful in business and life.
Weak ties are good to have, but they offer something different than strong ties, and are often instrumentalized in our world. A world that values weak ties over strong ties can be an alienating one. I think this is why authentic conversational modalities like Circling are becoming popular.
Circling encourages us to communicate what is most alive in the moment, which includes how we are feeling, both the pleasant and the unpleasant, and the comforting and uncomforting. It is not designed to instrumentalize a connection to achieve an objective. It is designed to achieve connection for its own sake.
Circling is not without its faults, as it could easily lead to weird collective emotional navel-gazing, but the best critique I heard of it was from Soryu Forall, the head teacher of the Monastic Academy. His most critical definition of it was: Circling is the way you can experience intimacy without friendship.
This is spot on. Circling gives us a dose of intimacy without needing to commit to others beyond the practice. In this regard, Circling by itself is not a panacea, and it is incomplete on its own. It is at risk of experiencing recuperation: being co-opted by the forces of late-stage capitalism, acting as a pressure-valve for alienation.
Cultivating strong ties, ones that are nurturing for both parties, is hard work. We have to get messy with each other, bring forth our shadows, our trauma, and our fears of not being likable or lovable. We also need to have space and time to do this, and space and time to do this are often hard to find.
Something that was said in the What is Emerging? documentary series we watched at The Stoa this week stayed with me: to address our collective pain we need a collective heart. In this world between worlds, where everything is on the line, we need to develop the skills that cultivate both weak ties and strong ties.
Weak ties can help by inspiring new ideas, which can inform how we will form strong ties, ones that can help us develop a collective heart.
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