september 24, 2019
There are multiple catalysts as to why I've been thinking about what makes great relationships.
I think I've had "coffee chats" in the hundreds at this point over the last 3 years. A low percentage of those have materialized into great friendships.
I'm pretty tired of having bad conversations - not that it won't ever happen or that you can avoid it, but I sincerely believe I can do more to avoid those draining, unfulfilling conversations, and that people are more interesting than they initially come across.
I'm probably going to move to a new city, and I'm pretty anxious about making new friends who are deeply meaningful to me - and aren't just professional / happy hour friends.
I can draw a pretty clear pattern in initial meetups that led to fantastic things:
We talked about things other than work for most of the time
There was a level of vulnerability; we jumped right to the feelings, frustrations etc.
When these things happen it feels like I understand what makes a person tick, and that's much more of what makes them who they are - not what their LinkedIn profile says. And that's who you can actually be friends with.
However, I often have great conversations which may not pan into great relationships - that's clearly to do with follow up, frequency, and consistency. If there's frequency, there isn't enough things that happened to talk about, so you have to dig a level deeper. I realize that sometimes I will end up only seeing these great-conversation people every 4 months or so, when we remembered how great the last conversation was. But we just spend time rehashing the things we did or felt in that time apart. It feels like we're talking past each other, telling but not sharing in the experience.
The core of what actually allows one of those initial friendships to blossom into a relationship is what I'm articulating as creating surface area. If me and a friend are like 2 blobs existing in parallel, those catch up coffees are mostly just me shedding some visibility on the events / blob that makes up my life that the other person hasn't seen and can only imagine based on what I'm telling them and vice versa. But real relationships are built when there's an a context with another person that isn't imagined anymore - it's real. That happens by crossing over our blobs to create surface area by actually doing something other than talking in an un-dynamic environment, and create a shared experience that is uniquely ours.
What "unique surface area" allows is quite literally for a unique context to take shape - and that unique shared context builds into a unique connection / relationship. Engaging in something other than conversation actively means there's dynamic input into the interaction which could introduce new topics that might have never come up, reveal behaviors or traits which someone only shows in certain contexts, or more. Going back to the point earlier, these small things and vulnerabilities are much more what makes a person who they are than what they've professionally accomplished.
What I started doing in the second half of the summer is avoiding dinners/drinks - especially with people I hadn't yet broken the ice with. Even for a first hang out, I'd ask people if they wanted to go to museums, poetry slams, jazz clubs, etc and I realized I had so many more fantastic discussions - I doubt we would've talked about random college music classes and the value of the liberal arts or or been through the intensity of hearing people's immigrant struggles if not for that external input.
These situations also gave us something particular to talk about afterwards, and opened the door for wanting to continue to do those activities. We now have a growing surface area which could go any which way! And that's so exciting!!
I think that I could create a more dynamic unique conversation even in a coffee chat, but honestly I find it difficult to lead with vulnerability in a conversation - I tend to match the level of whoever I'm with. Doing something different sets a precedent that I want this interaction to be different, and that I care enough to spend meaningful time to share an experience rather than it being a throwaway coffee. It also affords the ability to be silent rather than having to search for boring, surface area topics just to keep the conversation going!
I'd generally like to have better conversations from the get-go though, but I don't know how to do that consistently without feeling like I'm peppering them with questions or making people uncomfortable, so that's the next thing I want to keep thinking about.
I know one way is just to spend a lot of time together, and eventually you run out surface level conversations and are forced to bring up something new. This could also be simulated by having regularly scheduled hangouts/conversations, in which not enough things happened in between to talk about the whole time so you have to reach a level deeper. Both of these things have worked well for me, but obviously you can't do this with everyone, so the balance for those who you can't or won't see extremely regularly seems to be to experience something with external dynamic together so that your conversation automatically has different input over which to build a new connection.
In retrospect, it seems to be why dates / date activities work ... so why don't we extend that same experience with everyone?
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