Why new, surface-level friendships can be more freeing than old ones

It’s easy to reinvent yourself with someone you’ve just met.

Let’s hear it for shallow friendships. For friends who are not “good” friends, just friends. Let’s accept the types of friendships that happen now, that don’t ask too many questions, that open up when you meet and close when you break up, without afterthought, without obligation, free of all the complicated history and knowledge that surround old friendships.

Three greetings to the man who doesn’t know much about you, who doesn’t ask for anything from you, but who listens enthusiastically and speaks clearly. Let’s drink to a pleasant acquaintance – someone about whom you can think: “If we had met before, we would be close.”

When you begin a friendship in later years, when your romance is over, your children are grown and gone, and your career is already at its peak, it will be different from the friendships that started when you were young and that you will develop together in the future.

Photograph: Robin Cowcher

Back then, as you were exploring each other, you were exploring human nature through each other. Each new friend was a vital piece of the puzzle of existence. You were competing for points, girls, boys, careers, coolness, places on the team, social rankings. You were stealing each other’s vibes, copying each other’s looks, so in love with each other that you were trying to be each other. Meanwhile, subconsciously, they are trying to beat each other in the race to finally become someone important.

Old memories are as precious as medieval tapestries; Look, there’s little me with a stick in your hand, and there’s little you about to attack little me. But when you are with your old friends, you may be so surrounded and entangled in these ancient tapestries that you cannot see the present through the window.

And they know a lot about you, old friends. You can’t bullshit them. You cannot, even for an hour, make yourself the self you want to be and the self you wanted to be in the past; You’re stuck with who you are and who you were. The bastards have receipts and they’re not shy about showing them. If you were scared of girls at school, your friends still refer to you as the Monk, even if you’ve since been serially married and are now paying child support in three states. “Hello, hello… look who came in. It’s the Monk.”

With a shallow friend, a new friend, you have more freedom to shape yourself. And I’m not outright calling for lying, so much as regulating enough for you to keep for yourself that shred of dignity that makes beer sweet. You only tell a new friend the things you want them to know about yourself. And he, that nice guy, only told you what he wanted you to know. What a pleasure it is to meet two exemplary people on such a meticulously chosen ground. No need to mention bankruptcy or DUI confusion.

You become locked into your old friends, the ever-present and ever-present yourself. But you’re not that person anymore. The new friend, the drinking buddy so to speak, is introduced to the present you by the present you, the curator of the present you. It’s not as hypocritical as it seems when you consider that your new friend probably gifted you a tuxedo-clad ghoul.

With a shallow friend, a bar friend, you don’t even have each other’s phone numbers. You drift apart and immediately disconnect in a way that has barely been possible since the last millennium. If you walk away from this conversation and these few beers, that’s the end of it. It was an island of politeness, a holiday of sociability, like an episode Officeor a stopover in Spain.

You don’t have his backstory other than the bare bones, and if you dig into it, that counts as nosy. Fortunately, this half-friend of yours doesn’t have your past either. He doesn’t know about your first two wives, your losses, your resentments. Little does he know that you failed your final year of law three times, and legend among your best friends has it that you ended up giving the faculty dean the honor of giving the Johnnie Walker case and an STD.

I sit and have coffee with Marg, whom I’ve met recently, she’s obviously a smart woman, well-rounded, funny, sharp and laughs easily – and the level of familiarity with this first floor is enough, it’s a nice place to spend some time. Not knowing everything about him is, in a way, more interesting than knowing everything about him.