Do you have any of those things that annoy you disproportionately? There’s no reason for this little, inconsequential thing to cause you so much consternation. For my mom, it’s when I refuse to use those stupid little bread ties, or those clips that keep the chips fresh. What can I do, I’m a rebel. For some people, it’s the kid who prolongs class, because he just has to ask a question about Hegel’s philosophy of history at the very end of a 5 o’clock Friday lecture. For me, it’s the facebook pictures of groups of friends, holding hands and jumping in front of a sunset.
What is the jumping picture, you ask? It’s the picture that everyone has taken once, usually at the beach or some other “scenic,” locale. Everyone jumps (more or less) at the same time, and the undesirable friend takes the picture of everyone else having fun. Why do I get annoyed at this ubiquitous picture? For one, it’s everywhere. Really, you couldn’t think of any other picture to take on your life changing pilgrimage to Southeast Asia? That boring. Second, it’s annoying because it’s just trying too hard. The caption for every single one of these photos is “look at all the fun we’re having. FUN, WE”RE HAVING IT. Everyone better see how great this is, lol.” It’s such a blatant attempt to cement a moment in a collective memory, a really desperate effort to say: “look, remember the time we were all friends and having fun, before we took on the soul crushing obligations of a dead-end job, a ballooning mortgage, and no way out from our cramped, lifeless, middle class existence.”
Well, maybe it’s not that bad, but you get the idea. Anyway, as I stoked my righteous fury against the affront to humanity that is the jumping picture, I realized, yeah, I do exactly the same thing. You see, all friendships, and I’d even say relationships, are based on rituals. The jumping picture is a ritual. Everyone knows its stupid, but millions of people take it every day, why? Because it marks an occasion. Like telling grandma you like the casserole, or telling your kid he did great in his part as “Tree,” in the school play, it’s something that has to be done.
Our friendships are built on a few shared experiences, and a lot of ritual. For example, with one of my friends, I have the following ritual: he asks me “how are things going with (whoever),” I give an evasive response, flip the question on him, and we commence making fun of people. We both recognize it as a ritual, and it’s even become an in-joke of sorts between us. We say, “ready for the ritual?” At this point, I’m not sure either one of us are interested in the answers to the questions we ask during the ritual, but that really doesn’t matter. It’s this little thing we have, that seems inconsequential, and even stupid on the surface, but it underscores our relationship. If we have nothing to talk about, we can do the ritual. If we haven’t seen each other for a while, we do the ritual, to see what kind of witty dodges the other one can come up with.
The rituals we have with our friends are the touchstones of those friendships. One trip, one crazy weekend, or even a crazy day, becomes the stuff of legend. Certain figures become mythologized. The girls you met at Senor Frog’s on spring break. The crazy old guy you met at karaoke. These events and experiences were great in the moment, but they get better, and more meaningful as we retell them. Have you ever noticed that hanging out with your friends eventually turns into a storytelling session? That’s not an accident. Human beings are naturally storytellers. It’s the original way to communicate vital information, that often meant the difference between survival, and a swift end at the hands of some primordial predator. Just as we sit around the glow of plasma T.V. in dorm rooms strewn with the carcasses of late night delivery boxes, telling tales of our harrowing exploits on the undergraduate battlefield, our ancestors sat around in equally sordid conditions, telling about their own exploits.
It’s actually pretty interesting to read ancient literature, because you realize pretty quickly, that Homer, and whoever wrote Beowulf, would have been, like, total bros. All they can talk about is drinking, pillaging, and of course, their sexual exploits. Sound familiar? I thought so. I’m not saying that stealing beer from a party and hooking up with a sophomore when you were a freshman are on par with sacking Troy, or fighting lake monsters. But in spirit, they’re pretty similar. And more importantly, the legends that grow up around these exploits are very similar. We tell stories about what’s important to us, as individuals, and as a society. What you talk about with your friends is indicative of the relationship you have with them. More than anything else, our stories give a glimpse of what’s going on in our collective consciousness. It makes sense that the ancients would want to accentuate their martial prowess in the stories they chose to tell. That was important then, because militarily inept societies had a to get enslaved, have their cities burned, and their land salted. College age people base their stories around going to parties and drinking, because that’s where a lot of socializing takes place. That’s where we build the friendships we revisit later when we’re telling our stories.
The stories and rituals we have with our friends often take on characteristics of theater. A lot of these interactions are fairly predictable, which makes them, well, rituals. For example, I love telling stories. I have a go to list of them that I will gladly tell again and again. For the most part, my friends indulge me in this tendency. They know I love to tell the stories, and to some extent, they like them too. So, if we meet new people, everyone holds off on saying “I’ve heard this before.” It quickly becomes a collective enterprise, with someone telling the main narrative, but handing it off at times to others who have salient contributions, or interesting side-stories. It can become a bit of a problem, because very tight knight groups of friends can even form their own subculture. I know in my group of friends, we have to make a concerted effort when meeting new people, not to barrage them with the mythology behind our group and all the interesting characters who populate our lives. Usually, we fail miserably and barrage them anyway. It’s almost irresistible though, because it really is its own culture. We have a shared history, to some extent, a shared identity, and a certain skewed lens through which we see the world because of it.
All groups are like this. On the surface, it can seem pretty shallow. Friends put on this performance, for what reason? To seem cool? To one up others? I think to some extent that’s true, but when you still tell the same stories within the confines of the group, that’s something different entirely. That’s a mythology forming. And the myths have their own sacredness. We rarely interrupt our friends when they’re telling one of those mythological stories. We allow them to stretch the truth, to jimmy the facts so the story flows better. And so the myths change, but they always return to those few, core events that defined the group. Erving Goffman was the first sociologist to use the metaphor of the theater to describe social interaction. We want things to go smoothly with our friends, for the most part. So, we allow them to stray from the script a bit. We don’t always make them tell the whole truth. Of course, this might seem totally superficial and silly. Why do we need to put on these collective storytelling events with our friends?
I think they’re useful because every time we have one of those storytelling sessions, we’re rebuilding the friendship, almost brick by brick, even if it hasn’t fallen apart. We take it apart, go back to its roots. Sometimes we find weaknesses, sometimes we find pillars of hitherto unknown strength. But what’s important is that we revisit it, and in some ways rebuild it each time we relive those important memories.
One of my favorite characters in fiction, Proust’s Marcel has an interesting storytelling encounter, similar to my own. He desperately wants to share a story with a group of new acquaintances, but his close friend, Saint-Loup has already heard the story. However, Saint-Loup, sensing his desire, pretends to have never heard it, and encourages Marcel on. After the exchange, Proust comes right out and says: “such is friendship.” And I think he’s right as he so often is. Our friends put us at ease by helping us negotiate the social space. But more than that, they know how to put us at ease in the first place. Our friends can read us. They know what we secretly long for, how we’d like things to play out. And that’s not a show, not a theater, nor a ritual. It’s something that can only come through deep and abiding human connection, and if we can say we have that with even a handful of people, then we should count ourselves very lucky indeed.
