This post is about what it means to get to know someone. It consists of various previously unconnected points on this subject that I have gathered over the course of some years.
History
Everyone has a story. By this I mean that almost everyone is able and, in some contexts, willing to tell their entire life story from birth to the present. The older they are, the more story there is to tell, but also the more times they have been asked to tell it before, which makes them readier to do it.
I have a story, too. I will not tell it here, but I have it down to a pretty coherent narrative that I tell a little differently each time depending on the audience, but the details of which are pretty fixed. I usually begin my story in 2017 rather than at my birth, considering events before that point uninteresting. Everyone who knows me knows my reasons for beginning at 2017; only a few, besides my family, know about my life before then. (My family, in turn, do not know much about my life since then.)
Not everyone is equally good at telling their story. Some people are particularly interested in some aspects of their life and will omit others. But there are a few major aspects to someone’s life, and you cannot be considered to know someone well if you do not know those, even if they usually pass over them. Roughly, in trying to get to know someone, you’re trying to get them to hit at least these points:
- Who are their current friends, and how did they come to meet them?
- What are their current interests (and/or career), and how did they get into them?
- What religion were they brought up in? How did their own religious views develop over time, if at all?
- How did their political beliefs develop over time, if at all?
- What have their romantic and sexual experiences been?
- What have their experiences with drugs and alcohol been?
- If they do not have children, do they want to? Have their feelings, with regard to wanting to have children, always been the same? Do they have any particular views on childrearing?
I just wrote this list up for the first time, so it’s not something I have been explicitly checking every time I wanted to get to know someone. But mentally, I have probably always gone through something like this, since I wanted to learn almost all of these things about most people I made a deliberate effort to get to know.
Conveyance
A distinction I like to make is between clarity and transparency.
Clarity refers to how clearly you can convey what you think when you speak; its opposite is obscurity. Transparency refers to how much you tend to say what you think; its opposite is opacity.
Someone who is very clear, but very opaque, will not often speak his mind, but will usually be understood when he does so; someone who is very transparent, but very obscure, will speak his mind a lot, but people will usually be confused as to what he means by what he says, and requests for clarification won’t seem to help.
I do not claim that the two tend to either go together or appear separately; the qualities are simply worth distinguishing. Both make someone easier to befriend.
Length
There’s a niche indie film called Classical Period, directed by Ted Fendt, which I know about because I have been internet friends with one of the actors, Calvin Engime. (Due to regional restrictions, I have not actually watched it.) Cal showed me some of the published reviews of the film, which spoke to its relative notability within its niche. One was this one by Jonathan Romney, which includes the line: “These are people who speak in paragraphs. Very long paragraphs. With footnotes.” This line has stuck with me for some years, because it describes me and my closest friends very well.
I have sometimes texted people who don’t read or write a lot. There’s a lot more orality to how they text than to how assiduous readers text, even if they stick to a high register – they’ll send many short messages to say what could have been said in one longer message, because that’s what writing looks like when written by someone who is more used to speaking. This style with a lot of short sentences, juxtaposed rather than connected, is also found in the Old Testament, which was written in a culture where writing was not very common yet.
Popularity
There’s one sense of popularity which is equivalent to notoriety, i.e., how many people know about you or have heard of you. This is the most common way to describe someone as “popular”, and while it can be measured by doing polls on how well people know someone, it is usually measured by checking the number of Google results when looking their name up, or by looking at their number of followers on social media.
There’s another sense of popularity which is something like likability or status, and which is seen in the phenomenon of “popular kids” in school. In school, due to common roll calls and such, almost everyone knows almost everyone else’s name, so everyone is equally notorious. But only a few kids are popular. They’re the kids that everyone likes, or admires, or aspires to be like – the coolest kids. Popularity, in this sense, refers to the extent to which people like you, or have a high opinion of you.
I have never been notorious. I do not do anything important enough, or widely enjoyable enough, to achieve notoriety. But I think I have usually been one of the more popular persons within the groups I’ve gotten into.
At the same time, I am peculiarly unlikable, and I am not allowed into many groups. My account on X (formerly Twitter) is blocked by so many other accounts that it often gets hard to read the site while logged into it, due to the large number of comments that are hidden from me. This had usually left me out of group chats on the site, as well, back when an account could not be in the same group chat with anyone who blocked them. Even after this rule was changed, I was still not added to many group chats.
I don’t like many people myself, either – sometimes I connect this sense of ‘liking and being liked by few people’ with a personality disorder. But this is not the place to go into this.
Tolerance
The novel The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald, begins by describing a peculiar quality of its protagonist, Nick Carraway. I will quote the first three paragraphs of the novel in full, since it costs nothing to do so, since the book is in public domain, and space within a webpage is practically unlimited.
In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since.
“Whenever you feel like criticizing any one,” he told me, “just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.”
He didn’t say any more, but we’ve always been unusually communicative in a reserved way, and I understood that he meant a great deal more than that. In consequence, I’m inclined to reserve all judgments, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and also made me the victim of not a few veteran bores. The abnormal mind is quick to detect and attach itself to this quality when it appears in a normal person, and so it came about that in college I was unjustly accused of being a politician, because I was privy to the secret grief’s of wild, unknown men. Most of the confidences were unsought—frequently I have feigned sleep, preoccupation, or a hostile levity when I realized by some unmistakable sign that an intimate revelation was quivering on the horizon; for the intimate revelations of young men, or at least the terms in which they express them, are usually plagiaristic and marred by obvious suppressions. Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope. I am still a little afraid of missing something if I forget that, as my father snobbishly suggested, and I snobbishly repeat, a sense of the fundamental decencies is parceled out unequally at birth.
Carraway goes on to say that he had grown tired of listening to everyone’s personal story, but that he made an exception for Gatsby, the novel’s titular character.
Ever since it was pointed out to me by a close friend that I seemed to also have this quality, I have related strongly to Carraway’s sense of his tolerance, because I have also often had the experience of someone opening up a lot to me very quickly. The occasion in which it was pointed out to me was also significant – I was remarking to my friend that I was, at the same time, close friends with two persons who had also been close friends with each other, but were in the process of bitterly falling out, so that I heard both of them tell me how they felt about their dispute in closer detail than they’d ever tell each other to their face. This experience of being privy to the internals, as it were, of both sides of a conflict, was very interesting. (It did not, for all that, help me prevent their falling out, and they have not spoken in almost three years.)
Although I am not liked by many people, the people who can stand me are unusually comfortable with me. This is also, evidently, a quality that makes it easier to get to know people.
