Engineering a Friend

Please bear w/ the anecdotal background which follows. In fact, if you'll just bear w/ me for a moment...

Harkening back to the days of yore, the lonely and shunned of the human community have devoted themselves to this purpose; defining the salient steps necessary to codify a satisfying, mutually beneficial social coupling. Being lonely sucks, and such forlorn circumstances can spur one to take action. There's a wealth of samples out in the world: you can't turn around w/o finding two people getting along. Surely, with such an abundance of information, a solution can be found.

See, people like me can't help but break things down into a series of steps. With rare exception, everything follows some kind of pattern. As a software engineer, the bulk of my job is to identify common patterns and write code which satisfies a broad set of terms: this is possible primarily b/c everything has patterns, and these patterns can be massaged into general formats applicable to many scenarios. Relationships are no exception.

Take a common course you'd take in college - one with a standard class size of ~30. No doubt, you'll make the acquaintance of a few tolerable people in the class. Gradually, this acquaintance will become more of a class-friendship: you'll say "hi" to each other outside of class, but the bulk of your interaction revolves around some kind of class activity. Yet, in some rare cases, you'll find you enjoy the company of a given person - say, person X. You and X might hang out outside of class. You learn more about each other - the quirks, eccentricities, and the things you enjoy doing together. Whether it be the gym, video games, crafting, etc., the company of X is one you enjoy. Before long, their name will be inadvertently merged into the list of names you default on inviting to hang-outs. And so, in the matter of just a few short months, you have what we call a "friend".

Of course, you're never conscious of this process. At least, not in the moment. Looking back, it's easy to see the steps. Hindsight, we all know, is 20/20. (Me and Vince do that all the time, as the story of our friendship is a good one). But I can't leave it there. I want to study that process; define the outline; highlight the key moments that were the "turning points"; see the general pattern.

I can't help it. It's part of who I am and how I see this world.

At my church, I'm faced w/ a social conundrum. I have a 9-to-6 job, after which I've gotta' come home and eat. For most people my age, hangin' between the hours of 7p and 11p is perfectly acceptable. But for the high school students at my church, that's just not possible - I don't expect it to be. But I need to develop relationships w/ the kids in the youth group if I want to have any kind of positive impact on them; if I want to be a part of the important things in their life that I know I can speak into.

I'm deprived of my main source of developing friendships: extended time investments and one-on-one interaction. So I must rise to the challenge, and rise I try. My solution? Break down a relationship into the high-level events that define the skeleton of a friendship. If I could just get that, I could spend time later to fill in the body. I just need that friendship frame in place.

Think of it like optimized friend-making. Sounds good on paper, at least to me. Not so much in practice.

Because I'm not a part of these kids' everyday lives, I'm not privvy to the high's and low's they go through. I don't weather the crap they endure. Part of a being a friend is taking someone else's mental baggage on yourself. For everything that leaves a mark on them, there should be a mark on you. Not the same, maybe, but certainly correlated. Without that, my empathy is stretched to the max to try and relate to these kids. I've gotta' "meta" my way into understanding them - analyze what they're saying and how they're acting and guess at the person behind it that drives them. Inevitably, I'll get it wrong. Or I won't fully grasp the depth (or lack thereof) of something they say.

I can't know them, y'know? There's just too much in people's lives that I can't control. My ploy to define the blueprint to a friendship just doesn't encompass everything. At least, not in a detailed scope that's helpful.

Time. Time is the deepest I can drill into this problem. Spend time. Lots of time. Like a panicked me in the kitchen, just throw thyme at the problem. Beyond that, it just has to "click". I don't know what makes that happen - what that crucial "catch" is. Maybe that's b/c it can't be defined. Perhaps my efforts to streamline this process are for naught. Yes, the pattern's still there - I've defined it and understood it. But that's not really...helpful.

I guess this is something I'll have to keep struggling with. It could be that it'll take more time than I've already invested. Perhaps the ratio of time-lived to time-spent-with-these-kids isn't as high as college, so it'll take more time-lived to achieve what I need.

Damn, I wish my foresight were as good as my hindsight is.