Friends

The nature of a minimalist's relationships with friends and pals.

Transcript

Friends

In addition to the romantic relation-ship, another one that I am particularly angered or threatened by is the pal relationship, in which the friend does not really have an intimate interest in me, but mostly just thinks of me as

someone to have fun with. Unfortunately, I tend to see this as a lack of appreciation for my self, and so I am very inclined to find an excuse to be rid of this so-called friendship. It’s a seeming curious irony that as a minimalist who fears intimacy and anything else that might affect me, I would be bothered so much or at all by a relationship that nowhere approaches that kind of intimacy. The reason is clear though: this kind of relationship, even though it involves a real person whose company I might even enjoy sometimes, is clutter. There’s more thought that goes into the ending of a relationship with an intimate, but a minimalist can take down the pal like he is swatting a fly.

Something or Nothing

So.

I’ve been involved in perhaps half a dozen serious romantic relationships in my life, and in only one of them did the woman leave me. In all the others, I’ve left, and often without much, if any, cause. I don’t want to overstate the influence of minimalism in any of those breakups, but with most of them one of the advantages accruing from the cessation of all that love, affection, sex, companionship, communication, self-esteem, confidence, and the thousand other things that go along with any good romantic relationship – one of the advantages was always being free of commitments.

I remember clearly one of the breakups when I was literally at her front door, leaving after an argument about something or other. There I was right on the doorstep, half inside her house, and with the ability to make a decision one way or another: go back into the house and talk this through and fight for the benefits of this relationship, or cut myself free. I chose the latter.

Leaving will always be the tendency of the committed minimalist in all relationships. A typical scenario is that any difficulty in the relationship, even something minor, even a one-off sleight or mistake on the part of the partner, will cause me to consider my current options and reconsider my original choice. In a way, I’m always looking for a reason to get out. Part of it of course is just the desire to be rid of things and entanglements, but another part is that the fault or action on the part of the partner makes me think that I had it all wrong with my choice in the first place, and I will worry that things are only going to get worse now that the parade of faults has begun. There is often a strong vein of paranoiac thinking: I might worry about a plot against me in such cases, that the woman was always hiding something and accidentally let her true self show through, and that I am being mani-pulated into something, whatever it might be.

That’s one reason, for example, that I can tend to react negatively at what seems on the surface to everyone else to be the smallest provocation, or no provocation at all, and often even an action that’s a blatant demonstration (to everyone else) of esteem on the part of the other person, but which I misinterpret in my disfavour, and often as an indication, a hint, a revelation of something fundamentally wrong with the relationship. The minimalist is

someone who will interpret the smallest fleck of dust as an indication that the place, the relationship, is filthy. That’s part of what makes me so anxious all the time: either I am worried that the dirt will reveal itself, but years go by and I never see a hint of it; or I see a fleck and in a paroxysm of destruction I will imagine the whole thing coming down, and I will participate in that destruction myself.

This is perhaps one of my worst tendencies, and of course it’s inextricably tied to the fact of being a minimalist in the first place. Minimalism is all about paring everything down to the least that it can withstand without becoming something else or nothing.