Shallow connections can be just as important as deep connections
by Pace on December 8th, 2008 @ 5:34 am in
Connection Paradigm
I could never understand why watching movies together was considered a social activity. You sit in a dark room in silence. Maybe you’ll share a laugh or two, but there’s almost zero interactivity. Sure, if you talk about the movie afterwards, that makes sense as a social activity, but the movie itself seems isolating instead of social.
I think I finally get it now.
Let me tell you about witchcamp. (I swear this is related.) Witch camp is a spiritual retreat where those in the Reclaiming tradition of neopaganism can go to do self-work, magick, and personal growth. It lasts for a week and it’s very intense, both spiritually and emotionally. I formed deep bonds with some of the other people there. We shared sadness and we shared joy. We shared heart-to-heart conversations and life-altering self-work.
But I never see them or talk to them other than at witchcamp.
In the moment, it feels like that connection means the world. I feel like we share a deep, close bond, and that our hearts and souls are connected. And it’s true. But what do I do with that connection once I’m back in the everyday world? I set it aside, possibly until next year, possibly forever.
Those connections have depth but not breadth.
Now compare that sort of connection to a shallow one. A friend I play games with at a weekly game night while we chat about random inconsequential crap. A coworker with whom I interact eight hours a day. Someone I often meet at the arcade to play DDR. An online friend who posts often about her day-to-day life and I read her blog regularly. An unschooling mom I hang out with at park days and we talk about our kids. A friend with whom I often go to the movies.
Those connections have breadth but not depth.
Which type of connection influences my life more? A deep, heart-to-heart connection that only lasts for one week out of the year, or a shallow connection that lasts throughout the year?
I’m not sure, but I am sure that I’ve underrated the importance of shallow connections. Or to be more precise, I’ve underrated the importance of spending time with people who are important to you, even if the time isn’t spent doing anything deep, useful, or meaningful.
Now watching movies together makes sense to me.
It’s a shared activity that creates connection and bonding. It doesn’t really matter what activity you share, it only matters that you share it.
Blogging is an interesting mix of shallow and deep.
Sometimes people post about deep, personal issues, and we feel like we have a connection with them. We feel like we know them, like our hearts or souls resonate with their words. But we don’t really know them, especially if we’ve only been reading what they write for a short time and have never interacted with them in any other way. It’s a deep connection without the breadth to back it up, and it can be hard to grow the breadth of a connection online. Sharing activities online doesn’t always create the same kind of bond.
I want connections with both depth and breadth.
I’d like to get to know my hanging-out friends more closely. I’d like to hang out with my witchcamp friends more often. I’d like to add depth to my shallow relationships and add breadth to my deep ones. Connections with both depth and breadth are the ones that bring me the most happiness, and I hope the feeling is mutual. (:
How do you get to know people better (depth-wise or breadth-wise), either online or in meatspace?
- Related posts:
- I can teach connection without connecting to everyone.
- We hurt ourselves when we hurt others.
- Different facets of the Divine.
Have you read the Freak Revolution Manifesto? It tells the story of why there is so much hurt and sadness in the world, and how we can heal through connection.
9 Comments!
#2 Posted by 
Green on December 8th, 2008 1:54 pm | link
Hmm. I had to think about this.
I sort of.. involve myself? Volunteer, comment, try to find ways to be important. I feel like being an important part or a common association with something is a way of getting over the awkward of “Hey you’re cool please be my friend please?”. So I usually end up being “Green from English class who will help with homework” or “Green from Theatre who knows where to find things in the prop closet”. I desperately strive to be useful and knowledgeable.
The down side of that is that when that common interest is out of the picture, I get pretty paranoid I’m going to lose the friend: end of semester, I’m no longer ‘Green from English.’
#3 Posted by Green on December 8th, 2008 2:01 pm | link
Oh! I forgot a major plus! This method also gets me interested/knowledgeable in really cool things I otherwise wouldn’t have obsessively researched. Many cool adventures and ideas in my life have been the result of trying to build a friendship. So it’s no so pathetic that I become interested in new things just to make friends- it’s more like I meet an interesting person and they become a catalyst for me discovering a cool thing I never knew was so interesting. The examples I gave were more times when I was knowledgeable on my own and tried to use that to make friends, but there are super cool interests* I wouldn’t have discovered without a cool person to want to have common ground with.
* (like how the school project you helped me with not only gave me an excuse to talk to you and become better friends, but also opened my eyes to new and awesome things I was unfamiliar with!)
#4 Posted by 
Oliver Danni on December 8th, 2008 3:50 pm | link
!!!
I was JUST THINKING ABOUT THIS EXACT THING TODAY. I was doing a survey for a friend’s class project on reading, and one of the questions was about reading with friends. I sometimes really enjoy activities with friends like just sitting around and reading in the same space, because I get to spend time with my friend and be around another human being without pressure to interact with them. Like, they know I’m there, I know they’re there, it’s comforting to have another person just THERE, to know that if I wanted to say something about the book I’m reading or the movie we’re watching or the stars we’re gazing at, there’d be someone to say it TO.
I’ve been not really enjoying watching movies much lately for totally unrelated reasons, but I was thinking about that because it’s basically the same idea, and it used to be one of my favorite activities to do with another person until I realized that I was mostly choosing to do that with people to avoid actually interacting with them. When I realized this (and…then broke up with the person I was dating, having realized that I really didn’t want to interact with them all that much…), I got a really negative opinion about that activity for awhile. Then, I found that it really is a good way to just be with people without having to interact with them…it just isn’t a healthy basis for an entire relationship if I’m using it to avoid interacting with the person.
On the other hand, over the weekend I accepted an invitation to go to the movies with a new friend who I actually really want to have depth-interaction with because we keep saying “oh, we should hang out sometime!” and then we never really do, and figured “well, this is better than nothing, right?” But she didn’t even call me, and by the time it was too late for me to expect that she would call I didn’t even really want to go out at all.
Another reason I don’t like the shallow connections is that I don’t actually have a sense that the person I’m having those connections with even really likes me. The shallow connection only tells me that we’re occupying the same space — like my classmates, we might have a good conversation because we’re sitting in the same room 15 hours a week, but most of them don’t seem to have any interest in connecting with me without us happening to show up in that room. To me, the deep connection happens when people actually have to make an effort to have the connection…it doesn’t just happen to occur because we both showed up and habitually entertain ourselves by engaging other people who also show up in conversation. Does that make sense? That’s why the internet bugs me so much lately…I don’t feel like the connection is as valuable if it only happens because of an alignment in internet habits (signing into IM clients at the same time, reading each other’s LJs on our friends page, etc.).
#5 Posted by 
Pace on December 8th, 2008 4:48 pm | link
@Betsy: That makes me really happy. (:
@Green: *nods* I know what you mean. I stopped hanging out with my DDR arcade friends when I stopped playing DDR in the arcade. The best solution I’ve found is to forge deeper connections while the common interest is still shared. That way, the good ones persist and the shallow-only ones can fade away without paranoia. And that is a pretty neat way of acquiring new interests. It’s always more fun when you have someone to share your new interest with.
@Oliver: I know exactly what you mean about sharing space while each doing your own thing. We call that “talone” time. I hear what you’re saying about avoiding interacting with people. I also hear what you’re saying about not liking shallow connections, and I totally agree, it’s just that I’ve had a similar experience with deep connections. A connection forms because of a happenstance alignment in heart- or soulspace, we happen to be processing the same big things at the same time, we align, and then we move on. Did the person really like me? Sure. But is that kind of connection intrinsically more valuable than a shallow one? Not in the long run.
#7 Posted by Oliver Danni on December 10th, 2008 9:42 am | link
Pace: I am pretty sure that I agree with you. In fact, now that I am thinking about it more, I’m realizing that a lot of the places where I’m experiencing dissatisfaction in my relationships are because of unfulfilling deep connections…because the person and I never have shallow connections and spend all our time processing and/or (usually “and”) because my relationship with that person involves an incredible amount of Oliver supporting Friend’s processing and not a whole lot of Friend supporting Oliver.
Thank you for this; this helps me clarify some of the goal-setting I need to do to improve my social life. :)
#8 Posted by 
Melissa on January 3rd, 2009 1:01 am | link
I actually find watching movies together is a great chance to cuddle, to simply share in the emotional energy of the movie. Just because I’m not talking out loud doesn’t mean I’m not communicating on other levels, sharing and interacting.
Watching Cloverfield the first time, I watched it with a friend who loves to riff on movies: we didn’t take it seriously, but we had a lot of fun tossing out jokes and ripping it apart even further afterwards. The second time I watched it, it was with someone who got really immersed and was quivering with fear, and I was holding her tight and letting myself be drawn in. Two totally different experiences, because I was sharing something different with each of them.
#1 Posted by
Betsy on December 8th, 2008 7:27 am | link
So fun that you would post this. We had dinner and movie night with Pete’s family last night. It has been really hectic and stressful for us lately, and we talked about how we wanted to skip it. But we didn’t.. The tree was almost finished being decorated, his mom’s famous fried chicken was heavenly, and the movie was a corny old black and white called “Beyond Christmas.” We sat together, three generations, and it was perfectly lovely. Investment: several hours. ROI: peaceful reminder that despite troubles outside and within, it’s still the holidays, and we have each other.