The friend who lights up every party is rarely the one who brings soup when you’re sick.
The feelingsy, arty romantic friends are always talking about how badly they want community. Yet compared with their more pragmatic friends, the nerds and the entrepreneurs, the romantics tend to end up lonelier and less supported. Why would the people who want community most be worst at keeping it?
It isn’t for lack of social gifts. The romantics can dance and sing. They cook and host, tell stories and jokes, and sparkle in any room they enter. They are willing to be vulnerable and they connect quickly. People love them. By the usual measure, being fun to be around, they should be the backbone of any group.
But community runs on a different question: can you be counted on? When someone is sick, will you take care of them? When Liza debuts her one-woman show, will you be clapping in the audience? When Ryan goes through a breakup, will you offer him your couch?
Feeling as the final authority
Romantic friends often don’t show up for each other, and the reason sits in what they believe:
- My current emotion is the truest thing.
- My personal journey is the most important thing.
- If life doesn’t feel magical right now, something is deeply wrong.
These tenets are not compatible with reliability. If the truest thing is always how you feel right now, then every commitment is provisional, open to override by the next wave of feeling. So a “Yes” RSVP comes to mean “Maybe, if I feel good on the day.” The sisterhood or collective gets abandoned for a hot stranger met in Spain. None of this needs malice. It follows from treating the feeling of the moment as the final authority.
Trust needs the opposite: the willingness to show up when you don’t feel like it. Bringing soup to a sick friend will rarely feel magical, and that is exactly why the romantic skips it. The community they long for is built almost entirely out of the boring availability their ideology treats as optional, which is the same trap the puer aeternus falls into when commitment of any kind feels like the death of possibility.
The unsexy kind of freedom
“The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.” — David Foster Wallace
The romantic hears “petty, unsexy ways every day” and recoils, because it sounds like the opposite of freedom. Wallace’s point is that it is the freedom worth having. It leaves the romantic with an uncomfortable question: if a feeling can’t survive a dull Tuesday spent keeping a promise, was it ever the truest thing?
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