A few years ago I got stuck on a form at a clinic in Bangkok. Not the medical history. The emergency contact line.
I didn’t have nobody. I had the wrong somebody. The name I wrote down belonged to someone who would drop everything and get on a plane, and who I hadn’t spoken to in five months about anything that wasn’t a problem.
It’s a peculiar feeling, being demonstrably loved and faintly starving at the same time.
A lot of genuinely kind, easy-to-be-around people are living in that exact gap. They are somebody’s emergency contact and nobody’s everyday one. The loneliness isn’t in the emergency. It’s in the Tuesday.
An emergency contact is a role, not a relationship
Crises come with a script. A marriage detonates, a father gets a diagnosis, someone needs collecting from an airport at 2am, and you know exactly what to do. Show up. Bring food. Say little. Handle the logistics.
When I ran restaurants I was excellent at this. I had a van, a freezer guy, a lawyer I could ring at midnight and a face that suggested I would sort it. People called me when things broke. Almost nobody called when nothing was happening, and I preferred it that way, because the crisis version of me was far more impressive than the ordinary one.
That’s the trap. Being useful in a disaster asks nothing of you emotionally. You get every intimacy signal going, and none of the exposure. You never once have to be boring in front of anybody.
There are two kinds of lonely and we only ever discuss one
Back in the seventies the sociologist Robert Weiss argued that loneliness comes in two separate flavours. One is emotional loneliness, the ache of having no close attachment. The other is social loneliness, a flatter feeling of not belonging to any group whose ordinary week includes you. His point was that they don’t swap out for each other. Twenty acquaintances won’t touch the first. One devoted best friend won’t fix the second.
Emotional loneliness gets all the airtime. It’s breakup songs and every film about the one that got away. Social loneliness barely gets a mention, and the emergency-contact life runs on a third pattern that fits neither. Vast amounts of care going out. Very little ordinary company coming back. On paper the network looks healthy. In practice you’re staff.
Being lovely can quietly become a hiding place
Psychologists have a clunky name for the extreme end of this. Unmitigated communion. In plain English, it means being so tilted towards other people that you drop yourself out of the frame. It isn’t the same thing as being warm or generous, which is good for you. This particular pattern has been linked to a reluctance to ask anyone for help and a shortage of support coming back the other way.
Which tracks. If your whole social position is built on being the one who copes, asking for help feels like handing in your notice.
I ran this play for years without clocking it. Someone would ask how I was, I’d hand over ninety seconds of pleasant nothing and then flip the question back like a waiter clearing a plate. Completely opaque. Nobody gets close to a man who is permanently interviewing them.
Friendship runs on hours, not intensity
There’s a study I think about more than is probably healthy. Jeffrey Hall at the University of Kansas tried to put real numbers on friendship and estimated roughly 50 hours together to become casual friends, about 90 to become friends and more than 200 before someone counts as close. He also found the hours have to be the right sort: time spent working alongside each other counted for far less than time spent messing about.
Crisis hours are intense, unforgettable and extremely rare. Nobody has that many disasters. The 200 hours are built out of traffic, mediocre films, a second coffee nobody needed and long stretches of saying very little.
So that’s the real gap. Not affection. Volume of unremarkable time.
The repairs are embarrassingly small
Ask someone for something minor. A drill rather than a confession, an opinion on a decision you’ve already made. Let a person do you a small favour and watch their posture change. Being needed is how you’ve been telling everyone you love them for years, so let somebody else have a turn.
Then send the message with no reason attached. Peggy Liu and her colleagues found that people consistently underestimate how much others appreciate being reached out to, and the effect gets bigger the more out of the blue the contact is. Your pointless hello lands harder than you think. That silence you’ve been reading as indifference is usually just two people being equally shy.
Make it recurring while you’re at it. One standing arrangement beats four brilliant spontaneous ones, because spontaneity needs energy and a repeating calendar entry needs none. Mine is a bad noodle place on Wednesdays with somebody I’d otherwise see twice a year.
And once in a while, answer the question properly, though not the full autobiography. One unglamorous true sentence will do it. Work is grim. I slept badly. I’ve been in a foul mood since Tuesday. That’s the toll for the bridge, and it’s cheaper than it looks.
The clinic form still has the same name on it. Nothing wrong with that name. It was never the problem.
The difference now is that I rang them on Sunday about absolutely nothing, for eleven minutes, and neither of us was in trouble. Emergency contacts are for the worst day of your life. What you actually need is somebody in the middle of an unremarkable one.
