Friend Juice

 At the severe risk of sounding self-congratulatory, I have to say it: people seem to like my company. For all that I've managed to construct an adult life for myself as an affirmed single, it turns out this does not necessarily prevent one's daily life from becoming a ceaseless struggle against the tide of various platonic entanglements. My phone lights up each day with whatever one would term the non-romantic equivalent of billets-doux. The importuning of amicatory suitors. Tonight, at 11:30 PM, a text message arrives for instance. "I'm low on friend juice," says a friend whose last few calls I'd ignored. "I need a refill." The good-natured guilt-trip worked. I phoned him up at last. 

When asked to account for this need of my company, my friends and family all give versions of the same answer. "Why does everyone want a piece of Josh?" I asked recently to my best friend from high school, my well of humility having run dry. He came out with the ready answer: "Because you're fun!" My sister and I, more recently still, got into an argument during COVID, because there was a time when I wanted to barricade myself in my own home, eliminate all possible sources of outside contagion, and experience a week of monk-like seclusion. When she objected, I got angry: "Why can't you let me live my own life?" I demanded. "Because I want to hang out with you and watch Drag Race!" she replied. 

So there we have it. Don't take it from me. These are true testimonials, not hired actors. Whether I am to be compared to a juice or other nourishing fluid, or, more simply, it's asserted that I'm fun to hang out with, the upshot is the same. People like me. I was trying to figure out exactly how and why I have this effect on people, at least those close to me. After all, it's so completely at odds with my even more abundantly-documented shyness, introversion, awkwardness, reclusiveness, etc. Then I realized: I am pretty lively and conversational and a good listener when I am around them. But I am able to achieve this effect precisely because I am also for long periods utterly inaccessible.

The great Quentin Crisp talks about a similar phenomenon in his autobiography, The Naked Civil Servant. He enjoyed, throughout his life, a reputation as a conversationalist. One might expect, therefore, that he must have been the sort of person with an inexhaustible love of company. Au contraire. As he puts it, his "mistaken idea that to win people I must dazzle them [...] made it essential for me to live alone. From time to time I had to stagger into my dressing room." Similarly, in The Adventures of Augie March, Bellow's protagonist observes the personal habits of his supervising labor organizer in the CIO: he notes that even though he was the most active organizer during the week, he would be utterly impossible to reach on the weekends, when he would spend two days immured in total isolation at home.

This then, is what people are not realizing. My reclusiveness is not an odd contrast with my sociability, but a necessary precondition of it. In order to have interesting things to say, I need time to be alone and read books and think thoughts and store up content. My friend called me up because he wanted me to pour him a tall one of friend juice, and I did my best to oblige. But in order to restock him with friend juice, I first needed to refuel myself with introvert juice. As Jack London once wrote in another context: "one pays according to an iron schedule—for every strength the balanced weakness." In my case, homeostasis can only be achieved through counterbalancing my days of good companionship with long stretches of disappointing everyone by turning off my phone and hiding it in the other room. 

And it occurred to me at last that the romantic analogy with which I began is apt, for the conundrum I am describing is really just the classic chivalric dilemma in a new light. "I could not love thee, dear, so much, loved I not honour more," as Richard Lovelace wrote. Except in my case, it's: "I could not entertain thee, dear, so much, did I not entertain myself by reading first." 

Lovelace's point was that, as much as his beloved didn't want him to go and get himself killed in the English Civil War, it was precisely the lovable and loving qualities in him that made his participation in that conflict unavoidable. And whatever one makes of that spurious pretext for bellicose monarchism, I'm quite convinced that in my own case, my friends are in an analogous position to Lucasta. They protest against the very thing they appreciate in me. It is the same restocking of my mental pantry, through demanding weekend splurges of reading and social isolation and "me-time," that makes it possible to reemerge with gifts of wit and conversation at the end of it that I can share with others. 

And so, as much as friends and family might resent my occasional absences, I assure them that they are, however paradoxically, necessary prerequisites to the very things about my presence that they enjoy. 

Thou wouldst not love my friend juice, dear, so well,

    Had I not spent the weekend squeezing it from the fruit of solitude.