by Rebecca Baumgartner
A few months ago, I was eating dinner at a restaurant and the manager stopped by to see how I was doing. When he saw me reading War and Peace, we got into a conversation about what the book was about, why it was so long, and whether it was worth it (the answer to the last one is “yes,” by the way!). After a few minutes of conversation, he assured me he would get it and try to read it. And then he comped my meal.
I love it when things like that happen. I don’t mean getting free stuff (although that does happen sometimes – just the other day I had a cashier at Target randomly give me a $5 gift card because he liked my Legend of Zelda shirt and was happy to find a fellow fan). What I really mean is the surprisingly pleasant, spontaneous interactions we have with strangers, acquaintances, and other “weak ties,” to use the sociological term. For example, the other day I showed up at my favorite Italian restaurant and before I’d even sat down, the waiter had brought me my wine and informed me that he’d already put my order in.
What amazes me is just how meaningful and interesting and life-affirming these exchanges feel. It feels good to be recognized and remembered, even in the context of trivial things like pizza and coffee (which are actually not that trivial, in my opinion). Baristas remembering your name, a coworker remembering your birthday or pet’s name, someone asking after the random body part that was hurting the other day – all of these are dopamine hits for our socially wired brains. Each one says You have a community. You’re safe. This person has your back. Of course, in reality it’s not that simple, but in a very significant sense, it almost doesn’t matter if those beliefs are literally true or not. The simple fact that your brain holds them has a psychologically healthy and protective quality all its own.
Maybe these aren’t the people who would drive you to the airport or help you move, but they would probably help you jump your car battery or let you know that it’s going to rain tomorrow. These kinds of interactions are often hyper-local – hey, there’s a traffic jam over there, don’t go that way; it’s supposed to get cold again next week; did you see that new place that just opened up? It’s the kind of information that you often can’t or don’t get from your close friends and family, unless you live extremely close to them.
There are other advantages to weak ties, despite the somewhat derogatory name, compared to close ties. Friends and family relationships usually demand some reciprocity and accountability, which can be a drag. They can involve conflicts and envy and ambivalence. They can fall into a rut, or breed resentment if one person routinely invests more in the relationship than the other. There’s back-and-forth texts that make you want to gouge your eyes out just to schedule a single outing. There’s a history. You’re probably not surprising each other very often. By contrast, weak ties show us the glory of an interaction you didn’t have to schedule. No one’s expecting anything from you other than basic politeness while you live your normal life.
The other aspect of weak ties that makes them unexpectedly great is that you run into people who are completely different from you. You didn’t seek each other out, you’re just people sitting next to each other on an airplane or walking your dogs or waiting in line, but you can get a glimpse into slightly different political views, lifestyles, living arrangements, jobs, and preferences. If the person I’m interacting with is at work, I like to imagine what their job is actually like and I’ve found that if you ask a general question or make an observation about what they’re doing, they’ll often give you interesting unfiltered information about how their workplace functions.
These random insights can be fascinating in their own right, or useful later on. One time years ago, I had to make a trip to an emergency room and ended up chatting with a nurse, who informed me that I had the misfortune to be there on a Monday night, their busiest time. I wanted to know why that was the case – after all, ERs are open on weekends, so it’s not like people have to suffer and wait till Monday like they would with a regular doctor – and while she didn’t know the exact reason herself, she shared a bunch of anecdotes about the hospital industry and its mysterious trends that I found interesting.
One benefit to these kinds of interactions is that you get outside of your own head, brush up on your curiosity, and put your own life and problems into perspective. When traveling recently, my own irritation about the flight’s delay was tempered when I learned that the woman next to me was going to be missing a meeting she’d scheduled with a Congressional committee. Weak ties, the people who are the minor characters or extras in our stories, are the main characters of their own stories, and it’s bracing and good for us to remember this.
Weak ties may even be a cure for our political polarization. In conversations with coworkers who vote very differently from me, I’ve often stumbled upon something unexpected that we agree on in the course of a conversation about music or corporate drama. I think this may be the most important thing that weak ties have to offer. While it’s true that family and friends may also differ from us politically, there’s more at stake in those relationships. Emotions run high. You have to get along with this person at Thanksgiving. We probably won’t change the mind of a friend or family member – they would rather keep being wrong forever than have us remember that time they changed their mind.
But a weak tie? Those seemingly throwaway conversations actually chip away at us through a series of low-effort, low-stakes, low-emotion micro-encounters that have the potential to add up to a more nuanced view of what the “other side” believes, or help us realize there’s actually more than two sides, or maybe even change our minds on something. In these casual chats, there are higher standards for politeness, so we stay civil, but there’s also a greater freedom to leave the interaction whenever we want. These conversations give you the chance to try out ideas or positions that you wouldn’t air in front of a close friend or family member because it doesn’t match their idea of who you are. With a barista or a coworker or a fellow tourist, you can present yourself in a totally new way to someone who doesn’t know what you were like when you were 20. You are past-less, totally immersed in the present moment, whatever that entails.
Ultimately, weak ties give you a way of being known without really being known. The waiter at my Italian restaurant “knows me” in the sense that he knows what kind of Italian food I like, which is an important thing about me to know. But he doesn’t really know me. Despite the term “weak ties,” this kind of semi-personal knowledge doesn’t feel “weak” compared to the knowledge my friends have of me. Rather, it just feels different. And, in my view, these kinds of interactions provide outsize benefits compared to the effort you have to expend to get them. Research has been accumulating to back this intuition up. Having a variety of connections of different levels of intimacy appears to be good for us.
Of course, close ties and weak ties aren’t mutually exclusive, but since it’s so difficult to make and keep friends as an adult, perhaps cultivating weak ties is a more realistic path to feeling connected on a day-to-day basis. To put it bluntly, our friends and family will inevitably die or move away, but weak tie relationships are an infinitely renewable resource and are only a short walk or drive away no matter where you are or what stage of life you’re in. But they’re also more than just a consolation prize for lonely people who can’t find friends – while it’s true they sometimes have a “better than nothing” quality, we’re increasingly learning how they can be valuable in their own right.
To take advantage of this low-stakes companionship, you first have to get out there. You can get some of these benefits from social media or online interactions, but (you already know this) they just don’t have that spice of real life that you need. There’s something about being in the same space as another human that colors interactions and allows genuine spontaneity to emerge – the physical world is more than just a set, it’s another character in the show, and anything can happen.
So you have to leave the house. I personally find this easy; working from home full-time drives me a bit batty, so whenever I have the chance to leave my house/workplace, I generally take it. Committed homebodies may require more prodding, but it’s worth it. And if you’re worried about being too shy or not having anything to say, there’s evidence that talking to strangers gets easier the more you do it. And if you’re intimidated and wondering whether the other person will think you’re annoying, take heart from a study that demonstrated the “liking gap,” or the idea that we underestimate how much people actually enjoy interacting with us.
It might sound ridiculous that remembering the name of my neighbor’s dog would have any kind of significance to my social life. But it does – and in fact it’s probably way more important than I’ve been giving it credit for.