I’m not a good acquaintance.
I think it’s because I’m not great with simplicity.
My 9-year-old came home with fraction homework, broken down simply.
It took me an hour to figure out.
I process through layered contextual meaning, not linear reduction.
Some people simplify to understand. I contextualize to understand.
Things that should be easy, like small talk, are agonizing.
Neighbours, my kid’s friends’ parents, coaches, friends that have drifted in another direction; I just don’t know what to do with them.
How often do we talk?
How much do I share?
Is this performance, or real?
Why does it feel both intimate and distant at the same time?
It’s too much for me, so my system defaults to two lanes:
1. Soul-deep connection
2. Closed gate
No middle ground.
Depth feels safer than ambiguity for me.
Ironically, total distance also feels safer than ambiguity.
The In-Between
Acquaintances are ambiguity.
They live in the in-between.
For most of my life, I treated these kinds of relationships like incomplete versions of closeness.
But what if they were never meant to become more?
Maybe they have a different purpose:
To create lightness.
Community.
Evidence that not every relationship has to become emotionally consuming to be valuable.
Which means I need to practice:
unfinishedness,
casualness,
being misunderstood at times,
and not needing to merge.
All of which feels oddly vulnerable when I’m used to depth.
Guardrails
Although I’m not a linear thinker, I do like a good set of rules, and acquaintances lack this.
They feel uncontained. Half-formed. Context dependent. Sometimes warm, sometimes absent. Sometimes oddly performative. No defined container.
When my nervous system asks for guardrails I can’t provide, it’s interpreted as ‘unsafe.’
Unlike intimacy and isolation.
Intimacy says we’re close, share deeply, and we matter to each other. We’re there for each other.
Isolation is clean. It simply says, ‘no access.’
At parties, I look for one person I can have a deep conversation with stand by myself.
When I’m out running errands and recognize someone, I hide.
It’s not personal. Grocery store interactions just feel strangely loaded to me.
My brain cycles through questions:
How long do we talk?
What’s the correct depth level for this interaction?
Questions like these make me feel like it’s my first time ever on earth.
People often open up to me quickly and in ways that feel unexpectedly intimate. And afterward, I’m never quite sure what happens next. Are we friends now? What obligation, if any, does vulnerability create between people?
What if I ignored them last time?
Sometimes I’m warm but sometimes I’m unavailable. Does that mean I’m misleading, inconsistent, untrustworthy, insincere?
Are we becoming friends?
We spent a week at a tennis camp in Spain, sharing meals, conversations, and long days with a group of adults and their kids. By the end of the trip, I was emotionally invested. Like I was ready to be part of their lives, although they lived all over the world.
But once we got home, everyone slowly faded back into their own worlds.
I know this is normal. Temporary proximity. Shared context. Human nature.
But something about it feels jarring to me.
Invisible Social Threads
My husband is a genius at all of this.
He’s a charming extrovert, happy to talk to everyone, all the time.
The other day he pointed to a couple walking down the street.
“They used to live behind us. Two houses over, a few years ago.”
“How do you remember that? Or even recognize them?”
“Because I talk to people.”
I imagine familiarity is regulating for him.
For me, it feels more like accrued obligation.
Which always makes me think about my business.
Would I be more successful if I were an extrovert? Out there talking to everyone all the time?
Maybe that’s part of why I gravitate toward online work.
I show up when I want to be seen.
But I don’t always have to stay.
What feels especially difficult for me is when an acquaintance goes through something terrible. What do I do then?
How involved should I be?
We’re connected. Doesn’t that mean something?
Doesn’t that make me responsible for caring?
I don’t experience humans casually.
Connection immediately carries ethical gravity for me.
