The lovely protocol generates an enormous quantity of warm acquaintance and almost no friendship that survives once the proximity ends
I want to write about a man I'll call J, who I worked with on and off in London in my late twenties, and who is, in the years since I last saw him, the person I think about most when this particular subject comes up.
J was lovely. I want to use the word deliberately, because the word is the article. Everyone who met J described him as lovely. He was warm. He was funny. He remembered your name. He asked after your weekend on Monday and remembered, the following Monday, what you'd told him you were going to do. He was, by every external measure, the easiest person to have in a room.
I worked alongside him for about three years. We saw each other most days. We had hundreds of brief, pleasant exchanges. I would have described him, at the time, as a friend.
It was only, looking back from a distance of about a decade, that I realized something strange about my time with J. I could not, after three years of daily contact, have told you anything substantive about him. I didn't know what he wanted from his life. I didn't know what he was afraid of. I didn't know whether he was happy. I didn't know, when I really thought about it, whether he had any close friends at all.
I had spent three years in the company of someone I would have, without hesitation, called lovely, and I knew almost nothing about him.
I want to write about why this happens, and what it costs, because I now believe that being called lovely is, in some real way, one of the loneliest social positions a person can occupy. It looks like the opposite of loneliness. It is, structurally, a setup for it.
What "lovely" actually means
I want to be precise about what we mean when we call someone lovely, because I think the imprecision is the problem.
"Lovely" is what we say about a person who is easy to be around. Easy in a particular way. They don't make demands. They don't take up too much space. They don't bring uncomfortable subjects into the room. They don't, in any of the small daily ways available to people, require anything from the people around them.
What "lovely" almost never means, in my observation, is "deeply known." We don't usually call our closest friends lovely. We call them other things. Brilliant. Difficult. Hilarious. Loyal. The vocabulary we use for people we actually know is more specific, more textured, and often less complimentary in any single direction. Real friendship produces strong adjectives. "Lovely" is the adjective for the people whose interior we have not, in any real sense, been allowed access to.
This is the thing the people using the word don't quite realize. When we describe someone as lovely, we are usually describing the experience of being around them, not the person themselves. We are describing the absence of friction. We are describing how easy they make the room. The description tells you almost nothing about who they are. The description tells you, quite precisely, that the question of who they are has not been raised.
The trap of being easy to be around
I want to talk about why some people end up in this position, because I don't think they choose it, exactly.
Most lovely people, in my observation, learned very young that the way to be safe in a room was to be easy. They figured out, around the same age that other children were figuring out how to throw a ball or read a book, that smoothness was a survival strategy. The world rewarded the version of them that didn't require anything. The world rewarded the version that absorbed difficulty rather than producing it. The world rewarded the version that, in any given room, was the least demanding presence in it.
This works. It works at school. It works in jobs. It works at parties. The lovely person becomes, by their twenties, extraordinarily good at being in rooms with other people. They are popular in the very specific sense of being widely liked. They have no enemies. They have many acquaintances. They are, by any external measure, doing well at the social game.
What the lovely person does not have, by their thirties, is a working set of close friends. The closeness is not there. It hasn't been built. The skill the lovely person developed early was the skill of being easy. The skill they didn't develop, because the easy version of them was so successful that there was no apparent need, was the skill of being known.
Being known requires the opposite set of moves from being easy. Being known requires producing some friction. Being known requires saying difficult things, occasionally. Being known requires demanding, at least sometimes, that the other person engage with you on terms other than the smooth surface terms you've been operating on. Being known is, in some real way, the willingness to be slightly less lovely in service of being more visible.
The lovely person, by the time they realize this, has often been operating on the easy protocol for so long that switching off it feels almost impossible. The protocol has become identity. The lovely is who they are, in some deep and difficult-to-revise way. The deeper version of themselves is in there, but the wiring required to get it out and into a room with another person has, through years of disuse, gone largely offline.
What a life of being called lovely actually looks like
I want to describe what this looks like in midlife, because I think the texture of it is useful, and because I have, since J, watched this play out in several other people I know.
The lovely person, at forty, has hundreds of acquaintances and no close friends. They are invited to many parties. They are mentioned warmly by many people. They are remembered, in the most general sense, by almost everyone who has ever met them. If you asked the people in their wider circle whether the lovely person was lonely, almost everyone would say no. Lovely people, by definition, don't seem lonely. They are too pleasant, too composed, too apparently fine.
What the lovely person experiences, internally, is something different. They have nobody to call when something is wrong. They have nobody who would, on a Tuesday afternoon for no reason, ask how they are actually doing. They have nobody who has, in any real sense, been allowed past the smooth surface they have been presenting to everyone for thirty years. The interior of their life, the part that needs witnessing, has no audience.
They go to the parties. They are, as always, lovely at the parties. They come home, often alone. The interior weather they came home with has not been, at any point in the evening, even briefly visible to the people they spent the evening with. The people at the party do not know, after years of seeing the lovely person at parties, anything substantive about them. The lovely person, in the privacy of their own kitchen at midnight, is more or less alone with whatever is actually going on inside them.
This is, I want to be clear, a much heavier loneliness than the loneliness of being unliked. The unliked person at least knows where they stand. The lovely person is liked, often very much, by a large number of people, none of whom would think to call them on a Tuesday. The volume of liking masks the absence of knowing. The volume is what makes the loneliness so hard to confront. How can you be lonely when so many people have warm feelings about you? The answer, which the lovely person figures out in their forties if they figure it out at all, is that warm feelings from a distance are not the same thing as warm feelings up close, and you can have a lifetime of the first kind without ever once experiencing the second.
What I noticed about J, in retrospect
I want to come back to J, because the part of his story that I've been thinking about lately is what happened after I stopped working with him.
I left the company. We exchanged warm goodbyes. We added each other on whatever the relevant social network was at the time. And then, in the way these things go, we drifted. The first year, we exchanged a few messages. The second year, fewer. The third year, almost none. By the fifth year, we were the kind of contacts who had once worked together, and that was it.
I don't think I noticed, at the time, that this drift had happened differently with J than with some of my other former colleagues. With some of them, the drift produced a small pang. I missed them. With J, there was no pang. There couldn't be. I had nothing to miss. We hadn't, in three years of daily contact, built anything that would survive the structural shock of no longer being in the same office.
This is not, I want to stress, J's fault. Or my fault. It's a structural feature of friendships that operate on the lovely protocol. The lovely protocol can sustain the relationship for as long as the proximity is in place, but it doesn't build the kind of friendship infrastructure that survives when the proximity ends. The friendship is, in some real sense, dependent on the office. Once the office is gone, there's nothing left.
I think about this, sometimes, when I think about J. I think about how many former colleagues he must, by now, have. I think about how warm he must have been to all of them. I think about how few of those friendships, if I had to bet, are still active. The lovely protocol does not, structurally, produce friendships that last past the structural conditions that originally enabled them.
This is, in the largest possible aggregate, the central problem with the protocol. The protocol generates an enormous quantity of warm acquaintance. The acquaintance is real. It is also, almost by design, ephemeral. The lovely person ends up, by their forties, with a long list of former friends, all of whom remember them fondly, none of whom are currently in their lives in any active way.
What I'd say if you suspect this is you
I want to write directly to anyone who has been called lovely a lot in their life and has, somewhere underneath that reputation, started to suspect that the reputation is part of the problem.
The first thing is that the reputation is, in itself, not your fault. You learned the protocol young. The protocol has worked. It has made your life run more smoothly than the lives of a lot of people you know. You have nothing to apologize for and nothing to dramatically reverse.
What you might consider, though, is that the protocol has a ceiling. It can produce wide acquaintance. It cannot, by structure, produce close friendship. If you want close friendship, you are going to have to start, in small careful ways, breaking the protocol.
Breaking it looks like saying the slightly less smooth thing in conversations where you would normally have said the smooth one. It looks like admitting, occasionally, when something is hard for you, instead of producing the lovely-person reassurance that everything is fine. It looks like asking, of someone you'd like to be closer to, a question that requires more than a smooth surface answer. It looks like, in essence, allowing some friction back into the room with people you would like to actually know you.
This will feel, at first, like you are doing something wrong. The protocol will tell you that you are being demanding, or weird, or, in the worst case, no longer lovely. The protocol will be operating from the assumption that the lovely is your value, and that any friction you introduce is a subtraction from your value. This is what the protocol always says. It is not, on close examination, true. Most of the people you'd actually like to be close to would much prefer some friction over the smooth nothing the protocol has been providing them. They would, if given the chance, like to know you. The protocol has been preventing them from doing so, for years, in good faith.
You are allowed to introduce some friction. You are allowed to be slightly less lovely in service of being more known. The trade is, in my experience and the experience of friends I've watched make it, well worth making. The wide acquaintance you give up in exchange is, structurally, not what was going to sustain you anyway. The few friendships you build by being slightly less smooth are, by some distance, what most adult lives actually run on.
The lovely is not your friend, ultimately. The lovely is what you get called when nobody has been allowed close enough to call you anything more specific. You are allowed to want specific. You are allowed, in the second half of your life, to be known, even at the cost of being slightly less easy to be around.
I think about J, sometimes, and I wonder how he is. I wonder if, by now, he has friends who would call him on a Tuesday afternoon. I wonder if he ever broke the protocol. I hope he did. I would have liked to know him.
