The Prufrock Problem: We Are Alone Because We Can't Speak

How our social ineptitude drives the Loneliness Epidemic

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I can’t remember where I first came across this general thesis, whether it was on a Twitter thread or this Psychology Today article, but the gist of the argument is that a significant part of our friendlessness problem comes from the fact that many people (maybe especially men) don’t have the foundational social skills to make and develop deep friendships. I want to call this the “Prufrock Problem,” after Eliot’s famous character who is pathologically incapable of expressing his feelings towards a woman. He laments at one point, “It is impossible to say just what I mean!” Out of this frustration of language, he chooses not to express himself. And so he ends up alone. Similarly, I wonder how many of us are friendless because we lack the virtue of courage (which Prufrock clearly lacks) to put ourselves out there. You can’t make friends if you never introduce yourself, if you don’t “squeeze… the universe into a ball” as Prufrock puts it, and try (this gets back my discussion earlier this week about resilience). But this raises an interesting question: Why are our social skills inadequate? Why is it so difficult for us to make friends? And most importantly, what can we do about it?

Whether you’re tired of hearing about the way the Internet has reshaped our lives, the reality is, it has. And I believe this is yet another way. For example, there’s strong evidence that with the rise of social media and smartphones, people have stopped spending leisure time with each other in person. We’re spending more time in isolation. Less time with friends, less time with family and more time alone. And when we’re alone we’re probably scrolling. The decline of face-to-face interactions may be one the most remarkable and disturbing trends of our times. The simple reality is that the less time you have to practice communicating in person with someone else, the less prepared you will be to have meaningful conversations of the kind necessary to be the foundation for a good friendship. We need practice sharing our thoughts, carrying a rich conversation, expressing our emotions in a healthy way, and responding to people compassionately.

And it’s also the case that the kinds of communication we’re typically practicing on social media and smartphones aren’t conducive to establishing deep friendships. Of course it’s possible to have meaningful conversations via text message, I’ve had plenty, but the platform lends itself to short, contextless, flighty messages and emojis. When we reach out to a friend and share something meaningful via text, we’re working against the platform, not with it. And even then it assumes a prior friendship built on something substantive. The kinds of communication we get into online tends to be performative rather than personal and sincere. We’re hyper-aware of our audience and how we’re being interpreted. But friendship requires that we focus our attention on one person and that we let down the mask (the face you “prepare” to “meet the faces that you meet” says Prufrock) of performance and introduce your self.

I might be going out on a limb here, but it seems to me that another cause might be our risk aversion, particularly in childhood. We’re so concerned with “stranger danger” that we don’t bother knowing our neighbors or their kids. We don’t bother knowing anyone else. We stay in our own little familial “pod.” Which means that we don’t get positive experiences meeting new people and introducing ourselves, a vital skill, particularly for when we get older.

For most of us, friendship comes naturally in childhood. As a kid, everyone is your friend (except the bullies). And even as you age, so long as you are in school, you have a structure for finding and maintaining friendships. In college, you are with like-minded people of approximately the same age with the same major and similar goals who you can spend time with in person. Of course there are still challenges to making and developing friendships: there’s drama, people graduate, you’re only together for four years, friendships can be shallow, and so on. But initiating friendships in college is on the whole easier than once you leave for the workforce. Once in the workforce, things change.

As C.S. Lewis writes in Four Loves, friendship is formed around a shared love. So it makes sense that friendship is easy when you are a child, for there are so many things to love as a child. A child can learn to love and find adventures with a rock or a stick. Put two children in a room with two sticks and they’ll be knights or Jedis within seconds. And it makes sense that friendship is easy in college, where you share a love of a subject of study, or hobbies, or bands, or God, or games, or books. But at work, what is there to love? Some people love their work, I mean truly find their work a labor of love. But only a few. Lots of people enjoy their work but don’t really love it. So the odds of two people loving their work together and finding each other and bonding in friendship over that love is rare. It happens. It’s happened to me. But it’s rare. It’s more likely that you tolerate your work or you find bits that you enjoy and you have some “friends” at work who are really acquaintances (what Aristotle would call friends of utility or friends of pleasure) and none of them really know you.

Thankfully, for Christians, we have the church to make friends in, but let’s be honest, there’s plenty of friendlessness within the church, too. Each Sunday morning is an opportunity to greet people face-to-face, learn a name, and develop a relationship. But when we spend six days of the week doing our job and isolating ourselves, communicating to each other primarily through screens, these moments of embodied interactions can become challenging for us, especially for us introverts. When the Passing of the Peace or time of greeting comes, we (I) hide in our seats waiting for something to happen to us instead of taking action.

I think sometimes we (I?) like to tell ourselves a story that some people are just natural at making friends and some of us are not, as if that were an excuse. But the reality is much more troubling: we have an obligation to take the initiative to meet people. To speak. To greet people. To shake hands. To make small talk. If it makes you uncomfortable, good! That’s a sign it’s working like a muscle to mature you. Your social skills may be atrophied. They were probably wonderful or at least adequate when you were a kid, but you’ve left the playground and left the faces of other people and forgotten how to play nicely with others. Forgotten how to run up to a stranger and say, “Do you want to play?” Only as adults it sounds more like, “Do you want to enjoy life and also suffer together to the glory of God?”

The Prufrock Problem, if the thesis is correct, can only be solved by people exercising the virtue of courage to risk embarrassment, rejection, and betrayal for the sake of love. It can only be solved by speaking, by doing what Prufrock could not do: get out of his head, stop worrying about how other people judged him, and speak. Practically speaking (pun intended), this means putting yourself in situations where you can speak to others. Getting out of your house, putting your phone away, doing something with other people. Church is a great place to start, but go beyond that. Get involved in a small group or ministry. Start a book club. Do something.

Because here’s what I know from my short experience with life: without friends, it’s bleak. God gives us friends as a common grace comfort in this life. And it is a comfort.

Now, I know not everyone has easy access to church or other people. Some people, due to difficult life circumstances, are mostly restricted to their homes and have few opportunities to make face-to-face connections. By no means do I want to add another burden onto their lives. Far from it. Instead I would say that it is the obligation of their neighbors and those in their church to reach out to them, to befriend them, to take the initiative to minister to them.

But for the rest of us who have the agency to seek out friendships, and the only thing holding us back is our choice to act and speak, don’t allow fear or shame or awkwardness keep you from the good gift of friendship. It’s worth it, after all.