An introvert’s guide to friendship
Our culture chirps an incessant tune of romantic love and we do this in our most popular songs, even in our unpopular songs. But friendship is fairly unsung. A friendship of long duration is not scandalous; it is gentle. Friendship endures or it doesn’t. The making of a new friend is not usually marked by a ritual, nor is the end of a friendship. Friendships are mostly mourned in silence.
I have noticed that even highly introverted people need friends; I myself scored 20 out of 21 on an “Are you introvert?” quiz.
It can be a hurdle for introverts that to make friends you have to talk to people. And yet introverts can make the best kind of friends — often the most loyal, often the best listeners. Some of my most profound friendships have been made in enclosed spaces, like rehearsal rooms or classrooms.
I even met my husband by being his housemate first, then his friend, then, several bacchanals later, we fell in love. I’ve been lucky — friendship has found me, despite my shyness. If I had to give advice to other introverts on how to make friends, I might boil it down to this simple advice: Don’t move. I’ve also made friends through paper — the writing of letters back and forth.
I lost one such dear friend, a brilliant poet named Max Ritvo, two years ago, when he was 25. We wrote about 500 letters back and forth before he died, and at some point we decided to make a book of them. Max had a rare genius for friendship, and for the writing of poetry. Our friendship, which I think would have been lifelong, had to be compressed into the four years we knew each other. I first met him when he walked into my undergraduate playwriting class at Yale. In his application to get into the class he wrote, “All I want to do is write.”
At the end of the semester, Max told the class that he’d had a recurrence of Ewing’s sarcoma, a rare paediatric cancer he’d battled in high school. I told Max that he could talk to me about his fears if he wanted to. He wanted to. Our friendship was accelerated by the urgency of his questions. Max worked hard to graduate from Yale while going through chemotherapy and surgeries. He went to Columbia to get his Master of Fine Arts in poetry, wrote an extraordinary book of poetry called Four Reincarnations, fell in love with a young woman, got married, wrote even more poems and gave of himself, always, to his wide circle of friends.
Unlike me, Max was an extroverted writer. When he read his poems aloud, he shouted them to a crowded room, circling and often wearing a pink kimono. He collected friends readily, intensely and demonstratively. Max knew he didn’t have time for the slow reveal. To distract him from chemotherapy, we swapped poems, plays, rants, jokes, spiritual questions and dreams of the afterlife. We wrote on subjects as far afield as metaphysics, the essence of soup, literary revenge, meditation, the Amtrak quiet car, childhood battle chants and our mutual love of Mel Brooks.
Max’s genius for friendship was partly a genius for conversation — he could discourse as easily on the soul as he could on Cyndi Lauper.
The end came in August 2016.
Max was first my student, then my friend and finally my teacher. In our culture it sometimes feels as though social ties can be summed up by the bonds of nuclear family and romantic love. Perhaps we’re obsessed as a species with romantic love because it helps propagate our species. But isn’t friendship just as necessary to emotional survival?
When we find the right friend at the right time in our life, or the right teacher, or the right student, our lives are changed forever. Max was the voice that answered back. And he still is.