Commentary: The value of transactional friendships

My first iteration of this brief essay was written in the relatively benign pre-Covid era, and then I let it sit in my draft folder. I recently took an almost post-covid fresh peek, and realized that my basic arguments still held true, though now substantially exaggerated and reinforced by the impact of social isolation. I have changed the essay very little, even if the references seem to exist in a far-away world. 

If there is a pattern to the dissolution of transactional relationships, it is not obvious. If there are causal factors or preordained characteristics, they are equally obscure. If it’s about me or about them, finding blame or clarification in one or many instances, it has been a challenge. Or maybe there is just a built-in algorithm which limits the number of contacts allowable in my life (or on my phone) at any one time. Friendships, in those important paraphrased words, are a puzzlement. Except that many of them end, expectedly or predictably. 

But why should I care as I enjoy (pre-COVID and hopefully after) my New York City version of retirement, filled with family, breakfasts and lunches shared with others? And the occasional teaching or reluctance to be a consultant, attend cultural events, read the newspaper and an endless list of books or spend time in my country home. And what of the decisions I’ve made to stop attending events (even virtual ones) of all kinds? Avoiding seminars, debates and presentations, making no effort at self-promotion, declining almost all requests to do consulting, and not even sending holiday cards. Old friendships remain, new ones emerge, and on a somewhat regular basis, my contact list shrinks when I press the delete button.

I do, however, experience momentary hesitation, just for a few seconds before pressing delete, partly to understand how life defines important friendships at specific points in time, and partly to understand what is important to one’s self at each stage of life. Am I deleting my life, or just names?

This essay might be stronger or more convincing if I could define friendship, but that definition is as elusive as defining its end. I do, however, know what friendship looks like and how it feels, with enjoyable variations. So just to illustrate what I believe are a few characteristics of friendship, I list the following:

Friendships stand the test of time through many stages and iterations. Some never lapse, others are reignited on site after long separations. Time dimensions disappear when together.

Friendships involve some form of affection, not necessarily physical but certainly caring, hug-worthy, immediate bonding. Just liking someone is sufficient. 

Friendships always have a bit of personal stuff mixed in with other, occasionally professional, stuff. There are stories of family, historical events, shared interests, books in common, gossip.

Friendships frequently seem to involve food, sharing a meal, at home or at a restaurant. 

Friendships pop up in your thoughts, with visual or emotional content. You may even miss certain people.

Friendships create intangible points of connection, each unique and buried somewhere in your head. 

In contrast to real friendships, here is an attempt to describe what a “transactional” friendship looks like. Even without patterns in defining friendships, a plethora of “micro-level” categories may be clear.

I love you now until you serve no purpose. 

The easiest transactional relationships to acquire and the easiest to eliminate are the professional relationships which are necessary for work performance but which clearly upon examination have no depth. These come in the hundreds, and are so important, valuable, frequent, even entertaining, that they appear to have real value when alive. For me, these were folks working for the government, or in the non-profit arena, or at foundations, or with advocacy groups, and even sometimes board members. In fact, for decades, these relationships comprised most of my personal relationships outside of my family. 

Professional friendships define the world of work, especially successful work performance, where actually liking or disliking the person seems irrelevant.

There are folks I worked with for years, ever cordial, even affectionate at times, always respectful, whom I never trusted, never thought acted in other than their own self-interest, and whom I would never invite home to dinner. Okay, I admit it. Sometimes I just didn’t like them, either as people and occasionally as colleagues, but we were co-existing friends in the drama of New York City non-profit survival. We needed each other. I knew the moment I left work, that certain relationships would end. I might choose to meet these people again, at an event or some forum, exchanging polite conversation (‘so what are you doing now?”), but neither party cares about the response. Some of these folks should have retired before me. And new relationships come along, filling missing transactional gaps, and minimizing the value of what soon become historical friendships. But, and this is important, I have been wrong in a number of cases, where a transactional friendship has morphed into a real friendship.

I have no time, my schedule is full, but let’s do lunch. 

In this category, there is the pretense of an ongoing relationship, maybe even with some sincerity, but somehow the time is never quite right. Occasionally, contact is made and a commitment to re engage is settled, and the friendship gets renewed. These relationships, for me, generally escape the delete button because hope and optimism should never disappear. There are two reasons why this category differs from the first. Most importantly, life goes in funny cycles, and people can become useful and important once again due to a change in circumstances. Best to keep the cinders alive for when they need to reignite. This is both a practical and cynical approach to friendships. Slightly less important is the reality that people fill their days with what is most important at any moment in time, and there can literally be too much demand on too little supply. This is neither purposeful nor deliberate, but does result in diminished friendships.

Why I never joined LinkedIn.

What drives any of us to want to be known, to be connected, to be present to others in some social media forum? Is this a posterity thing? If transactional relationships are just natural at certain points in our lives, then not having them or losing them is also natural. Therefore, finding patterns about “why” is a useless exercise. Best to just move on, be a little careful on pressing the delete button, and learn how to retract a name from that file in case the person pops up again. Where the first two categories are more deliberative, requiring thought and action, this last is internalized and separate from any engagement with the “other.”

Transactional friendships that do survive.

Many of these friendships survive, irrespective of the categories just summarized. Again, I find no pattern, except that they begin in major or minor ways to resemble the characteristics of real friendship. This is an argument for avoiding the delete button when I open the contact list. 

Michael Zisser, is the retired CEO of University Settlement and The Door