The unexpected power of fleeting friendships

From Aristotle on, we’ve learned to see long-lasting relationships as more valuable. But what does that leave out?

In Russian, a poputchik is a stranger you meet on a journey who you end up confessing everything to because you know you’ll never see them again. Like the English “fellow traveller”, poputchik was repurposed to describe Marxist sympathisers, but the original meaning intrigues me most.

The idea that we might safely unburden ourselves to strangers, or have their secrets bestowed upon us, is deeply embedded in Russian culture. It’s there in Leo Tolstoy’s The Kreutzer Sonata: as the windows tremble and the tundra passes in a hypnotic blur, Pozdnyshev tells his life story of marriage, betrayal and murder. Or in Venedikt Erofeev’s 1970s satire Moscow to the End of the Line, in which a retired cable fitter drunkenly hops a train and unfurls a sublime monologue on politics, society, love and, of course, vodka. A Russian friend jokes that this is “therapy, Soviet-style”.

Despite the fact that the proliferation of headphones and devices makes talking to strangers seem almost radical, most of us can probably tell our own poputchik tale. Perhaps we exchanged intimate secrets with someone on a car-share ride, or in an airport bar, or on that holiday when the coach broke down.

Earlier this year, on a long-haul flight to Toronto for work, I was seated among a group of excited young lads. My heart sank (though, for the record, they were impeccably behaved). Theirs must have too, finding a flustered, middle-aged bespectacled type in their row, instead of a pretty young thing to flirt with. We headphoned up and politely ignored each other, until at 4am, everyone gently snoring around us, my neighbour and I got to whispering. It turned out they were a group of Royal Navy submariners undergoing training off the icy Canadian coast.

Naturally I was dying to know all the details of their underwater life, but what I really remember was his shy admissions that he longed for a girlfriend – with months spent away it was hard to make a connection – and his worries about the talk he was due to give. In turn, I confided my fears around a recent career change. Then the lights pinged on, the cabin stirred and shifted, and we melted back into our separate worlds, wishing each other good luck when we disembarked. It was a disarming and expansive moment of shared vulnerability.

In our lonely and divided times, these fleeting intimacies with strangers are vital, though we’ve long been taught to dismiss them. Writing in the fourth century BC, Aristotle created a hierarchy of friendships that still haunts us today. At the top was the “perfect friendship”, a lifetime meeting-of-minds. At the bottom were a rag tag of convenient, pragmatic alliances, struck up to pass the time or for mutual assistance.

What made these lesser friendships unworthy was that they seemed disposable: “when the motive of the friendship is dissolved, the friendship is done away with,” Aristotle wrote with a disapproving sniff. It might be a stretch to describe someone I’d spoken to for an hour a friend, but if Aristotle was right, and the length of a relationship is the measure of its value, then fleeting connections ought to be the least worthy of our attention or interest.

Yet most of us recognise these connections can touch us in profound and lasting ways. Instead of Aristotelian hierarchies, perhaps it’s time to embrace the concept of “relationship anarchy”, which circulates in polyamorous communities. Relationship anarchists argue against ranking our romantic relationships, neighbours, long- and short-lived friendships, inviting us instead to see the singular value and qualities of each connection.

The evidence certainly suggests there are important benefits to even the most seemingly inconsequential connection with a stranger. Even small talk about, say, the weather can increase our sense of belonging and connection (it is more the form than the content that matters, researchers say). We frequently imagine that what distinguishes a close friend is that we can tell them anything, but just as often, we feel safe confiding in strangers, since they are less likely to judge or pepper us with intrusive follow-ups. In Shoji Morimoto’s 2023 memoir Rental Person Who Does Nothing, about his service offering company to strangers while they perform their chores, he observes: “There are a lot of important things that can be talked about with people you don’t know very well or even at all. Depth of discussion and depth of relationship don’t always go hand in hand.”

However sceptical we are of online spaces, and with good reason, they are one place we can exchange our secrets with strangers with relative ease. In the 1990s, trans people gathered in early internet chatrooms. Known only to each other by their handles, and often disappearing without warning, they forged temporary friendships that were nonetheless highly significant: in 1991, Terri Main, a 39-year-old trans woman, compared visiting CompuServe’s GenderLine forum to being enveloped in an “electronic hug”.

But while they can act as a lifeline, online encounters are different in important ways from real-world ones. So much in emotional connection happens unconsciously, a question of tone and rhythm, gesture, even smell. Real-world conversations also carry a different level of risk, since we can’t just log off when things go wrong, as they inevitably will (even Russian railway carriages had their fair share of opinionated bores, and other menaces). In the real world, we must learn to negotiate, to tolerate awkwardness and difficulty, to tactfully divert or withdraw. It is delicate, daring work, and its costs do not fall equally on all people. But if we neglect these social muscles entirely, they atrophy.

And there is so much to be gained, and to be learned. I don’t remember the name of the young man I met on the flight to Toronto. But I do remember exactly how the exchange made me feel. Connected and curious. Unburdened, Soviet-style. But most of all, awed by the extraordinary lives of others.

Tiffany Watt Smith is the author of Bad Friend (Faber). To support the Guardian order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.

Moscow to the End of the Line by Venedikt Erofeev (Northwestern University Press, £26.99)

Friends by Robin Dunbar (Little, Brown, £13.99)

Friendaholic by Elizabeth Day (4th Estate, £16.99)