performative closeness

16 Feb, 2026

often i think back to the friendships i've experienced over the years, and i've realised i can almost categorise my close friends into two groups: those i was truly close with, and those i was performatively close with. there are several differences between the two categories, and i want to spend some time differentiating between the two.

to clarify, both types of close friends i was close with. we would often spend time together and at length, speaking about whatever came to our minds. but there were subtle differences between the two types of friends, which makes me realise what a big difference it made to have one type of closeness over the other.

public vs private

as mentioned earlier, i usually would speak often to both types of close friend. however, with the performatively close, i often find that our conversations were almost always in public spaces. if they weren't public, then we might find a way to talk about them publicly in some way or another.

you would often see us posting about our friend group, and yet some of us in the friend group had never even had an actual conversation with another in private before. we would almost always find a way to quote inside jokes when someone else was in the conversation; find opportunities to sigh contentedly about how unique and amazing our friendship was whenever we felt someone was watching us.

how often we would parade around and publicise our "closeness" to one another and how much we loved spending time together, but most of the "closeness" we publicised felt like an image of a close friend, carefully designed to make others look and wish they had what we had.

with truly close friends, i don't believe i often felt the need to gush about how much i loved so-and-so. because our relationship was deeper, it almost felt personal to tell others how much a truly close friend meant to me, like i was revealing a hidden part of me if i were to let others know how utterly intermingled my mind had become with this person's. it's not to say that others weren't aware i was close to my truly close friends --it's not like i kept it a secret at all-- but it was not what i would publicise regularly in the same way i would publicise my friendship to a performatively close friend. i would not be very surprised if someone who did not know me very well wasn't entirely aware that i was close to my truly close friends.

disagreements

one of my performatively close friends once mentioned to me, "i don't think we've ever fought. i think that's a good thing." i would agree with this friend, but that observation also reveals to me something far deeper about the reality of our relationship. we'd never fought-- not because we were mature enough to handle disagreements, but that disagreements never happened in the first place. in short, we never knew each other well enough to disagree with the other about something.¹

every human is shaped by various things (experiences, upbringing, natural inclinations, to name a few) and everyone is wildly different from one another. it's extremely unlikely (or maybe even impossible) that two people that have lived completely separate lives could agree with each other on absolutely everything. so, really, people that have never disagreed with one another simply don't know each other well enough to know those differences in opinion between the two of them.

my friend's observation carried out to my other performatively close friends: it's very rare that i found myself in a serious conversation with them about something we disagreed about, or a friend mentioning something distasteful they believed the other did.. and it wasn't because we weren't very different, it was because we simply had not gone down the depths of understanding with one another like i had with my truly close friends. or perhaps it'd be too impolite to bring up small annoyances the other did, since we weren't close enough to have those sort of conversations.

i've disagreed with my truly close friends a number of times, on different topics. and while disagreements are often unpleasant to experience in the moment, i'm contented by this reality because it meant we'd learnt a lot more about each other than mere acquaintances do. it's not to say i've known everything or even a lot about my truly close friends, but the fact that i've known enough to disagree with them on certain matters means i know them to some extent, even if it's not to the fullest extent of how much i could possibly know them.

difficulty and vulnerability

the differentiation between performative and true closeness was brought to stark light whenever it was revealed that a friend had been experiencing some sort of difficulty. if it was made known to a performative close friend that the other was having a hard time, they would receive the equivalent of a pat on the back. one of us would say something like: "i'm sorry to hear about that :( if you need anything, i'm here!" and other textbook friend-consoling phrases. but behind every sentence, there was the implicit acknowledgement that that friend would not, in fact, always be there if you truly needed anything. they were there to cheer you on from the sidelines as you pushed through the sorrow; they weren't expecting to come down and accompany you through it all.

your truly close friends do much more than that. they're the ones who sit down and listen to you in the moments when you're struggling to get words out, when you're blubbering and sobbing and can barely make sense of what you're saying. they might even be stern and stop you from doing things you don't realise you'll regret. in those times of sudden hardship, it became clear who we felt we had to keep a mask on for and who we didn't. it revealed who we were truly comfortable with, not the people we felt like plastering the name of all over our accounts.

while it's true that i held all of those performatively close friends close to my heart and i did truly love them, they were not the people i would go to if i ever found myself stuck or in need of help. one of the essences of a close friendship is the willingness to be vulnerable with each other. when i think of these friends i was performatively close to, i can't (if ever) think of a time i felt comfortable talking to them about something that had really hurt me. unless i mentioned the situation jokingly or lacking seriousness, i was not willing to let the mask of constant joviality slip for a moment.

knowing sides

linking to the last point, it was often the case that i would only show a certain side of myself to performative friends, leading to a level of one-sidedness in the way that those friends and i would understand each other. it would be easy to describe performatively close friends since you would only know one side to them. and this would make our friendship easily fit into the trope-like dynamics you can find in fiction: the doting mother and loving daughter, the old married couple, the pink and black duo. making it more and more like our friendship was something to look at and dream about having, because the image can remind you of so many other friendships like it that fit into these tropes.

but my truly close friends defy description, since i know so many more sides to them. people are more akin to being prisms rather than a single image: over the course of truly getting to know someone, you come to understand the layers to them, the different sides they have, their contradictions and their messiness.² so to attempt to condense people you know quite well into a sentence or two feels like an impossible task.

whenever i'm trying to describe what a truly close friend is like to someone who doesn't know them, i'm often at a loss for words. what is it that i can tell you? do i talk about their hobbies or their complicated relationship to their parents? this friend of mine is comprised of so much, some of which i can't tell you about when you're just a stranger. she's gentle and sweet but also angry and defiant. she's both quiet and loud and everything in between. you'd know if you saw her. you'd understand if you knew her like i do.

dissolved friendships

when i think of friends i was performatively close with and no longer talk to anymore, it's often the case that i think of them happily, with warm feelings in my chest. it's not usual that i've had some sort of big fight with any of my friends in a way that's left us both reeling and bitter (at least from my side, and i thank Allah for that), but i think this is especially the case with performatively close friends. as mentioned earlier, we'd usually not really have much to disagree about when we knew so little about each other.. so when i think about old performatively close friends, i often feel happy and nostalgic thinking about our friendship. the conversations and little jokes, how simple things were with them. since everything was so surface level, there's not much else to think other than: "we had a nice time together."

but when i think old real close friends, i'm usually struck with a lot more than just warmness. so often my closeness to one of these friends meant that our friendship had times where there were fraught, fragile feelings between us and real conversations that aren't easy to brush off or forget. it's almost like thinking back on them makes me relive the depth and vulnerability of what was between us, so i don't usually think about old real close friends with as much one-sided warmness as i would with performatively close friends. it would be hard to ignore the depth of our friendship, and the complexity of how i feel about these old friends reflects that. a mix of nostalgia, warmth, and oftentimes, slight sorrow.

small thoughts

this post has been interesting to think about and write. perhaps there's some food for thought in wondering how these two types have affected me, since i assume they haven't affected me exactly the same way. also, the things i've mentioned here don't really hold up for all the friendships i've had of these types, so maybe i'm just saying things that aren't entirely true. but most of it.. i would think.. is. perhaps? i don't know.

moving forward, i do want to avoid making as many performatively close friends and building real connections with other people that isn't dependant on whether someone's looking at us or not. i think the performative kind was a bit of a side effect of having a semi-public online presence, so in shaa Allah i don't really have to deal with those types of connections anymore.. although you could probably say it's still possible when talking about friends with other friends. i guess there's no escaping any sense of publicity if you know more than one person on this earth..

but we can at least try. so to avoid a friendship's closeness becoming performative, try not to make it so known whenever you spend time with a friend. do kind things for your friends without wondering what anyone else would think. deepen relationships secretly. and stop caring about whether people are watching or not.

p.s. i started writing this around feb [as seen on the date at the top] but i'm actually finishing off the last bit and publishing this on the 5th of april. long time.. no see.. but i've been thinking about coming back to this place a bit more. that is, if i actually get some coursework done too....

footnotes:

#personal #seen