Part III: Coferences

Part of my goal in outlining the above is simply to make more people aware of this dynamic (and thus better able to recognize, ameliorate, and avoid it). I’ve been on both sides of iterated asks, and hated each independently, and it wasn’t until I experienced them in quick succession that I gained empathy for both sides at once.

When I’ve been in Bob’s shoes, I’ve been frustrated by the degree to which people jump to conclusions and won’t just talk straight with me—by the way in which they create huge social distortions out of simple requests, or build persistent narratives that I can’t escape no matter what I do.

And when I’ve been in Alice’s shoes, I’ve felt the confusion and panic of not knowing just how much power—and therefore responsibility—the other person has just handed me. I’ve found myself wanting to tiptoe or freeze, so I don’t accidentally break things. I’ve felt a strong impulse to go far into the red—to give way too much in the immediate moment, if it’ll discharge my moral obligation or stave off a crisis—or to break off the relationship entirely, so I don’t have to deal with the strain of constant wariness.

If fear is the mind-killer, then wariness is the love-killer, the trust-killer, the authenticity-killer. As I become more and more wary, I’m more and more careful about each of my thoughts, statements, and actions. I start to curate more deliberately—sifting among all of my possible responses, and choosing the ones I think will have the most positive effect.

This is the opposite of being present and authentic—when I’m curating the image I present to you, I’m deliberately limiting your access to me-as-a-person. You’re not seeing my thoughts, you’re seeing the thoughts I deem appropriate to show you, based on my explicit model of how you’ll react.

Several bad things are happening, here. First, I’m no longer treating you as an equal—I’m making unilateral, executive decisions about what you can or can’t handle, what you do and don’t deserve to know. Either we aren’t equals, which sucks, or we are and I’m mistreating you, which also sucks.

Second, I’m vastly increasing my own cognitive overhead, because instead of simply responding naturally through intuition and reflex, I now have to run everything through filters and simulations, and if I’m doing my job right I’m not only simulating you, but also your simulation of me and your simulation of me’s simulation of you. In addition to being slow, this is exhausting, which means that—second by second—I’m conditioning myself away from future conversations with you, rather than toward them.

Finally, I’m missing out on you. Whatever makes you cool and interesting, whatever sets you apart from everyone else, whatever thoughts you’re having that I’ve never dreamed of—I’m going to miss all of that, because I’m focusing all of my attention on controlling the situation. It’s as if you’re a shark, and I’m in the ocean with you—I’m not going to be able to notice your grace and beauty the way I would if my immediate survival weren’t in question.

If there’s a generalized solution to this dynamic, I haven’t found it yet. I was recently handed one useful tool, though, which I’m calling coferences until my ally Andrew Critch gives me a better handle for it.

The basic idea of a coference is simple, for all that it takes some twisty sentences to say: a lot of the time, people don’t actually have opinions or preferences at all. Instead, what they have are potential preferences that are contingent upon the preferences of others—except that the other people don’t have preferences either.

For example, I might have a preference for eating at a Chinese restaurant tonight. If so, I might make that preference known to the group, and then we might discover that Alice has a preference against Chinese, and Bob has a preference for tacos.

In this case, at least one person is going to lose, at least a little. We can try to weigh the relative strengths of our preferences against one another, and choose the least offensive option (and we should, if we’re actually good friends).

But there’s another possibility, which is that I have a coference for Chinese food. In this case, I want Chinese if and only if Alice and Bob do, as well. By registering her dispreference, Alice isn’t costing me anything, because I literally did not want it unless she did, too. If she tries to push for Chinese anyway, in a fit of friendly altruism, she’s actually doing a thing that I specifically don’t want, and making the evening slightly worse for both of us. If, on the other hand, we end up eating tacos, I’ll experience zero disappointment.

I’ve settled on the word “coference” because there’s actually no preference at all—only the potential for one. As it turns out, a startlingly large number of things I’d been referring to as preferences were actually coferences all along, and the ability to clearly express them as such would have made a major difference in many of my interactions.

For instance, I recently spent a year in which a good portion of my attention was taken up by attempts to turn a specific friendship into something more durable and meaningful (whether romantic or platonic). There were a number of factors that made this a long shot, but possibly the least-necessary and most self-defeating of them was a neediness narrative based (at least in part) on my inability to express coferences clearly.

N represents the maximum tolerable level of neediness for the relationship to work, given their state and resources.

Represented in the graph above are various important moments—a couple of personal crises, a few explicit bids for greater intimacy, some unrelated stresses that happened to bleed over in a perceptible way. Most (though not all) of those moments were interpreted as signals of neediness, and came with a corresponding increase in my friend’s level of wariness.

Many of those moments were “real,” in the sense that I endorse my friend’s interpretation of them, and think that their wariness more or less appropriately matched the signals I was sending. I can think of at least one example, though, in which the confusion between preferences and coferences caused wariness that didn’t have to be there. In a probing conversation, my friend asked me outright what my goals were vis à vis our relationship. My response?

“Maximize opportunities to interact with you.”

In point of fact, what I was experiencing was a coference for more interaction—I’d found all of our conversations to that point to be fun, challenging, interesting, and mutually beneficial, and so to the degree that they felt the same, I saw good reason to seek out more of them.

But of course, the actual sentence I uttered really can’t help but be interpreted as needy, especially given the already-extant narrative. It entirely failed to communicate my preference for avoiding interactions motivated by duty, concern, sympathy, guilt, or any of half a dozen other responses to neediness.

A plausible shift in the dynamic, assuming the removal of confusion between coferences and preferences.

I don’t think coferences do anything at all in situations where the neediness is genuinely felt and correctly perceived—it’s entirely possible, for example, that this particular friendship would have broken down due to wariness regardless.

But they certainly help reduce needy-wary spirals that come about as a result of clumsy communication. Coferences are “wanty” by nature—properly expressed and understood, they push relationships away from confusion, constraint, and coercion, and toward clarity, choice, and authenticity.