No, I Will NOT Be Your Friend
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About This Book
One afternoon at the end of rehearsal, an actor crossed the floor and said six words: I want to be your friend. The author laughed, answered with a warm question of his own, and spent the next thirty years telling the story as a comedy. No, I Will NOT Be Your Friend is what happened when he stopped laughing, and it is built from two inquiries at once: an audit of a lifelong rule, if I know you, you are my friend, and a history of what the word cost before it was free.
For most of the human record, friendship was a made thing. The ancients timed it in shared meals, a bushel of salt eaten together before the word could be spoken. Homer priced it in the sixth book of the Iliad, where Diomedes and Glaucus trade gold armor for bronze and the poet stops to marvel at the exchange. The medieval church solemnized it, and two English knights who swore that rite still share one carved stone in Constantinople, their helmets leaning toward each other across six centuries. Rome interrogated it, and a philosopher named Blossius gave the loyalty answer that has unsettled readers for two thousand years. Then the bond was privatized, and then it was platformed, stripped to a button whose database schema preserves the one clause the culture threw away: offer, acceptance, mutual confirmation.
The last movement of the book recovers what the button replaced: the honest refusal. A Regency cut delivered to the face, against the modern ghost that never arrives. One diplomatic lie that ends a conversation without appearing to refuse anything. The empty chair, and the hired pallbearers who now carry caskets for the people the deceased called friends. And it closes with the few: the second signature on a life, the friend who arrives before or after the vows, and the name sign, told by Janna Sweenie in her own words, in a chapter on the Deaf world's kept ceremonies that stands in the book exactly as she wrote it. The two authors disagree in print about the actor in the rehearsal room, and the disagreement stands too, because a bond that can hold an argument openly is the book's thesis in practice.
The Argument
A word is a currency, and friend has been through a hyperinflation. The author kept a lifelong rule, if I know you, you are my friend, and when the platforms finally put a number on it, the count came back at five thousand and he demanded the ceiling be raised. He wrote about the number proudly, twice. The book opens that ledger in public: what the rule felt like from inside, what it paid, and what it quietly cost the small handful of people who had earned the word and found themselves sharing it with a roster.
The confession comes first because the confession earns the rest. Before the book indicts the platforms, it indicts the author: the laugh that bought time to build an exit, the courtesy so smooth it could decline a man to his face and leave him thanking you, the season that was sold when the truth would have cost it. Only after the author has paid does the book turn to the machinery, the marketing of intimacy, the button that performs an ancient ceremony a billion times a day for strangers, and the culture that calls the result connection.
The argument the book leaves the reader with is practical. A yes is worth exactly what a no costs, and a person who has surrendered the refusal has nothing left to give. The book asks the reader to run the audit on his own roster, to recover the honest no, and to find out who remains standing in the room when the word finally means something again.
Table of Contents
Part One. The Inflation
Chapter One. The Rehearsal Room
Chapter Two. The Blanket
Chapter Three. The Counterfeiter
Chapter Four. The BFF Industrial Complex
Chapter Five. The Button
Part Two. When Friendship Was a Made Thing
Chapter Six. The Ladder
Chapter Seven. Salt by the Hour
Chapter Eight. Gold for Bronze
Chapter Nine. Renunciation
Chapter Ten. Brothers by Rite
Chapter Eleven. The Great Privatization
Part Three. The Refusal
Chapter Twelve. The Right to Refuse
Chapter Thirteen. Burn the Capitol
Chapter Fourteen. The Cut and the Ghost
Chapter Fifteen. The Diplomatic Lie
Chapter Sixteen. The Godless Methodist
Chapter Seventeen. The Empty Chair
Part Four. The Few Who Are
Chapter Eighteen. The Second Signature
Chapter Nineteen. Before or After the Vows
Chapter Twenty. The Name Sign
Chapter Twenty-One. The Few
Afterword: The Stocked Shelf · Glossary · Sources and Notes · Selected Bibliography · Acknowledgments · Questions for Discussion · About the Authors · Also by David Boles
The Epigraphs
"The wish to be friends is quick work; friendship is not."
Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics
"Because it was he, because it was I."
Michel de Montaigne, "Of Friendship"
"…whose love for his companion was no less than for himself…"
The Westminster Chronicle, on Sir William Neville, 1391
What the Book Traces
From a Lincoln, Nebraska childhood where acquaintance ran like a municipal utility, through the rehearsal room where six words met a laugh, into the counterfeiter's kitchen with Plutarch and the touchstone the Greeks called basanos. Then the deep history: Aristotle's ladder of friendships, the bushel of salt as a clock, gold for bronze between the armies at Troy, the philosophers' renunciations, the brother-making rite of adelphopoiesis and the shared tomb at Galata. Then the long privatization, the unsent text message, and the button that put the old law in a database. The third movement recovers the refusal: Blossius before the Roman inquest, the cut and the ghost, the diplomatic lie at Harvard, a godless Methodist in a Catholic kitchen, and the empty chair at the funeral. The last movement belongs to the few: the second signature, the friend against the vows, the name sign conferred in a Deaf classroom, and the arithmetic of the handful who remain when the roster finally empties.
A Note on the Free PDF
A book about the price of a word should cost nothing to read. The free PDF is the complete text, set on full Letter pages with all six fonts embedded so it reads the same on any machine, with a linked table of contents that reaches all twenty-one chapters and every section of the back matter, and the cover's toggle standing at the head of each chapter. Download it, read it, and count your own few.
Dedication
For Janna, and for everyone who ever asked out loud and deserved a better answer than they got.
Author Interview
Further Reading
The Facebook friendship chronicle (Boles Blogs, 2009 to 2012): Grieving is the Price of Love and Friendship · Forcing Fake Facebook Friendships · Facebook Warns Me Against Accepting New Friendships · Death on the Tethered Vine: Breaking the Virtual Bond · How Did I Get Over 5,505 Facebook Friends · Facebook as Probiotic: I Now Have 5,000 Friends
Go to Every Funeral · The Last Living American White Male · Beautiful Numbness · About David Boles