Risk Mitigated

On a warm September evening, at a gathering of friends and colleagues, I met up with a pastor of the Quaker faith whose half century of listening to her congregation shaped the advice she gave me about what I struggle with in these blogs, for she reminded me that risk lies at the heart of relationships, and the cost–reward analysis is often just a language for legitimizing the choice to love oneself at the expense of others. After the cost-reward computation, the discarded one is placed in the liability column, their absence suddenly a relief, their companionship no longer a need but a nuisance avoided, the chooser convinced that the reward of time freed outweighs the negligible cost of a fading connection. To jettison a friend is to calculate that the loss is minimal compared to the convenience of declaring, without guilt, “sorry I will not be there when you will be there to see me.” What makes the calculation possible, and even comforting, is the discovery that another person has appeared to fill the vacancy, and thus the risk is mitigated by the arrival of the new: the fresh colleague, the neighbor, the partner who now absorbs the hours once spent in commutes, lunches, and conversations with the person discarded. And the expression plays out in real terms, where the presence of the old companion becomes so trivial that even when they make the effort to be there, their presence is negated by the chooser’s absence for more urgent business—often the new adventure, where the risk of loss must be managed and minimized at the cost of the old friend. It is not merely a replacement, it is an upgrade in the eyes of the chooser, for the new person promises a bigger reward, a richer return on investment of time, a greater possibility of affirmation, status, excitement, or novelty itself. This asymmetry creates a cruel hierarchy: the old friend becomes a small cost easily written off, while the new entrant is treated as a high-value asset whose loss must be vigilantly avoided. The chooser, therefore, directs their care and loyalty not toward balance but toward insuring the reward of the new, even if that means ignoring the growing risk of alienating the old. The old companion becomes redundant, not because of fault but because the need for their company has evaporated, patched over by novelty. As Georg Simmel observed, relationships are sustained as much by utility as affection, and once the emotional usefulness fades, the emotional tether erodes (The Sociology of Georg Simmel, 1950). Zygmunt Bauman sharpened this further, warning of a liquid modernity where intimacy itself is fluid and people are treated like “disposable assets” (Liquid Love, 2003). The chooser, intoxicated with the new, works to minimize the risk of losing their replacement, while the discarded experiences the silence, the empty phone, the unreturned message, the canceled plan, absence where once there was presence. And the new entrant, basking in the sudden attention, rarely pauses to see the harm done to the one costed out, nor to recognize that their own security is provisional, for in time they too may be reclassified as cost. For the one written off, what remains is not the memory of affection but the rejection of their worth, the cruel arithmetic of being unnecessary. In the end, what endures is waiting, not because hope lingers that the old pattern will return, but because waiting is the only act left when one has been displaced by irrelevance. It is indeed the ABBA anthem that reminds: "The winner takes it all/The loser's standing small."