The New Kid In Town

There is a certain pleasure in knowing that someone needs you. The hours spent in conversations and the tender moments suddenly demonstrate that one can have influence on another person’s life. A life in turmoil, fighting unknown devils, continuously needing to fill a void that devours the very core of existence. And then the cost–reward equation rewards the person as the chosen one to fill the void. The one selected feels important, for in that moment of being chosen there is the illusion of triumph, the sense that some contest has been won and there is work to be done to support the one seeking the answer to the “Where Art Thou?” question. Forgotten in that rush is the reality that someone else was answering the same question a moment ago—now discarded, now the cost, now erased from the narrative. Time-tested friendships dwindle in the face of the excitement of the new kid in town. Yet the void is not always produced by discarding an old friend. Often the emptiness exists independently—it shapes the very rhythms of a life. The discarded was not the cause of it, only the temporary occupant. Their companionship served as a fragile plaster over a deeper fracture. A man with a long-lost marriage, for instance, filled the silence of a solitary existence with the presence of the newcomer. That man was filling the void, perhaps partially, with the one that has now been cast aside. The “winner” is convinced that stepping into the void is a favor, that this act of companionship is an offering rather than a substitution. It feels good to imagine that one is the healer of someone else’s loneliness, that the vacancy exists so that one might step in. But the vacancy comes after the one who earlier filled it has been abandoned. The chosen rarely knows the full history of the void. What the old friend knew can never be learnt, because the old friend experienced every moment and over time learnt how to be “there.” The newcomer simply steps into a role without the burden of scars and memories, lightened by novelty but shadowed by an unspoken guilt—the awareness that someone else once stood there, that someone else bore the weight of another’s unhappiness (Bauman, Liquid Love, 2003). The self-confidence grows by believing there is no replacement, that the bond is singular, inevitable, untouched by the churn of absence and presence. Completely forgetting that someone came before, someone who knows much more, someone who has experienced shared pain. The newcomer revels in being the one in shining armor, intoxicated by attention and energized by the promise of making a difference. The ones discarded watch with amusement, “been there done that.” Because the old one knows very well, through the experience of disacknowledgement, that the cycle of human relationships is neither singular nor inevitable—it is transactional, governed by the exchange of cost for reward. One void is never erased, only re-filled, and the process of filling always implies the dispossession of another (Beck & Beck-Gernsheim, Individualization, 2002). The risk, unseen by the newcomers, lies in mistaking occupation for permanence, as if the “position” is permanent. And when the cycle turns, as cycles always do, the chosen person learns that the role was temporary. The void, stubborn and recurring, demands new companions. What once felt like victory now feels like disposability. To be selected is not to be secured; it is only to be next in line, a placeholder in a long procession of replacements (Illouz, Why Love Hurts, 2012). It crashes, it burns, and the ashes left behind are familiar—they are the same ashes once inherited from the one who was displaced. In the meantime, it is important to remember what the Eagles warned in their song: “Johnny come lately, the new kid in town / Everybody loves you, so don’t let them down.”