I had a conversation with Mr Man where we considered how many of our friends we might consider 'normal'. Of course normal is a loaded word because it is such a relative kind of thing, we know really that our shared version of normal will not be familiar to many people.
It may be no surprise that we struggled for quite some time and still drew a blank.
Why would that be?
Do we attract odd people?
Very possibly, we try to approach life with openness and a benign attitude of curiosity which may delight those who are used to being rejected by others who think them odd.
People become odd from hanging around us?
Again it seems likely that the fact that we aren't too distressed by strangeness means that people feel able to express their oddities more comfortably.
Becoming close to people means you get past the 'normality' masks, and see the foibles within. ?
A bit like the one above it seems very likely that if you enter into a close relationship with a person this allows you to share the not so normal bits and be accepted and cherished without judgement. Hence none of our friends are normal, at least not the ones we know well.
The flip side of this might be all those people who have 500 friends on myfacepage thingies, the onus is to 'know' lots of people and yet never be close or open enough to expose any oddities, hence remaining 'safe' and generally unseen, to achieve this it's best to have lots and lots of people that you 'know' but share only the most superficial part of life with.
I begin to see that I find that very difficult and don't really have the skills to do it successfully. My favoured approach of a few close people is dangerous but mostly all I can manage.
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