Is a stranger a friend you have not met yet?
Not quite. A stranger is not yet your friend, and pretending otherwise is intrusion. But they were never your judge either, and most of what makes talking to them hard is the court you built before either of you spoke.
You have remembered the book correctly, and the book, for the most part, remembered me correctly. It was written long after my time, by two men in Japan who had read me with care, and the words you are reaching for, vertical and horizontal, are theirs rather than mine. I will borrow them gladly. They are good words for a thing I spent my working life trying to describe, and they are shorter than the ones I used.
Your connection between the two halves is right. I want to correct one thing in it before I agree with the rest, because the correction is where the useful part lives. You said there is no difference between a stranger and a friend of four years. There is a difference, and a large one. What I will try to show you is that it is not the difference you have been afraid of.
The room becomes a ladder
Walk into a room with people in it. Before you have said a word, before you have consciously decided anything, something in you has already begun to sort them.
By the time you have found somewhere to stand, the room has become a ladder and you have found your rung on it. And from that moment nearly everything you say and do in that room is an answer to one question, which you would never say aloud and which is nevertheless the loudest thing in your head: where do I stand compared with you?
That is what the book calls a vertical relationship. Notice what it does to you in each direction. If I have placed you above me, I become self-conscious. I start composing my sentences before I say them. I wonder whether I am impressing you, whether you like me, whether I have embarrassed myself yet. If I have placed you below me, a different sickness appears, and it is no better for being more comfortable. I patronise. I explain things you did not ask about. I expect gratitude, and I am wounded when it does not arrive in the correct quantity.
People take these for opposites. They are not. I spent a good many years insisting on this, and I will insist on it once more: the feeling of inferiority and the striving to be superior are two ends of one rope. The man who must be above everybody in the room is not the opposite of the man who is sure he is beneath them. He is the same man, having found a different way to bear it. Both of them have accepted the same premise without ever examining it.
Higher on the ladder=More of a human being
Nobody says this out loud. Nearly everybody lives by it, and once you have accepted it there is nothing left to do with a life but climb.
Take the ladder away
Now remove it. Not by pretending. A horizontal relationship does not mean we are all equal in ability, and anyone who tells you it does has not looked around.
None of that is denied. What is denied is the second step, the one the ladder takes so quickly you never see it taken: that a difference in ability or fortune or knowledge is a difference in worth. Different, yes. Above and below, no. The picture I would put in place of the ladder is a level field. People are walking across it. Some are ahead of you, some behind, a good many are heading somewhere else entirely, and not one of them has become a higher or lower kind of human being because of where they happen to be standing.
And this changes what you are able to do with your attention. As long as you are asking where a person ranks relative to you, you are not looking at them. You are measuring. The two operations cannot be performed at once, any more than you can read a letter while you are weighing it.
You cannot ask who someone is while you are still asking where they rank.
Even praise has a height
Here is the part of the book people find hardest, and it comes straight from my consulting room. I was suspicious of praise. Not of warmth, and not of noticing what someone has done: of praise, the thing a parent says to a child who has tidied their room. Good boy. It sounds like kindness. Look at its shape.
In every case the one above evaluates the one below. That is what praise is: a verdict, handed down. And the moment I praise you I have quietly appointed myself the person qualified to decide whether what you did was good, which puts me back on the ladder with you a rung beneath me, however kindly I say it.
What I asked parents to do instead was so small that they often thought I was joking. Not good job, I approve of you. Rather: thank you, that helped. The difference is the whole thing. The first is a judge speaking. The second is one person telling another that their contribution had value, which is something you can say to an equal, and which a child can hear without learning to look up for the next verdict.
The feeling of belonging to the others
I called the thing that makes all this possible Gemeinschaftsgefühl, and English never settled on a translation: social interest, community feeling, social feeling. I once tried to define it as seeing with the eyes of another, hearing with the ears of another, feeling with the heart of another, and I still think that is close. It means experiencing yourself as a member of the human company rather than as one competitor among many, and I came to believe that most of what goes wrong in a person goes wrong here.
The circle of that company starts small, and it can widen without limit.
Once that feeling is strong in a person, the other people in the room stop being what the ladder made them: competitors, judges, an audience, a threat, a resource to be used or a status to be measured against. They become fellow human beings, walking the same field. That phrase sounds soft. It is not. It is the hardest achievement I know of, and the only one that makes the rest of a life bearable.
The stranger at the next table
Now we can go to the café, which is where your question actually lives. There is someone at the next table. You do not know them. Vertical consciousness says I don't know him, and underneath that plain sentence it is running twenty calculations at once.
- Would it be strange if I spoke?
- Does he want to be spoken to at all?
- Will he think I am odd, or lonely?
- Is he cooler than me?
- What if he simply does not answer?
Look at what has happened. Nothing has happened. The conversation has not begun, and yet you have already built a small court, seated the stranger on the bench, and given him the power to hand down a verdict on you. He has no idea. He is drinking his coffee.
Horizontal consciousness sees the same person and thinks something much shorter: here is another human being. Not your closest friend. Not someone who owes you their attention, and not someone whose table you may sit down at uninvited. But not a superior, mysterious being whose approval you need before you are allowed to open your mouth, either. So you might say, what are you working on?, with roughly the inner freedom you would have if you had known him for years. Not because you know him. Because you have not placed him above you, and so there is nothing to lose by asking.
Two measures, not one
And here is my correction. A friend of four years is not the same as a stranger, and you should not pretend otherwise: the pretence is what makes some people exhausting to sit near. Four years contain shared history, trust, knowledge of each other's tender places, obligations, jokes nobody else finds funny. The stranger has none of that with you, and you have no right to behave as if he did.
But you have been measuring two things with one ruler. Intimacy is one measure. It grows, slowly, through time and risk, and it should. Worth is another, and it does not grow at all, because it was never on a scale.
Nearly all the social anxiety I ever saw lived in the confusion of those two lines. The person believes, without ever putting it into words, that because intimacy is low, their standing is uncertain, and that the stranger holds the deciding vote. No. You do not know this person yet. That is the whole of the situation. Nothing about your worth is pending, and nothing needs to be settled before you speak.
Children know this. I spent a great deal of my life watching them, and the playground is the clearest lecture on the subject I have ever attended. One child walks up to another. Want to play? That is the entire negotiation. Seven seconds later they are allies. The adult has to build an enormous apparatus around the same act, and nearly all of it is ranking: will this look strange, should I wait for a reason, what if she thinks I am lonely. Some of that is legitimate tact. Most of it is a person imagining themselves being graded.
Your side of it, and theirs
The book has one more idea that makes all this workable, and again the name is theirs while the thing is mine: the separation of tasks. When you approach someone, there is a part of what follows that is yours, and a part that is not.
To be respectful. To be genuine. To speak, and then to listen. To notice when they would rather be left alone, and to leave them alone.
Whether they like you. Whether they answer. Whether they are busy, or tired, or think you are strange. Whether anything comes of it at all.
The anxious person is secretly trying to do both jobs. How do I behave so that this person is certain to like me? There is no such behaviour. It cannot be done, and the attempt is what makes the approach so stiff that it fails. Do your side of it well and hand the other side back to its owner. Then you can say hello. If they answer, good. If they do not, nothing has happened to you, because their answer was never a ruling on where you stand.
Curiosity, where the verdict was
So the change I am asking for is not the one you might expect. It is not become more outgoing. Plenty of outgoing people are climbing the ladder as fast as anyone, only louder. It is this: stop experiencing other people primarily as your judges.
When that goes, the rest follows almost without effort. You can tease someone you met a minute ago. You can ask a plain question. You can admit you do not know. You can disagree, laugh, say something slightly foolish and survive it. You can speak to the director and the doorman with a surprisingly similar posture: not the same etiquette, not the same context, but the same stance underneath, which says neither of us is above the other.
And there is a paradox at the end of this that I find beautiful. The more desperately you try to find out how others see you, the further you get from them, because you have stopped looking at them at all. You are looking at yourself through their imagined eyes. You are having a relationship with your reputation, and the actual person in front of you has become a mirror you are checking. The horizontal relationship breaks the mirror. The stranger stops being someone who might reject me and becomes someone I have not found out about yet, and curiosity moves in where the verdict used to sit.
So I would rewrite your sentence, as I rewrite most sentences brought to me. Not: a stranger is a friend you have not met yet. Say instead: a stranger is not yet your friend, but neither are they your judge, your superior, your inferior or your enemy. They are already your fellow human being, and friendship is one of the things that may grow from there. It is a longer sentence and a much safer place to stand.
Once that is not a trick you perform but the way you actually see a room, you will find you can meet someone and, five minutes later, be speaking with an ease and a playfulness most people keep for the friends of their youth.
The history is not there yet. The hierarchy never needed to be.