What is a consequential stranger?
If you look at the relationship continuum from stranger to soul mate, consequential strangers fall in that vast territory just beyond strangers and just short of friends. When people say they have 765 friends on Facebook, most of them are consequential strangers. Your hairdresser is probably a consequential stranger. Your lawyer may be. The person who comes in to clean your house and who has been doing it for 30 years might be a close consequential stranger. But you also have a lot of people on the periphery: the nice woman in accounting whom you see on occasion, people in a yoga class. You don’t know them that well. You may not even have had lunch with them or had coffee with them, but you know all of them. They are the familiar signposts of our day. What I always say is that our intimates anchor us at home, but our consequential strangers make us feel grounded in the world. You write about the “paradox of periphery.” What is that? We’ve been conditioned to think that our intimates ar
