Common enemy intimacy

On grocery store eavesdropping, counterfeit worth and the prayers we rarely pray

There’s a fine line between eavesdropping and research. I blur it constantly. I tell myself that I am an observer of the human condition, and I’m trying to offer support and guidance. It’s part hubris and part fiction.

Last week, my ‘research’ took place at a grocery store aisle. A man and his wife were leaning against a cooler in the middle of the aisle (the kind with the meat and butter), holding court about a neighbor who had wronged them, for another guy who was their only audience. The third guy’s whole job, as far as I could tell, was to agree. He didn’t say much. A nod here, a low sound of solidarity there. He seemed to relish the story and be in agreement.

I only passed. I caught maybe ten seconds of it, and it was enough. Because I’d seen its shape a hundred times before. The scene told on itself immediately.

I know it too well, because I’ve played every part in it. I’ve been the one building a case, angling for someone to take my side in a squabble or agree that my disappointment was justified. It feels like a connection. It even works in the moment. But it’s the shallowest version of connection available, and left unchecked, it becomes a habit. A habit that quietly reshapes what we reach for when we want to feel less alone.

There’s actually a name for this. Brené Brown spent years studying vulnerability and connection before landing on a term for what I watched happen over a package of ground beef. She calls it common enemy intimacy. It’s a counterfeit connection forged over shared disapproval. She came to this out of the same body of research that gave her the language for shame, belonging, and the difference between fitting in and actually being known. And her verdict on it is not kind. She calls it counterfeit connection. And goes so far as to say it’s the opposite of true belonging. Not a lesser form of connection but a perverse distortion of connection.

One really dark aspect is how it can become part of our sense of worth. And that’s truly awful because the worth it produces isn’t saved up anywhere. You can’t return to Tuesday’s shared grievance and draw further interest from it. It has to be replenished. Our news cycle-trained brain has created this unstoppable conveyor belt of expectation. Each day we need a new offense, a new “can you believe”. And I think it’s because the feeling it produces was never a possession to begin with. It was a transaction, and transactions end the moment the exchange does.

The transaction gives the couple a feeling of being more right than when they arrived. The listener leaves having been useful and appreciated. Everyone’s a little more assured of themselves than they were sixty seconds earlier.

I’ve written before about māna (the Buddhist term for the mind that can’t stop measuring, comparing, ranking itself against whoever’s nearby) and what I watched at the cooler was māna with a witness. Alone, our comparison is just a private ache: I’m not as put-together as her, I wouldn’t have let him talk to me that way. But bring a second person into it, get them nodding along, and something shifts. The comparison is ratified and becomes the currency of the connection. It might seem harmless, but it can become a part of our operating system.

A healthy way out

Here’s the thing that ought to be good news, if we could believe it: none of that is actually necessary. Scripture doesn’t argue that we earn our worth by being more right than our neighbor, or by finding someone willing to agree we’ve been wronged. It says worth was given before any of that. Imago dei, image of God, stamped on us at the start, not accumulated through the day’s transactions. If that’s true, the entire play at the cooler is not evil so much as unnecessary. It’s building a fire in a house that’s already warm. You don’t need to manufacture worth you were never without.

Zoom out

I don’t think the couple at the cooler are unusual, and I don’t think they’re at fault. I think we’re in a time when depth, unresolved connection, sitting with another person’s full and complicated humanity seem genuinely expensive.

Depth doesn’t compress. It can’t be delivered in the time it takes to lean against a cooler. It requires attention spans that the current moment doesn’t reward and mostly doesn’t build. We’ve been trained on the quick take. The observation that lands in one breath. It sounds decisive and moves on. A grievance about a neighbor fits that shape perfectly. “Let me tell you what he did” is a complete thought in ten seconds. But if we say, "I'm trying to understand why this still bothers me, and what it would mean to actually love him,” it is not a thought you can finish standing up. One is a slam dunk. The other is unresolved, maybe for years, and unresolved doesn’t sell. We don’t come out as the hero.

The smartest guy is the cynic

There’s a second current running under that one, and it’s sneakier: a real suspicion of sincerity itself. Cynicism reads as intelligence. It sounds sharp, unfooled, hard to manipulate. Sincerity, the willingness to say something hopeful, gentle, or unguarded, reads as naive or, worse, performative. Positivity has picked up a reputation for being gauzy, a little fake, something people perform for an audience rather than something they actually mean. So the quickest way to sound smart in a conversation is often to be a little bit against something. Enemy-making isn’t just easy; in a lot of rooms, it’s what gets you taken seriously.

None of that excuses the cooler. But it explains it. The couple weren’t reaching for cruelty. They were reaching for the nearest available form of being right, being heard, and being less alone in a complaint — because the harder forms of those things have been made scarce, and the cheap one is always in stock.

Where are our enemy prayers?

I have pastored for over twenty years. I’ve sat through more prayer meetings than I could count — small groups, hospital rooms, church basements, whispered requests before a service starts. And I can’t recall a single time someone offered it out loud: "There's a person who’s been treating me badly, and I want to pray for them.”

I want to be careful here because I can’t see everyone’s heart, and there’s a real practice in Christian circles of unspoken requests. Maybe that request has been prayed a thousand times over, and I simply never got to hear it. I hope that’s true. But even accounting for that, it’s striking how rarely this particular request makes it into the spoken kind. Prayer orbits around preventing life’s harsh, unmovable realities: illnesses, death, finances, decisions that will lead to comfort, and even requests about other people’s struggles. We’ll pray for someone who’s wronged another person, if the framing allows it — “pray for so-and-so, they really need it,” which can sometimes mean pray that they’d become someone less disappointing to me. But “help me love the person I’m currently resentful of”, I don’t recall hearing spoken, in twenty years, and I’ve wondered why.

I’ve wondered why, and if I’m honest, I know part of the answer, because I’ve been slow to pray it myself. I can tell you exactly who I’d need to name if I tried it right now.

The deeply inconvenient thing is that scripture isn’t vague on this action. The line “pray for your enemies” is about as direct an instruction as any sacred text gives anywhere. It isn’t a gap in what we believe, it’s a gap in what we’re willing to say out loud, even in the room built for saying things out loud. A prayer request is supposed to be the opposite of the cooler. It’s not clean and final. It’s vulnerable, oriented toward God instead of an audience.

If it’s this pervasive in the room built to resist it, I don’t think any cooler on earth stands a chance.

An unsatisfying finish

I don’t have a four-step way out of this. I thought about building one, and it felt wrong to offer a tidy exit. Because a tidy arrival is exactly the kind of quick, decisive, shareable thing this whole piece has been arguing against. Leave it to me to try to create a slam dunk for how to stop slam-dunking.

Here’s what I keep coming back to instead. I didn’t need to eavesdrop long at that cooler. Ten seconds, maybe less, and I had the whole shape of it — because I’d seen it before, and because so have you. That’s not a comment on the couple. It’s a comment on how fluent we all are in this language. We don’t have to be taught common enemy intimacy. We already speak it. The only real question is whether we notice ourselves reaching for it.

So here’s the aspiration we can carry through our day. What if, next time you feel a grievance rising and someone nearby who’d nod along, you just didn't hand it to them? What would it cost you? The connection that dangles at the end of our rant is the junk food of connection anyway. Maybe sit with the discomfort of a complaint nobody agrees with. The sense of belonging in the world and the sense of worth that the shared enemy-making fraudulently summons may be the thing to build in a healthy way.

I’ve come up in cultures, settings, and family systems where the only conversation is about who is wrong and how dumb everyone but us is. It has finally felt like the cancer that it always has been. We can paint it up as Godly critique and discernment, but we all know what we’re really doing. Let’s agree to live in a way that starts from believing we already belong.

Be well, friends.