Think about two people (adults) growing a friendship in the typical way. Imagine being a "fly on the wall", able to listen in on their conversations, over coffee, on walks, maybe at the job. Some of the conversations will be about how they see (human) life, how they think people should behave, how they see themselves, what they think about their families and growing up, and so on. Talk about topics like these may be short and crisp, or occasionally long and involved. It is this talk which is core of growing a friendship.
The problem of lacking proxies can be approached as follows. A proxyless person P (e.g., you) can solve their proxy-lacking problem by finding someone to become a new friend who will also become P’s proxy. Who can P find for this? The most likely candidate would be another proxyless person Q. Both P and Q are proxyless, and so are motivated to find a proxy. Suppose they have a mutual friend R who discovers that P and Q are both proxyless, and introduces them to each other along with the information that both are proxyless, hoping that they can become each other’s proxy.
How can P and Q become each other's proxies? They need to get to know each other well enough that each will trust the other to correctly advocate for them based on their individual Advance Planning Documents. If they could spend a year or two becoming friends in the traditional way, they quite likely could agree to become each other’s proxy. If there were magic in the world, they could magically cross that year or two gap, become friends, and become each other’s proxy.
Sadly, there’s no magic in this world. However, there does exist a method which two people can exercise to accelerate the development of a friendship. At a high level of description, first, think about the various conversations P and Q might have over, say, two years of developing a friendship in the ordinary way. For most normal friendships, many of these conversations will cover various levels of personal detail.
Next, imagine being the "fly on the wall" above, and making a list of questions which could trigger those various conversations. Make these questions generic, questions that don’t contain anything specific to P and Q, but would lead almost anyone into similar conversations, including the various personal aspects of the original conversations. Call these questions friendship acceleration questions.
Now, imagine that our two proxyless strangers P and Q meet for the first time, and that each of them has a copy of the friendship accelerations questions in hand. Let the two strangers P and Q jointly work through the friendship accelerations questions as follows. Each of P and Q alternately read a question aloud and then answer it to their partner. The questions start simply, but get quite personal as they go on. Because P and Q are motivated to find a proxy, they will be motivated to answer the questions truthfully. Answering quite personal questions truthfully opens vulnerability between them. And this vulnerability is the basis of trust between friends, whether they develop the friendship in the ordinary way from a year or more of regular friendship, or from a much shorter period of such friendship acceleration.
Psychologists exploring what it is that makes people feel close, to feel friends, have discovered that it is sometimes possible to speed up the development of closeness between strangers without such extreme circumstances.
According to one of the central psychology papers:
"One key pattern associated with the development of a close relationship among peers is sustaned, escalating, reciprocal, personalistic self-disclosure."The psychological experiments supplied the participants with lists of prompts and questions designed to lead participants into significant discussions of their personal lives. The experiments were successful in generating interpersonal closeness between the participants, most of whom were strangers to one another. The questions and promopts ranged from such queries as
"Before making a telephone call, do you ever rehearse what you are going to say? Why?"
"What are you most proud of that you don't usually get to share with people?"to
"How do you feel about your relationship with your mother?"
"What's one thing you can't live without?"A full set of 40 questions and prompts appears in Suggested Questions and Prompts These 40 questions were derived from the original (36) experimental questions, with an eye towards towards bringing proxyless adults together.