It's not. It's presumptuous, it's proprietary, and it's invasive. It's not going to make you any friends - because even those that are initially drawn to your interest, your openness, and the initial flattery that you see them, like them, and know them - even those people are going to draw back, as your lack of respect for their boundaries fences them in to the place where antipathy lives.
Because you don't know them. You don't see them, you see something to attach yourself to - and that's not inviting. It's parasitic, it's off-putting, and it makes others feel used and violated.
noun
1. personal knowledge or information about someone or something [syn: acquaintance]
2. usualness by virtue of being familiar or well known [ant: strangeness]
3. close or warm friendship; "the absence of fences created a mysterious intimacy in which no one knew privacy"
4. a casual manner [syn: casualness]
5. an act of undue intimacy
You aren't a known entity. You can become one, sure, but you can't force that - no matter how many hairballs you vomit on the table, no matter how invasively you insinuate yourself into someone else's world - you just can't make these things happen any faster and more naturally than they're supposed to, 'cause that just be the way it are.
I think people assume an over-familiar stance because they want to demonstrate a relationship of mutual trust, of mutual affection, and of mutual respect.
The problem? It doesn't do that. What it does do is that you can't be trusted with affection and intimacy with another, because, instead of treating it as sacred and something to be watered and fed and let to grow in a sunny corner, you make clear you're desperate to show the world the blossoms, before they've even bloomed.
Watched pots don't boil, and billboarded orchids don't bloom.
So here's my advice: Don't insinuate yourself into another's world, by word or by deed, because it's the easiest way to ensure you'll never be part of it. Don't portray a closeness with another when it's fabricated, because the holes in the seams are going to show. Don't believe, for a moment, that your lack of boundaries and propriety is shared by others, because you'll just come off as creepy. Just as you wouldn't walk into the home of someone who lives on the street solely because you wave to each other when you cut the grass on Saturdays, so you can't paint your arm around the model in the magazine and claim she's your 'bud'. Not only does it make you weird - it's a good way to get yourself a restraining order for Christmas in July (or September, as it were).
Don't imply a relationship that doesn't exist, or it never will.
This one's public. So if you're reading it, and you think I might mean you?
I probably do.
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