“How can a man of consciousness have the slightest respect for himself?”

Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground

Before college, the group of people I loved hadn’t changed much in a long time. Now that I’ve found new people, the mechanics of the process are getting all tangled up.

A new, frighteningly useful slang word has infested young people’s vocabulary recently: chalant. It’s the invented, prefix-less version of nonchalant, and it’s meant to mean invested, vulnerable, caring, and decidedly uncasual. 

Wiktionary calls it a “back-formation” of nonchalant, which feels more than linguistically accurate in its reflection of the way chalant was developed as a countercultural move against a cultural swing towards nonchalance. It, and in turn the original nonchalant, are becoming increasingly popular. A friend of mine said a sweatshirt at the UStore was nonsch while we were shopping—an abbreviation of nonchalant. 

Other nonchalant things: mysteriousness, being tall, not responding to text messages, casually stopping an elevator at the last second before the door closes, and feigning disinterest in or truly being disinterested in other people. Chalant things: writing an ode to a lost lover, gregariousness, asking questions in a large lecture, texting in a large group chat, Instagram Notes, oversharing, trying too hard in class (being a “sweat”), and being drunker than everyone else in a group. 

I hear it most, though, in a sentence something like, “I don’t want to sound too chalant.” Especially in young people, it’s understandable both why some find “chalance” so terrifying, and why, conversely, so many want to embrace it. Showing care for someone opens up a world of possibilities for rejection, humiliation, and hurt, but it’s also the only way to break into a deeper, more fulfilling relationship. It’s high-risk, high-reward; the ultimate form of vulnerability.

In January, I failed to give my friend a scarf. I found it at a by-the-pound vintage sale in a warehouse parking lot in Commerce, California, where vintage overstock from an overpriced boutique in Melrose was heaped onto gray tarps. The scarf lay at the edge of the pile, coiled up like an electric blue rattlesnake. 

I should have known then that it couldn’t mean any good. It should have made a dry, scraping rattle, like an ill omen, and set off all my biological warning bells, but it didn’t. I weighed my trash bag of clothes and Venmoed a Carharrt-clad hipster $42 for seven pounds of clothes, the scarf perched innocuously at the top of the pile. It made me think of my friend back at Princeton. I didn’t think anything of it.

I tucked it into the corner of my suitcase and flew it across America, over hundreds of millions of people with billions of people to love. I imagined I could see them through the window and the clouds and the rooftops, like millions of little candle flames. I loitered at Carousel 8 of EWR’s Arrivals terminal waiting for it, carted it back to school, and stuffed it in my backpack to give to my friend the next time I saw her. 

That proved more difficult than I thought it would be. I saw her without my backpack once, and she forced me to tell her what I had brought, since she hates surprises. This was my first failure—conceding the surprise. I saw her again and forgot all about it. I saw her a third time and exclaimed weakly, “The scarf!,” and fished it out of my bag. 

It was wrinkled. It looked much uglier in the dim, yellow light of the University Chapel nearing midnight, where we’d been studying. I held it out to her. 

She took it, smiled, and said, “It’s beautiful. But I’m allergic to wool.” 

My heart skipped. 

The worst part was that I knew she was allergic—she’d reminded me at least twice before, when I’d offered her scarves to borrow on especially cold walks. I felt ridiculous. I felt plain dumb, like a dog dropping an unwanted squirrel carcass at its owner’s feet. 

I love my friend. That’s the problem. Sometimes I don’t know how to go about putting my affection in the right places, at the right times. I knew I was being silly about the scarf, but it would have been more ridiculous to not express my affection just because I feared embarrassment or pain. I had that part, the readiness, down; what I didn’t know was how to bring my care for so many people from inside myself to an external expression. What is the procedure for loving someone?

I thought about it, and I was at a loss. 

A fellow Nass writer remarked that she worked much harder to seem nonchalant when she was on social media. Once she deleted it, she gradually stopped caring about withholding affection for appearances’ sake. Social media and the broader digitization of life functions, from communication to dating, offer up even more opportunities for chalance to become painful: screenshots of love confessions passed around text group chats, posts recorded, and the ease with which people can share accounts of botched attempts at chalance for the amusement and attention of others, at the expense an immaterial “other”. 

The effect is too disseminate to pin down because it feels more pervasive than it actually is. It’s like Foucault’s panopticon. When I’m on Instagram, I know people can see what I post, and that fact makes me feel as though I’m being surveilled and judged constantly, even when that feeling has little basis in reality. If you’ve reached that level of paranoia, it’s difficult not to imagine that everyone in real life, too, is watching and judging your chalance. This is the distinction I would make between the new chalance and less recent means of expressing a similar feeling. The all-seeing eye of social media makes for a distinctly new and unsettling version of the bashful, red-cheeked shame of our parents’ generation; it’s a new word to describe a new, sinister threat. Young people certainly felt self-consciousness without social media, but with it, the watchful Greek chorus of Instagram story viewers feels absolutely despotic. 

Without the threat of embarrassment, more people would be heedlessly dispensing affection all the time. The college-specific social media app Fizz evidences this. All users are automatically anonymous, so people can say whatever they like without the threat of humiliation. It’s full of declarations of love, students anguishing over whether to confess their affection, and students trying to parse how, exactly, they should go about loving someone. It’s a graveyard of unrealized affection. A recent poll on the app, posed by an anonymous Princeton student, asked female students to vote: if they were asked on a date by another student in the street, would they say yes? Another asked whether male students would want to be asked for their phone number by a classmate, and another, how long you should wait after a first date to text. This is what people want to know when they don’t have to worry about facing the humiliating consequences of their chalance. They want to know how to love people.

So it isn’t just me. It isn’t only men, either, although nonchalance in general does seem connected to the complicated prestige games and social trappings of masculinity, which are beyond this author and this article. Others’ attempts at chalance might be less spectacular fumblings than mine, and they might be more about yearning for romantic love than figuring out how to show their friends how much they care—but they exist, and their existence is a fraught one. We don’t know how to love people.

Young people also use chalant to signal self-awareness—a preemptive acknowledgement that their behavior is embarrassing. It seems that the only thing worse than being chalant is being chalant without realizing it, making a fool of yourself and letting others think you’re oblivious. It’s a matter of self-perception and mortification, as in the epigraph. The only way to maintain some modicum of self-respect is to shield yourself with an acknowledgement of chalance.

This shield, though, isn’t actually guarding anything. It acts as another layer of separation. The only real solution to the risk of chalance I can see is the most basic, obvious one: to try. Talk to your lab partners. Ask someone in your seminar to get lunch, tell your friends you love them, and shoot your shot instead of posting about how attracted you are to someone on Fizz. If I knew their name, I’d encourage the anonymous student posting “Tall gymshark girl at dillon every morning who are u” to just go talk to her.

This works best without couching your affection in preemptive acknowledgements of chalance. If you say “Not to be too chalant, but…” before saying something meaningful to a friend, there will forever exist a layer of self-consciousness between you and the object of your affection; an, “I like you, but I know it’s embarrassing.” No one wants to feel like the people they love are embarrassed to love them.

In the same novella as the epigraph, Dostoyevsky wrote, “To love is to suffer and there can be no love otherwise.” I figure the surest way to prevent myself from connecting with other people is saying, “I’m too scared of being embarrassed,” giving up, and living in a Firestone carrel for the rest of my life. Love is always messy, and anyone who denies that is deluding themselves. I can’t have love without some spillover; I have to take it all in or close everything off. 

After I gave her the scarf, my friend thanked me, gave me a hug, and told me she was glad I’d thought of her. We gave the scarf to another friend, whose skin was verifiably wool-proof. And we laughed about it, and it was over. The Chapel was dim and gray-white and quiet as we studied. We walked back under a bright waxing moon. I was warm in my coat and the plaid scarf a different friend had bought for me, three trains, a flight, and an hour’s drive away, over those millions of people and their millions of loved ones.

My arm in my new friend’s, she hardly remembered that the scarf was all wrong; all my “chalance” meant was that I loved her, and that was plenty.